How to Tell a Story with Photos

Most of us shoot photos as standalone images: one subject, one photo.   While individual images can be very powerful, short story sequences are even more fun if you’re trying to capture the mood of an event.  If you’re going to be putting your photos on the web, you can also build short slideshows with sequences and send the links out to friends and family.

Here’s an example of how just two photos can tell a story:

In the first picture, my mother is trying to teach my daughter how to stick her tongue out.  In the second one, you see both my daughter’s success and my mother’s surprise.  This wouldn’t have been possible with just one photo.

Take a look at the Flickr group Tell a story in 5 frames and think about how you could use their rules to create a “mini-story” about your kids.  Read through the description of the group and their guidelines to get a sense of what they’re looking for:

• 1st photo: establish characters and location
• 2nd photo: create a situation with possibilities of what might happen
• 3rd photo: involve the characters in the situation
• 4th photo: build to probable outcomes
• 5th photo: have a logical, but surprising, end

Now give it a try!  Go out and shoot your first photo story. You’ll probably need to shoot at least 100 photos to get 5 good ones that tell a story.  Really! Check out my post 10 Minutes to Improved Photos of Your Kids for why this is important and 10 tips from Kodak on how to get to 100.

Keep shooting and narrowing down the resulting images until you have five shots that really tell a good story and follow the group’s guidelines. Each image should be tightly framed, show the subject’s emotions and advance the storyline. Your goal is to tell a story with images that don’t require any words to understand. This is hard, so keep trying until you get it right!

From now on, whenever you shoot photos of your kids, try to follow the Kodak tips and tell a coherent story with your images so that you can build these mini-stories.  They are more interesting in photo albums than single static shots and can be combined to make wonderful framed images or online slideshows.