Take Photos that Tell a Story: Ecuador Video Dispatch #2

Bonnie, here, coming to you again from our Travel Writing and Photography expedition in Cotacachi, Ecuador.
If you missed yesterday’s video dispatch, with some quick tips from professional photographer Rich Wagner, you’ll find it here.
One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned so far here in Ecuador is how to take photos that illustrate a travel article, or that tell a story you could write an article around. Then, you can sell them as an article/photo package.
Rich gave us three different shots you should always be on the look-out for when using your images to tell a story:
** 1. Establishing Shots: These are the wide open, spanning shots. They set the scene by showing the reader the whole picture. For example, if you’re writing about a restaurant, museum, or artisan shop, before you take pictures of the food or products, get some shots of the building — inside and out.
** 2. Close-ups: Get the details. Take close-up shots of anything interesting, colorful, or unusual that you see around you, so long as it’s related to your story. Again, magazine editors and designers like to have the choice of close-ups and wide-open shots.
** 3. People: Who runs the place you’re photographing? What do they do there? Who eats there, goes there, or buys there? Answer these questions with photos. Capture people as they work… or customers buying… diners eating… etc.
Yesterday, attendee Florence Devermann followed Rich’s advice when we visited Peguche (the Village of the Weavers), so I thought you might like to see the pictures she got there.
Florence photographed the exterior and interior of one of the weaving shops. She got a great action shot of an indigenous woman at work behind a blurred spinning wheel.  And she got a few close-ups of the products and yarn up for sale in their store.
I’ll include her pictures in our video interview below…
TIP: Another thing that will help you get on an editor’s good side when is taking both portrait and landscape shots (that is, horizontal and vertical).
Editors like options. We typically raise the camera to our eye and take mostly horizontal shots, but most magazines are vertical.  Cover shots, for instance, are almost always vertical.
Whenever you take a shot, just turn the camera, re-compose, and take it again the other way.
You can watch Florence’s video here:

Next week I’m going to ask freelance travel writer Jennifer Stevens to show us how she goes about building an article out of photos like these.
Stay tuned.
— Bonnie
Bonnie Caton
Staff Writer, Great Escape Publishing
[Editor’s Note: Learn more about how you can turn your pictures into cash in our free online newsletter The Right Way to Travel.  Sign up here today and we’ll send you a new report, Selling Photos for Cash: A Quick-Start Guide, completely FREE.]