Lessons

Lesson Info

Storytelling with Images

I wanted teo also talk about the the need for, um, telling a story um, a lot of a lot of people when you're making a scrapbook, you're telling a story, and whether that's little stories that are just one spread long, or whether it's story over an entire book, um, it doesn't matter, but the important thing is that story's air based in they're based in, uh, various various viewpoints, so you can't tell a story to think about the way a movie is made it watch a movie, and the next time you watch a movie, you're going to notice three things you're going to notice an establishment shot, then you're going to notice a mid shot, then you're gonna notice a detail, then you're going to notice a mid shot, then you're gonna notice the detail, and then you notice a mid shot, then you're another establishment shot, and then you're going to go back to a mid shot than a detail and it's just going to keep going back and forth between all of those. And if you did an entire movie with real close up detail...

stuff or an entire movie with all establishment shots, that would be the weirdest movie you've ever seen, because you can't tell the story, you have to tell people where they are, you have to tell the people who there you tell people who's involved and what's involved in the story and then you have to give them those tidbits of information those those those nuggets that make them cry or happy or you have to give those to him and so all movies are based in that because they're telling a story if you read a book it's the same thing you get the establishment shot which is you know, it was the best of times the worst of times you know they come in they tell you you know generally this is what's going on in the in the world at the time that we start our story and by the way here's a character and then they go into the minute details you know, dickens tells the shape of the apple for three pages and how it you know felt and how it tastes whatever that's the detail and then he goes into a kind of ah mid shot where he establishes some conversation between an old man and a young boy and you know, and then and then he goes back to the world view of what's going on and it's back and forth all the time no story is complete without all three of those and so when I look at a story that I'm telling and so in this case we're telling a story we're telling a story about a little tea party that happened um when I tell that story, I want to tell in a way that shows the the entire event so you can see I've got details here, I've got little tiny things, so there's little things that tell you, you know what it was like and what poured the water and what the cute little cups look like and things like that on dh then I've got, but I always have an establishment shot of some sort, so you've got, you know, this establishment shot that shows you, you know, the backyard and the and the table and the cool things that are hanging in the in the trees, and then of course, I've got a shot of this this, I think, is the best establishment shot because it shows you the backyard, but it also gives you a little character and, you know, things like that, so you're you're putting all the story together and you have to shoot for it because you can't make this up later. So when you're photographing, you always have to think establishment shot close ups, mid shots and you gotta think, okay, I need a relationship shot I need to show that, you know, there are these people together, and then my establishment shot could just be a shot of you know the amusement park that we went to it doesn't have so I have to have a person and then once you put that that shot with the person the close up of them with a sucker in their hand or you know cotton candy or something then suddenly you've got the feeling of here's a child in an amusement park and this is the amusement park got the whole picture so when you're telling a story if you can tell it in a number of frames if you've got five frames to tell the story then one or two establishment shots and two details on a mid shot that's all you need and you've got the whole story encapsulated but you've got to think about that every story needs their close ups every story needs a nest abl ish mint shot and everybody every story needs some kind of you know interactive shots between people and so when you look at this little tea set up you can see that I've got you know, close ups of individual kids but then I've also got you know, shots of the entire set of them you know, having their tea together I've got shots of people interacting getting hugs I have them playing you know together so these air all those mid shots that tell those interactive stories on and I think that's really important when you're trying to tell a story now I'm in a talk to you just for a second about a story that I'm telling right now um and that story is about a little boy named trey gin and he's the happiest, funniest little kid um super great kid and this is this is trey gin and I got a I got a call from my wife and, uh she told me that there's a friend of uh their families friends with r us and I got a call that they had found out that he has cancer and uh so he's got cancer of his bone right here and apparently he one day just lifted his arm and it and it broke his bone just kind of snapped on him and so they couldn't figure out they were like, how could you break your bone and by lifting your arm but they went and x rayed it and found that there was just the bone was kind of eating away or whatever and so they found this cancer in it and so he has bone cancer right here. And, uh so anyway he had to go in for chemo therapy and it was going to be I think three or four days after I had found out about it and so I called his parents because I was thinking, you know, I was kind of emotional about it on guys thinking what would I want in or if I were a dad what would I want um and how would I feel and like what would be important to me because you know you want to help your friends and uh I thought you know if if if that was me and that was my son I would want to have it documented so well that