What is Art Focused Storytelling?

Capturing the Emotion of the Moment
Artfully Enhancing Each Image
Creatively Weaving the Images to Tell Your Story

Capturing the Emotion of the Moment: Storytelling photography starts with capturing the emotion at the “perfect moment.” Just before or just after is not perfect. Skilled storytelling photographers watch the story unfolding before them and anticipate when the emotion will peak (Mom is playing with her child. – Capture the moment their eyes “lock!” – It all happened in an instant and gone forever if not captured!). The anticipation is similar to a baseball batter “reading the pitch.” A great batter “sees” more messages and can better anticipate where the ball will be. People “telegraph” changes in expression! The skilled photographic storyteller reads these messages in order to capture the images at the perfect moment. A photographer attains those skills by observing people for thousands of hours with their eyes to the camera and pressing the shutter to take thousands of images.

Artfully Enhancing Each Image: Like Master Painters, photographers can enhance the emotion conveyed to the viewer in an image by hiding elements that are distracting and accentuating elements that are the center of attention and full of emotion. In the studio the photographer has control of background, lighting and directs the posing of the subjects. Subject’s faces are usually bright to attract the viewer’s attention while light to their hands and feet are blocked to keep attention away. However, while capturing the spontaneous emotions of in an environmental setting, the photographer has less control over the environment as the image is captured. But the photographer has tools to assist with post production of the image. A distracting object can be removed. Likewise, adding some blurring, changing to B&W, or in other ways modifying the color palette in the image can make the emotion more expressive! The way “Master Classical Painters” loaded different colors on their paint brushes created a color contrast that makes the colors vivid and the image “real.” Photographers can similarly modify the color contrast to direct the viewers’ attention and raise the interest and emotion of the viewer.

Creatively Weaving the Images to Tell Your Story: The placement and relative size of images can also unite and delineate the story of the combined images. We have many products that allow images to be combined into more complete stories. These include: Albums (2-page spreads are chapters & all the chapters tell the complete story), Wall Art products like: Collections (multiple independent images placed near each other with intent), Collages (multiple independent images on one print) and Composites (Multiple images smoothly integrated into a story).

The father & child playfully tickling is often filled with various emotions. One image may not convey that complete story. But multiple images in different settings may better capture the complete story. When developing a multiple image story, the image with the strongest emotion is often the “anchor image.” By making this image larger the viewers’ attention can be intentionally drawn to that image. The other images show other emotions, but they are more supportive. They “develop and support the main plot” in the photographic story. Love can be expressed in so many ways!

As Art Focused Storytellers we have developed a very intentional and methodical style of Portraiture. It starts with the skill of photojournalism to capture the emotion of the moment, adds the skills of an artist to fully develop the emotions of the image, and ends with the storytelling skills of a graphic artist.

Our goal is to make you “delighted” with the quality of our products and services! Just “satisfied” is not good enough! We are committed to you!