All useful comments not only for photos and also for other kinds of "media." For example I've been helping non-native English scientific researchers publish their manuscripts and finding that fixing the grammar is easy and relatively trivial. But helping them tell their "story" well to bring out its scientific significance and relevance to other published work which is necessary in a cover letter to draw the interest of managing editors even to move it into the review process rather than rejecting it out of hand and then accepted by formal reviewers is a much more difficult task. And these qualities must also be framed (to expand the comparison into a possibly bad metaphor) to capture the interest and understanding of a journal's readers. As an avid photographer I'm seeing these issues to be pretty similar for both of these outputs and thanks for articulating them so well.
For most of my photographic life (52 years...and change) I've never thought of myself as an 'author'. Even though I may have taken several rolls or MBs of digital images, my photographs have been stand-alone records of a scene. The existence of Facebook, Instagram, etc, reinforce this as most people post singular images and move on. Recently, I've started to edit in groups - mostly by geography but increasingly by subject / association - with the intention of producing zines, books or slideshows.
Great. And while editing and sequencing your photos you're creating a 'story' out of the separate photos and therefor I believe you act as an author (of images instead of words that is ;-)
Absolutely. The thing is that most amateurs (particularly since the advent of the digital age) tend to work on the principle of 'a picture paints a thousand words' and 'the picture should speak for itself' - hence becoming hooked into treating photos as stories in themselves. Consequently, compiling stories / narratives by selection / sequencing is something which doesn't come naturally to most.
All useful comments not only for photos and also for other kinds of "media." For example I've been helping non-native English scientific researchers publish their manuscripts and finding that fixing the grammar is easy and relatively trivial. But helping them tell their "story" well to bring out its scientific significance and relevance to other published work which is necessary in a cover letter to draw the interest of managing editors even to move it into the review process rather than rejecting it out of hand and then accepted by formal reviewers is a much more difficult task. And these qualities must also be framed (to expand the comparison into a possibly bad metaphor) to capture the interest and understanding of a journal's readers. As an avid photographer I'm seeing these issues to be pretty similar for both of these outputs and thanks for articulating them so well.
For most of my photographic life (52 years...and change) I've never thought of myself as an 'author'. Even though I may have taken several rolls or MBs of digital images, my photographs have been stand-alone records of a scene. The existence of Facebook, Instagram, etc, reinforce this as most people post singular images and move on. Recently, I've started to edit in groups - mostly by geography but increasingly by subject / association - with the intention of producing zines, books or slideshows.
Great. And while editing and sequencing your photos you're creating a 'story' out of the separate photos and therefor I believe you act as an author (of images instead of words that is ;-)
Absolutely. The thing is that most amateurs (particularly since the advent of the digital age) tend to work on the principle of 'a picture paints a thousand words' and 'the picture should speak for itself' - hence becoming hooked into treating photos as stories in themselves. Consequently, compiling stories / narratives by selection / sequencing is something which doesn't come naturally to most.