Photo Documentaries - How to Create a Powerful Documentary Series

Photo documentaries are a way to tell a story exclusively, or almost exclusively, through pictures. In most articles you find photo graphs that compliment lots of words and paragraphs, in a photo documentary the goal is to have small amounts of text that compliment lots of pictures. In this article I'll give you some tips on how to get started creating an effective photo documentary series.

The easiest way to begin is to look for events going on in your area, or an event you or someone you know will be involved in. My first photo documentary was on a local fishing derby in my community. You should identify an event with several key stages. Using my fishing derby as an example, I wanted to photograph the following stages: the participants signing in with all of their gear, people fishing off the dock and getting into their boats, bringing the fish in, measuring them, and then handing out prizes.

Plan out the photos you want to get, but don't limit yourself to these. You might have something really cool come up that you hadn't planned for, don't hesitate to snap pictures of anything that you think will help tell the story. At the fishing derby a neighbor played his bugle to signal to everyone on the lake that they needed to come in and time was up. I took a picture of him playing while looking out onto the lake. I hadn't planned on this, but it made a beautiful picture and worked into my story very well.

When setting up your prints to tell your event's story make sure that there's a flow to them that makes sense. I set most of my documentaries up like magazine article pages. They have a title at the top, and pictures moving left to right and top to bottom on each page to tell the story. An important thing to note is that you should only put captions under pictures you think need an explanation, it is usually more powerful if the photograph can tell a story on its own.

I hope this advice helps to give you an idea of how to set up your photographic documentary endeavors. Remember to pick events and photos that interest you and above all, have fun!