Photography Idea: Go Further with Essays

After the Christmas break and the new year, many of us are armed not only with resolutions about how we’re going to better live our lives, but with plenty of new gifts – gadgets and books and other implements of new or beloved hobbies. That makes the new year an ideal opportunity to jump back into some artistic endeavors with both feet.

If photography is one of those hobbies, the new year is a blank slate of artistic opportunities. Setting some goals for your photography is a great idea – and it’s also a great opportunity to raise the stakes a little. A great photography idea is to go beyond standalone images and consider larger, broader projects that can offer greater opportunities for artistic expression – the Photo Essay.

Photo Essays

A photo essay is a series of photographs that document an event or a concept. Instead of trying to express all of your ideas and visual concepts in a single image, you allow yourself the room to breathe and explore with numerous images. A photo essay is one of the most powerful and flexible photography ideas that anyone, at any level of skill or experience, can engage in, and the breadth of the concept allows for huge impact.

Essay Ideas

It might seem like a major undertaking, but it’s really just a shift in focus from ‘one great photo’ to documenting something. Here are some quick ideas for subjects that lend themselves to a photo essay:

• An event: Whether a personal event like a wedding or a birthday party, or a public event like a carnival or street party, events offer many opportunities for interesting and affecting photographs.
• Time lapse: A construction project or any public work that transforms the world around you is a great opportunity to snap a photo every day to document the change.
• Day in the life: Your own or someone else’s daily routine can be transformed into powerful art with a thoughtful photo series capturing each moment in its lived-in glory.

There are many more ideas – anything that lends itself to multiple images is a perfect candidate.

Tips

A photo essay follows different artistic rules than a single photo. Because you’re taking many photos, you don’t have to try and capture the whole story in one take – you can drill down and focus in on details.

And because you’re taking so many photos of the same basic scene, you’ll need to play around more with angles, composition, and framing. Have fun with this – you can take many more photos that you’ll eventually use in an exhibition, so it’s okay to eventually bin 95% of the photos you experiment with.

Finally, a photo essay demands to be displayed as one piece, so consider where your gallery wall will be – at home or in public. We’d be honored to create high-quality wall prints for you from your essay – just click here and we’ll take care of everything.