'A Picture Has No Meaning At All If It Can't Tell a Story' - Lecture Review Week 5 Telling Stories with Pictures

This week's lecture was based on well, you guessed it - pictures that tell stories! 

When you really think about it, picture stories are everywhere - magazines, television, movies, youtube, newspaper, computer screen, phone screen, facebook, twitter, memes, flickr, computer games, advertising, graffiti and even money

The concept of using pictures to tell stories have developed dramatically over time too. From Australian indigenous and Lascaux painting in France dating back to 15 000 BC then to biblical illustrations and stained-glass windows across Europe and China dated from 800 - 868 to the first illustrated newspaper in the 1860's, the first photograph in a 1979 New York newspaper, first coloured photography in Scotland 1936 and all the way to the first picture on the internet in 1992 and first video on Youtube in 2005 - a time that isn't really that far away in retrospect. 

Other developments of photography include the ability to capture and upload your images immediately, digital manipulation (photoshop), digital publishing and the ability to post photo galleries on websites not just one photo.

Some statistics on how Instagram and Youtube is used (from 2011) provided some results that I found very hard to comprehend : 14 million instagram accounts were created and 60 photos are uploaded per second. On Youtube (2012), users upload 72 hours of videos every minute!

So, what makes a good photo?

Well, there are MANY aspects one must consider before one tiny 'click'. Framing, focus, angle and point of view (POV), exposure or light, timing or shutter speed, rule of thirds and most importantly 'Capturing the moment' should all be taken into consideration if a good shot it desired by the photographer.

There's not just still pictures y' know, but moving ones too!

yep, more commonly known as movies! 

It all started in 1895 but the Lumiere Brothers who introduced cinematography. This was then expanded in 1925 by Sergi Eisnestien who edited his films. News reels were also popular as people only went to the cinema just to watch the news - a routine, I'm sure seems strange to everyone in my generation.

I think it's safe to say that at least 90% of my generation has some sort of recording device on their phone. It is because of this amateur and eyewitness recording has dramatically increased. For example, most of the 9/11 footage was filmed by amateurs alone.

Finally, this weeks lecture was left with two, very fitting, inspirational quotes

‘if it makes you laugh, if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, that’s a good picture’ – Eddie Adams, Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist

‘A picture has no meaning at all if it can’t tell a story’ Eetu Silanpaa - photojournalist