Second Beach, WA
Canon 5D Mark II with Canon 24-70 f/2.8L. 70mm, ISO 100, 67 sec. at f/8.
The above photo is from back in December when I made my first dedicated photo trip to the Washington Coast with David and Vlad. We had one very rainy day where a 20 minute hike to Second Beach seemed like it would be a waste. But then David saw a pretty patch of sand, and next thing you knew the three of us were shooting a 4×8′ patch of sand like crazy.
That one little shooting session resulted in a second trip a few months later to the same beach location. A third trip is in the works.
Why is one little patch of sand so interesting to me? Because I want to use it to build a folio. Unlike other folios I’ve produced, I want this folio to tell a story instead of being a collection of pretty images. I’m working on pulling together 7 images using the techiques John Paul Caponigro outlines in his Photo Essays creativity lessson. Right now I have about 20 good images to select from. I figure I need at least double that before I have enough to come up with the folio images.
More importantly, though, I need to pre-think before the next trip the kind of images I need to get to tell the story. If I just go and randomly shoot photos I may get some nice shots, but they may not be the ones necessary to finish the set. So I’m going to steal a page from JP and pre-visualize, and perhaps even sketch, some of the frames I’ll need to put the package together. Then I’ll go on the trip.
Have you ever used a package of photographs to tell a story? Or have you ever hung a gallery show and made the images in the show follow a classic storytelling pattern?
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