Photo Essay Ideas
There are four basic ideas and types of photo essay:
1. Event photo essays: this type of photo essay centres around an event, usually a news type
event such as earthquakes and so on but could be smaller scale such as a local wedding. May
be linear but not necessarily.
2. Time sequence photo essays: any linear sequence of events such as news events come in
to this category. The time span can be one day or one year or even a decade or two or longer.
3. Location photo essays: these can be done locally or when travelling and are usually thematic
rather than linear.
4. Idea photo essays: this can be a series of photographs around a more abstract idea such as
love, health, hope, poverty and so on.
Photo Essay Tips
Photo Essay Tip #1
The photo must tell the story.
Photo Essay Tip #2
Although variety is important in your photos, you need to give it a structure otherwise visually it just
becomes a series of one photo after the other.
Photo Essay Tip #3
Not all photo essays are linear. You can pick a theme and show a variety of aspects around that
theme but even though the pictures won't be sequential they must still make sense to your reader. So
the order of the photos is important.
Photo Essay Tip #4
When you edit down from say 50 raw photographs to 10 photographs, be ruthless and selective.
Photo Essay Tip #5
Making a photo essay is a chance for you to add another level of creativity to your images. It's virtually
an art form in itself. You are the editor, and you have total control over what goes in and what doesn't.
So be creative and, more importantly, have fun!