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Photojournalism
wedding fair and bridal show
It's pretty unusual to take photojournalistic style
photos at a wedding fair and bridal show....
First published 29th. April 2007
Pretty
confused wedding photo, analysis of a
wedding photo. that confuses
several generalisations.
First published 15th. April 2007.
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and strong assistant, mule etc.
(click on the photo to enlarge it)

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The bizarre relationship between
photojournalism and PR photography
first published 04/03/08
Democratic photo manipulation
Every time a wedding photographer asks someone at a wedding to smile,
it's photo manipulation.
It's also
photo
manipulation by democratic consensus, because
most people consent to it.
Experiment with the shape of a
wedding
photograph
Click on the photo to enlarge it. In photograph: group of
pageboys at a wedding at Skegness.
Wedding photographers often arrange people in a pyramid shape, but I
arranged these page boys in a kind of
`reverse pyramid shape'
instead.
Portrait photography analysis

(click on the image to enlarge it)
This teen girl had made a contribution to her local
community by supporting a highway safety campaign.
I could have asked her to compose a
special `concerned' or `caring' expression for the photograph.
Compare this with the photograph of the parade girls above her. This
isn't a photojournalism style picture, they aren't absorbed in
anything, they realize they are being photographed, they
are looking their
best, they
are looking
their most attractive.
But instead I just asked her to `look natural'.
Interestingly, she
naturally
looked concerned and caring, even though I hadn't
asked her to do.
*The photo was one of a series of portrait
photographs of teenagers
which were commissioned by the Lincolnshire County Council
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Blue plastic bottle photography
(click on the photo to enlarge it)
To most of us, a camp fire should be brown
and black,
the branches are usually brown and when they are burned they
are black.
This
perception might have
been shaped by our childhood experiences,
or by our
experiences as a
parent. As children we might have built a
camp fire, as a parent we might have built a camp fire for our
children.
Either way, it was coloured brown and black.
But the camp fire above isn't brown or black, there's a blue
plastic bottle in it, and this might conflict with our
perceptions.
Because of this, we might remove it, take it out of the photograph. But
this could be a mistake. This camp fire was built by
the
homeless people in the background. If we took the bottle out of the
picture, we would be applying our perceptions to them, we would be
effectively saying to them `you have the wrong perception about camp
fires .' This would be a pretty arrogant attitude.
To expand on this, our perception is probably that building a camp fire
is a fun event. But to them it probably isn't a fun event, it's an
unfortunate necesssity. Because of this, they aren't concerned
whether their camp fire looks pretty, whether its a pleasant brown and
black colour. They just want to burn their blue plastic
bottles on
it so that no-one - the kind of people that
resent homeless
people - can complain they
are untidy.
Anyway, I think the bottle
does make the camp
fire look pretty, the blue colour `picks up' the blue
colour of the tents.
Ethical photo manipulation
This usually happy-looking woman was asked to compose an
unhappy
expression for a media story about a missing person. The idea was to
arouse peoples's sympathy so they will help her find him.
.
Irresistible photojournalistic
wedding photography

Photojournalism - at least photojournalistic
wedding photography
- can be irresistible as well as whatever else its supposed to
be.
I couldn't resist taking a photograph of
this flowergirl and pageboy aka photojournalistic wedding photographers
taking photos of each other.
I took the photograph when I was the wedding photographer
and
photojournalistic wedding photographer (wow) at a Skegness
Lincolnshire wedding which was held
on the 15th. September 2007 (click on the photograph to
enlarge it).
If you're a student at a school of photography or photojournalism and
if you have to write something about it (yeah I know)
my advice is, try to incorporate the adjectives `natural' and
`spontaneous' into your work, because in my view this is
what photojournalism and photojournalistic wedding photography
is or should be about.
Photojournalistic
motives
This isn't the
motive
for taking the photographs, the motive is to portray
realism, to portray people as they
really are.
This may be fine for some people, but maybe it isn't
so fine
if the people in the picture happen to be girls, like the girls in the
parade above.
Photojournalistic failures
Sure, photojournalism captures the absorption on the face of the parade
girl above . But it doesn't capture her at a moment when she is
looking her best, when she is
looking most attractive.
Photojournalism versus conventional
photography
Compare this with the photograph of the parade girls above her. This
isn't a photojournalism style picture, they aren't absorbed in
anything, they realize they are being photographed, they
are looking their
best, they
are looking
their most attractive.
But instead I just asked her to `look natural'.
Interestingly, she
naturally
looked concerned and caring, even though I hadn't
asked her to do.
*The photo was one of a series of portrait
photographs of teenagers
which were commissioned by the Lincolnshire County Council
When photojournalism fails

Is
photojournalism style photography inherently unattractive,
can it ever be aesthetically pleasing?
It mostly consists of taking photographs of people who are
absorbed in doing something.
But when people are absorbed in doing something, they rarely look their
best, ie. their most attractive.
So the conclusion might be that photojournalism
results in pictures
of people who aren't looking their best (click on a photo to
enlarge it.).
Teenage dance girls photo non-experiment

(click
on the photo to
enlarge it)
A
more
conventional pyramid shaped image.
In photo: teen dance girls appearing in Julie Stevens school of dance
show at the Embassy centre, Skegness, in July 2007.
(click on the image to enlarge it)