Photo Essays

Photo essays
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

A photo essay is a set or series of photographs that are intended to tell a story or evoke a series of emotions in the viewer. Photo essays range from purely photographic works to photographs with captions or small notes to full text essays with a few or many accompanying photographs. Photo essays can be sequential in nature, intended to be viewed in a particular order, or they may consist of non-ordered photographs which may be viewed all at once or in an order chosen by the viewer. All photo essays are collections of photographs, but not all collections of photographs are photo essays. Photo essays often address a certain issue or attempt to capture the character of places and events. People who have undertaken photo essays include Bruce Davidson, W. Eugene Smith and Walker Evans.

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Here are a few other resources to help you understand photo journalism, so that you'll be prepared to get a great photo essay for your portfolio- "Photo Essay- Between three and seven images which convey a story."

http://www.thephotoessay.com

http://www.time.com/time/photoessays

What the World Eats, Part I (Time magazine)
What's on family dinner tables in fifteen different homes around the globe? Photographs by Peter Menzel from the book "Hungry Planet"

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Here's an excellent site for understanding what it means to truly "capture" something of life in your pictures:

Get the Picture; 7 photographers from the permanent collection of the Minnesota Institute of Arts. Learn about what makes a great photograph and these photographers' approach to making them.

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Sim-Cam. It doesn't matter whether you have a digital camera or an old Nikon, the concepts of exposure still apply. Film and digital photography use the same building blocks - lens, shutter, aperture, and film. Sim-Cam is a great way to test, and practice seeing what a picture would look like if you took it with a given shutter speed or aperture setting!