Break The Rules

I believe that the best photography, like the best of other kinds of craftsmanship, is often created by those who know the “rules” so well that they can confidently break them. The photograph below is technically “wrong”, just like the frame that forms the banner of this Website, but I still think it’s very good. The subjects of the photo are relatively tiny and exactly centred in the frame. There are seven people in it, but you can’t see any of their faces—and, anyway, most of them are out of focus and cut off by the edges of the view.

But the picture is striking and tells a story. Telling a story is the point of photojournalism. Some wedding photographers call this naturalistic, narrative approach “photojournalistic” or “reportage“.

This week I have been breaking one of my own rules and manipulating my images digitally: to remove an ambulance from the background of some group photographs. I used the “clone tool” in The Gimp, a wonderful free (both “free-as-in-free-beer” and “free-as-in-free-speech”) image manipulation package. There’s a simple reason for this: the ambulance is a completely unwanted distraction from some pleasing formal shots. It isn’t relevant to the event or aesthetically pleasing, and it isn’t a nice omen for a marriage. Removing the ambulance was also, thanks to the nature of the rest of the background, relatively straightforward to do—if boring and time-consuming.

In photojournalism, there are good “distractions” and bad “distractions”. Good distractions can contribute to the plot, often by forcing you to read a picture in a particular way, or contribute to the composition, sometimes as counterpoints. Bad distractions interfere with a picture’s story or detract from its beauty. In real photojournalism, however, deleting distractions is frowned upon.

For a top professional’s views on such matters you should read this interesting Q&A with Michele McNally, The New York Times’s Assistant Managing Editor for Photography. Scroll down to the section headed with the question “How do you feel about distracting elements in a photo…?” McNally’s answer covers both framing and focus. It explains how lopped off limbs and blurry blobs can make a good photograph and is illustrated by some excellent, if small, example images. (In the same article she also discusses the NYTimes’s policy on digital tinkering.)