Getting to know feature photography

John Deere technician students remove a CCS seed hose on a tractor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photos by Parth Pitroda 

 Feature photography is fun and tricky at the same time. Feature photography is the lighter, more entertaining side of news.

    Photographing features can be fun because you get to meet new people doing odd and out of the ordinary things. 
   The kind of thing you may find in feature photography is people doing interesting activities that are of human interest. Some of these activities, for example, could be a man running with one fake,  metal leg; a blind person dancing on the stage; a dare devil jumping off a cliff. The more the photographer looks around, the more feature photography he or she may find.

Auto body tech student Chandler Boyer feels for Imperfections on a car panel.

  Feature photography can also be tricky. The trickiness occurs when looking for it. The photojournalist has to be alert while shooting an assignment, and even after, because you never know when there is a feature photography opportunity. Features also give the photojournalist a change from plain old hard news.

   Hunting for feature photography has been quite a journey for me.  I had to deal with poor indoor lighting. Camera controls were limited because of the lighting situation, which meant shallow depth of field and a slower shutter speed. 
   The search for feature finding was harder than I expected because the School of Technology, which was my beat had very little going on this week. I had to go there spend all day waiting for something interesting to photograph. Photographing people has always been a challenge for me as opposed to tangible objects and still is so no, I am not getting used to people photography.     Composing the photographs in a tight spot with very little room to move around is what was challenging in this assignment. The type of lens I was using also limited my widest aperture to f3.5, with only an 18mm lens being widest which challenged my camera skills. I feel that feature photography is fun and can be challenging in some ways.

Design, composition and camera settings

Lata Sangtani, 2nd from right, serves at the Hindu Temple of Toledo in Sylvania, Ohio. (PHO245 photos by Parth Pitroda)

Sherry Clark reads a magazine

   The most important thing I learned from this assignment are the design elements form the NewsU tutorial. 
   The elements were the rule of thirds, different perspectives, and Sense of Place. The Sense of Place element was the most interesting and new to me. There were some other ones that were confusing. The Emotion Element, Mood, Surprise were all confusing elements.

   Image composition was old news to me. Practicing the rule of thirds is routine to me. There is one new composition technique, juxtaposition which was quite interesting. This composition style demonstrates togetherness in an image guiding the viewer to the subject.  

Ric Wolkins paints a pottery building.

    Most of the camera operations are quite fond of me. Camera settings can be confusing to some photographers at first. The reason they can be confusing is when the ISO is maxed out, the photographer has to compensate using either f-stop or shutter speed. The photographer then needs to give up depth or use a slow shutter speed this is when it gets tricky. A sports scene for example would be hard to use slow shutter speed because, slow shutter speed blur action. I can name many camera settings that come into play to make proper reciprocity but to name a few are: white balance (color balance), aperture (depth), shutter speed (motion). I feel that this assignment motivated me to be better at using my camera to make outstanding yet strong in design photographs.

How to be an efficient caption writer for PJ

    Captions are important to mount with you picture in photojournalism because, they identify and explain facts that aren’t perceived by the audience viewing them. The captions are needed to let people know of the missing elements in a photo. These are some thing that I  learned:

• Caption shouldn’t exceed more than two sentences 
• The importance of having the peoples’ names in the photo going from left to right and also letting your readers know that is in your captions  
• What is going on in the picture or the action
• Never  include past and present tenses in a caption otherwise the reader will get confused

   The AP Stylebook is a guide used by amateur and pro photojournalists to ensure correct grammar is acquired in their writing and style.   I feel  more confident about writing and getting the proper information for my captions after doing this assignment from the AP Stylebook.