![]() In Six Places to Recharge Your Soul, Mark Harrower uses this tight shot to help readers understand the resiliency of Jeffrey Pine trees you can almost feel the texture of the singed bark through the photo. These shots are more like your classic portraits, a photo showing just one corner of a room, or a surfer and her board filling the frame. Medium shots settle in between establishing and tight images, helping focus a reader on the setting and subject, so the details feel at home within the broader context. They provide the textures and details that make a subject feel authentic. Tight shots are dialed in on very specific elements: those wildflowers I mentioned, the callouses on a farmer’s hands, the intricate beading on a handmade garment. You’ll want to build on them by adding tight and medium shots, too. Establishing shots can do a lot, but they can’t convey the little details that make a person or place really come alive. ![]() Once you’ve established an overall sense of the subject, it’s time to start filling in the gaps. Incorporate a variety of shot types to round out your subject Photographer Jim Richardson uses this establishing shot to give an immediate sense of a historic village's personality in his story Neolithical Mystery Tour. Without them, your audience may feel confused or unsure, and confusing your reader is the fastest way to lose them. These wide shots help readers set expectations about the subject. If you’re profiling a community organizer, show her out in the neighborhood she’s serving. If you’re writing about a national park, don’t start with a close up of the wildflowers found there, show the sweeping landscape that awaits a would-be visitor. ![]() This is best accomplished with wide shots, or shots that reveal a lot of the setting. The trick with establishing images is that they need to situate your subject in its surrounding context. Don’t leave your readers guessing about that subject, show it to them early on! An up-front visual will help establish a mental-and possibly emotional-connection that will entice your reader to keep going. Stories generally begin with some place or someone. When it comes to copyright laws, safer is always better, so err on the side of caution if you have doubts. Just make sure you understand what a license does and doesn’t enable you to do ( Creative Commons licenses are especially worth reading up on). ![]() You can also filter Flickr search results by image license. Free sites like Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay are great places to start. Finding images you have the rights to use can be a challenge. Many authors, my teammates and me included, have to turn to the web to find images we can use in stories. So instead, let’s get to the main event-how you can best leverage photography to connect your readers to your message. I could go on for a while about the importance of working photos into your narratives, but if you’re reading this article, you likely don’t need much more convincing. As we pause to admire a landscape or study a face, our brains have a moment to process the text we just went through, better enabling us to focus on the words we’ll read next. ![]() That’s why we‘re so drawn to stories that include photography-the images powerfully confirm and expand upon what we discover in the text. Ninety-nine times out of 100, photos can create a sense of place, personality, or emotion more clearly and quickly than the written word. How often have we all heard that old adage? Cliché as it might be, it’s spot on. ![]()
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