PHOTOGRAPHIC COVERAGE ELEMENTS

LEARNING OBJECTIVE: Identify the elements of photographic coverage.

Photographic coverage is invaluable in most publications. Through effective layout, photographs can be used independently as lead stories with merely a cutline accompanying them. In other uses, photographs

PH2 Lawrence T. Henderson

Figure 12-2. - News photograph with action and impact.

can support headlines and written spot news accounts as well as feature stories.

The photograph serves as a definition for words. No two people imagine identical photographs through words alone. Groups of words rarely cause similar mental images in everyone. Different people see different photographs in their mental interpretations of verbal descriptions of a given scene. From a photograph, everyone gets the same mental picture.

TYPES OF NEWS PHOTOGRAPHS

What is a news photograph? Just about everything said about recognizing and gathering news also can be applied to the news photograph. News photographs also have common news elements. These same 10 elements immediacy, proximity, consequence, prominence, suspense, oddity, conflict, sex, emotion and progress - are essential to successful photojournalism. You can judge the newsworthiness of a photograph by the degree to which these elements are present. The newsworthiness of a photograph, like that of an event, depends on the strength of intensity of the news element it contains.

Nearly all news photography is classified into two categories: spot and feature news. This applies to sports as well as any other type of newsworthy activity. Since the spot news photograph achieves a dramatic quality, the unrehearsed action is obvious to the reader. The feature photograph, on the other hand, consists of elements that allow it to tell its story with a brief cutline, or on many occasions, without a cutline.

Spot News

In covering unrehearsed action, control over the kind of photograph you will get is somewhat limited by the situation. For example, in shooting a boxing match, you work at top speed and usually under great pressure. You record developments as they occur with little regard for the control of the men in the ring. Your ingenuity and alert observations will have to be called upon to ensure any technical quality at all. In shooting well-known personalities, you should photograph them doing something. A photograph without action, regardless of the prominence of the personality, is not in itself a storytelling photograph. The successful and usable news photograph has action and impact (fig. 12-2) and

Master Sgt. Don Southerland, USAF

Figure 12-3. - Award-winning feature photograph.

immediately draws the reader's attention either to the cutline or to the accompanying story.

Feature News

The purpose of the photo feature is to tell a story about a given subject, selected and planned by the photojournalist, using real people or real things, in real or believable settings. As the photojournalist, you arrange everything to appear as if the story were actually happening; you will have frill control over composition, posing, arrangement and expressions of the subject. An example of an award-winning feature photograph is shown in figure 12-3. You should create a lighting effect that establishes mood or realism in your photograph, and select the precise camera angle needed to give emphasis to your photographs.

In shooting the feature story, you are rarely hurried and there are opportunities to change your setups if you are not entirely satisfied. You also may take time to exercise your technical know-how (in processing control) to produce a photograph of the highest quality. An additional advantage of feature photography is that you may "cover" yourself by taking additional photographs; the straight news photographers afforded little more than a split second for the quick "grab" shot.