Using Photos - Giants Win It All!

I’ve been a San Francisco Giants fan for all 52 years since they came west from New York. Only baseball fans in places like Chicago, Cleveland and until fairly recently, Boston can understand what that means. Watching year after year as your team struggles futilely in its quest for a championship is indeed as a Giant’s broadcaster described it “torture.” So I am feeling a very strange sense of excited contentment today.  The photo below captures the reason.

Freelance writer Randy Murray, in his blog First Today, Then Tomorrow, offers some excellent tips on using photos and illustrations.

Murray begins, “Here’s the big secret: the image has to contribute to the reader’s understanding and comprehension of your text, not just to make the page more visually appealing.”

How do you decide when the image does contribute to the reader’s understanding. Murray suggests four guidelines to decide:

1.      You are referring to the specific image in your text – they purpose of your text IS the image.

2.      The image will allow you to take a shortcut. By pointing to the image you can significantly reduce your description or be more accurate. “It looks like this,” with a picture, might save you 500 words and keep your readers’ interest.

3.      The image reinforces your message

4.      The image provides credible evidence to back up your words. Think “news photo,” like the picture of a house fire. [Or maybe the Giants!]



Unlocking Family Photographs

Too often we meet people who say I have all kinds of old family photographs, but I can’t identify most of the people in them.

Maureen Taylor’s book Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs is a tool that can solve their problem. Taylor shows her readers how to use historical photos as research tools. She demonstrates how a family historian can unlock clues contained in the pictures. For example:

• Using clues about the type of photographic process used to take the picture helps to accurately date it.
• Historical details like telephone lines visible in the photograph demonstrate that it couldn’t have been taken before a specific date.
• Details of the dress, studio props and poses of photo subjects can be compared to historical records to help date the photograph.
• A close examination of a photograph may allow the researcher to determine its location.
• These clues may also reveal the identity of the photographer.
• And finally all of this information combined with a family historians knowledge of ancestors may allow her to identify the people pictured.

“If you are only going to buy one book on this subject, this is the book for you,” said reviewer Carol Boston of Eureka, Illinois.



Telling Stories With Pictures in Your Personal History

Telling good stories is a critical part of writing a memoir or family history. But it’s possible to enhance the written stories by using images to illustrate them or to tell others that don’t make it into the text. Darren Rowse offers some excellent ideas on how to use pictures effectively in his article Telling Stories With Pictures on the Digital Photography School website.

In selecting the photographs you intend to use in your book begin by realizing what emotions, moods, story lines, ideas and messages the images you choose may convey. Individual photographs may convey a story in a single image by emphasizing the context in which its subject is placed or by displaying the relationship between two subjects.

A series of photographs might document a specific event or experience. Think of someone’s wedding photos or pictures taken on a vacation.

Using photos to tell stories can, on a larger scale, parallel the kind of thinking a writer does in planning a written story. Carefully select introductory photos which will present important characters visually and provide a view of the settings in which events will take place.

Consider themes you may want to develop as your story unfolds. The themes might relate to the types of photos you employ – visual themes or stylistic themes. Or the photographs might convey details of time, place or relationship by focusing on a single character or characters in a similar pose at several different moments in time or images of a setting taken years apart.

Select the final images by deciding what lasting impression you want to leave with your reader, just as you plan the book’s concluding chapter.

Click here to read Rowse’s full article.