Photos that tell a Story

As someone that knows little about marketing, I have been trying to think of more ways to show my work. My current efforts so far have been just updating this site and adding images to Instagram. So when it came to trying something new I thought it would be fun to submit work to free photo competitions. Why, because these do not cost me anything but some time and effort and it may get my image published in a magazine, on social networks, or promoted in other ways.

Submitting Images:

Generally a lot of them ask you to submit your best photos but one of them recently asked to present 5 photos that told a story. I found this challenging but also a lot of fun. It made me think a lot about my photography and if I just capture moments or enough images to create a cohesive storyline.

One of the Many Community Squares in Havana

As I looked through my images I felt that most of my images are definitely on the side of single moments. Even if they were taken around the same time or in the same location they were often of specific subjects or settings that did not relate to each other. However, as I looked through my images in Cuba I felt the best set of images that could possibly tell a story where the ones of my visit to a coffee and tobacco farm. This set of images had a lot of “coverage” as it featured people, the location, and details that may work well together to form a story.

Making the Selection:

Once I decided on this set from Cuba, the difficult part was actually selecting which images to use. There were some I liked more than others but when I went back to the goal of telling a story, not all of them worked well together.

For example this barn shot is one of my favorites but did not add much to the story.

After going through them I settled on the following 5 images.

With this set I wanted to primarily focus on the people working on the farm and tried to find images that would help tie things together. So I added one of the car photos as an establishing shot to start the story off. Then I focused on the different people I came across on the farm and added a shot of the coffee as that was one of the main crops grown there.

Even though it was hard to narrow down the images I thought it was a fun exercise and it made me think that when I go out shooting I should try to tell more stories represented by a collection of images.

Let me know what you think and if these images work together or how you like to tell a story with your images. If you would like to see more of my images from Cuba you can view them all here. I’d also be happy to hear about any useful tips you may employ when creating a story with images? Until then happy shooting!