telling stories through photos
If you pause a movie and study that frame, you’ll find there is so much to learn and appreciate in that one frame. the subject, composition, highlights & shadows directs your eyes on what the director intended. A still frame lets you breathe, lets the information and your thoughts sink in.
On the other hand a movie, twenty four frames per second hardly allows multiple perspectives during the experience.It takes less mental energy to watch a friend’s wedding video. Flipping through photos album allows you to pause and notice so much more.
Another beautiful attribute of a photo is the creator does not have full control over how it’s perceived. A photo allows the viewer to have multiple perspectives and different narratives. This might be based on who is viewing the photo, what life stage you are in, and the state of mind. The viewer also might start to fill gaps to tell the full story of a photo.
The photo on this blog post shows my friend resting his feet on a rock. You know he is somewhere out of the city, in nature. The mirror like water and the undisturbed leave shows the calmness. The blueness of the water and the circular ripple on the water tells it’s a cloudy day and it’s about to rain.
Before my friend visited from Toronto, he said he’s been exhausted from work and he is really looking forward to get out of the city. He might have been doing three jobs at the time doing eighty plus hours a week. He was telling me in many ways he doesn’t want to do much during his vacation. He just wanted to relax.
The day after he landed in Vancouver, I took him to a nearby creek. We took two camping chairs. We were chatting about the school days reminiscing the care free days. I got up to take some photos of the leaves floating by us. That’s when I saw his feet resting on this rock. I thought this was the perfect frame to document his time off from work.
Someone looking at the picture will fill in the gaps to have a full story in their mind. To someone it might be a photo of a guy fishing. Someone who likes to think far might notice the rolled up work pants and think he wasn’t planning to be here that day, etc, etc.
Every medium of story telling has its own place. To me still photos are the most enjoyable..