The AP's Guide to Taking Great Photos
by The Associated Press
(Note: Click on each image to view the full photo).
The difference between a great picture and a good one?
It can be an instant, less time than the blink of an eye.
It can be a few inches, a step to the right or the left.
Or it can be the difference between standing and kneeling.
A good photo is a mixture of hitting the button at the right moment while in the right spot with a view from the right perspective.
Confusing? Not really. Difficult? No, it just takes some practice and thinking.
When you make pictures, think about pictures you have seen in the past and what made the good ones stand out in your mind.
A person in the picture gives the reader a point of reference on scale. Getting that person in the picture close to the camera gives the reader a point of interest. Getting up on a ladder or down on one knee gives the reader a different perspective on how the person fits in to the scene.
With today’s digital cameras, most of the exposure and technical calculations are done for the photographer. What is left, though, is the important part – making an interesting photo. Good composition is the key.
Let’s take a situation where a hurricane is hitting the coast. It could be flooding, it could be a fire, or any number of other news events. The lessons to be learned are the same.
Consider a few examples:
In AP photographer Dave Martin’s classic photo, three men work their way along a coastal road in Key West, Fla., The expressions on their faces show the severity of the storm and they are big in the foreground so the reader’s eye goes right to them. The wreckage of the house in the background reinforces the message of the photo – there’s been a big storm and people are suffering.
In Eduardo Verdugo’s AP photo, he frames the scene in such a way as to show the destruction of the hurricane while establishing that the lighthouse survived the storm. The person walking through the scene helps give it scale and perspective.
Contrast that with this scene. It shows damage just as severe as Martin’s photo but drama is missing because there is no dominant part of the image. There is no scale to the photo. The eye doesn’t know where to go, doesn’t know what is important. Simply moving several feet closer would have made the person bigger in the foreground and would have given the photo a focal point.
Framing is also important and delivers the important information to the reader.
In this photo of a roaring grass fire in the Ukraine, the image is left wide and the exciting part of the photo is minimized. While the person at the left is important, he’s the Ukrainian president, his place in the photo minimizes the dramatic effect of what’s really going on in the photo.
But, with some slight cropping to focus in on the action, the drama of the photo is emphasized. You can achieve this affect a couple of ways. The first is to move closer, if that is safe, to get a bigger image in the camera. That will give you better quality but you must weigh the risk. The other way is to crop the photo. This must be done sparingly, though, because the picture quality will be diminished by too much cropping. There’s only so much digital information in the frame and discarding too much of it reduces the chances of your photo being used because it will appear un-sharp or grainy.
The AP prefers to acquire raw photos, without PhotoShopping or cropping, so they can be prepared for the wire service’s network from the fullest amount of data.
The AP has the strictest standards for the integrity of the photographs that are moved. Here is the AP’s statement on the handling of electronic images:
AP pictures must always tell the truth. We do not alter or manipulate the content of a photograph in any way.
The content of a photograph must not be altered in PhotoShop or by any other means. No element should be digitally added to or subtracted from any photograph. The faces or identities of individuals must not be obscured by PhotoShop or any other editing tool. Only retouching or the use of the cloning tool to eliminate dust and scratches are acceptable.
Minor adjustments in PhotoShop are acceptable. These include cropping, dodging and burning, conversion into grayscale, and normal toning and color adjustments that should be limited to those minimally necessary for clear and accurate reproduction (analogous to the burning and dodging often used in darkroom processing of images) and that restore the authentic nature of the photograph.
Changes in density, contrast, color and saturation levels that substantially alter the original scene are not acceptable. Backgrounds should not be digitally blurred or eliminated by burning down or by aggressive toning.
You should follow these guidelines if you want the AP to consider your pictures.
Here are some examples of citizen-made photos that were used by the AP from the collapse of the highway bridge in Minneapolis.
They are good pictures from an important news scene. And the key to their acceptance was that they were available quickly. The AP is always looking for citizen contributions. If you have a good photo from a news event, offer it up!
