In this DWF Pro thread, DWF superstar John Mireles shares with us a salient quote from New York Times photo editor Michele McNally as she answered reader questions last week.
Q. What makes a photojournalist grow from making very good images to making brilliant ones?
— Sasha Turk
A. I think the best photojournalists have a philosophical, psychological, and emotional clarity in what they are trying to say with their pictures. They have done their existential homework and have achieved the ability to reach real emotional truthfulness in their images using narrative, gesture, light and composition. They also recognize that what they get to see and do is very special and important — to viewers and their subjects. I’d also say, hard work.
Ms. McNally’s does with a few lines of text what we should all be doing with our photographs: looking past just mechanics to connect people with an emotional truth in our images. Food for thought.
What do you think? What’s the difference between a great photograph and the merely “good?”
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3 Comments at "“The Difference Between Good and Great”"
In wedding photography. A good photograph might include proper or interesting exposure, the same for framing and subject matter.
A great photo has a purpose beyond covering the stock event- it captures a moment the client may miss or only notice in a fleeting way otherwise. It freezes the details of that moment to give them a crystal clear, revisit-able memory. A good photo can even use the technical skills of the photographer to create a mood otherwise unseen thanks to selective DoF and enhanced lighting. It can pluck out an individual from a crowd to represent that moment, or it can record a scope beyond what the human eye can catch, encouraging the client to home in on the details and the see them in the whole.
For some time, my thought has been that a camera is a tool to record what isn’t seen by most people, but what your eye and mind can pick out or envision and then readily share. A good photograph finds the rare, important, or even everyday vision and displays it in a way the intended audience will come to treasure.
The viewer.
Talent.
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