that no matter what happened I would either have something that I could show him and say look what you went through when you were five years old and you beat it or I would have something I could look back on and say you know, that was my son is my son so I called him and asked him I said look, I know this kind of intrusive but I wantto when I help out and so um we have had the opportunity now for the last nine in a month and a half two months to go in and photograph him in his in his experience and this is the first day so this is day one when he was going to go in so we met early in the morning and we did a portrait of him and his family and and him with his dad and his you know, everybody got pictures of the trade gin and we got pictures of trade and we've got pictures of the family and all sorts of stuff so we did like a family port trish you and then we just kept following trey gin and what was going on and we would, you know, go to the hospital and and that's trading in the hospital with my nephew was visiting him a cz well and just just such a silly boy, you know, just sophie fun and cute and and so he would go to the hospital and he gets chemo to try and try and get rid of the cancer and that's his port so they feed him all of his drugs and stuff through there um and it just just a super super fun kid um, but but that documenting that because I wouldn't as a father, I mean, I could document it myself, but I wouldn't want to because I need to be doing what his dad's doing and uh and I think I think that's a problem with all of us though I think we all spend so much time trying to document our lives that we don't experience our lives like I was saying, I never in my own photos, I'm never in the photos with my kids, I'm always taking the photos and sometimes I have to just set down the camera and walk away from it and if my wife picks it up and shoots great, but I have to leave it alone because sometimes the stories aren't worth telling you have to experience them and be there for it and so this you know, it would be important to me as a dad not to be taking pictures of my kid but to be with my kids and so I think that these are moments that really matter and this is this this actually is charlie this he's named his uh so that's charlie right there the the drug dispenser so he wrote wanders around the hospital with that little guy and he you know charlie always comes with him and so sometimes he likes charlie and the other day he said he hates charlie so sometimes he likes charlie's because he doesn't but he gets a different charlie every time he comes so I think actually might be saying he doesn't like this particular charlie because some charlie's he can ride on another charlie's he can't sew but anyway so one one particular moment wass a bunch of friends came and he was about to lose his hair you could see that it was kind of, you know, getting thin and so we all went over to a friend's house and uh he got to shave friend friend of ours head and he you know, but when he got shaved it was he was a little nervous about it, but in the end he uh he was okay with it but so something what's that okay, no, but some days are good and some days are bad, you know, sometimes you you have good days and sometimes you have bad days and uh but but how important is that to know that you goingto have all that and it looks like he's going to he's going toe I mean, they're pretty hopeful things were going well, and so in the end, I'm hoping that twenty years from now when he's forgotten that he was five at one point he'll be able to look at the photographs and realize and maybe they'll call some, you know, memory back and he'll be able to remember a little bit of what happened because I don't remember anything when I was five and soto have the ability to know, you know, you know what you have accomplished and the strength that you had when you're five might help you get through something even, you know, worse down the road or, you know, the same thing down the road and so, um, anyway, so this is a project that I'm working on it but again it's all about there are things that are important the frame is important, you can see that the frame is important here, you can see that the details are important, you know that you can see it like the frame itself shows you how little he you know how how insignificant little he must feel and how difficult and how overwhelming the world is and this is on a day where the world is very overwhelming to him because he was on all sorts of medications that weren't working with him and and he was just everything was wrong you know? You're just having a rough rough day and so even while people were playing with him and he was you know, getting to play video games and stuff like that nothing was going well and so those kind of shots to me you know that that crop alone tells the story um and so as you're telling a story, you've got to not only think about the details and the crop and the they also think about you know, how to tell that story with a wild you know, an establishing shot and a close up shot and things like that um so throughout this workshop we're gonna be working on some of these photos and we're going to make a book um and it's obviously going to be an incomplete book right now because we don't know you know the rest of the story yet and so we're going to keep telling the story and keep building on the book but I wanted to introduce trade into you introduced reagent and charlie to you and let you know kind of what we're doing and the purpose of this project and sometimes it's important if you're not if you're if you're a professional photographer or if you're whatever kind of photographer you are sometimes it's good to step away from just the normal everyday photography that you do and families and take on a project that means something to you um and do something worthwhile and meaningful with your photography because you can there's countless of opportunities to do that. Teo, if you're a good photographer, go out and take pictures of little kids that can't afford photographs or something like that and make it meaningful um but telling stories is so important it's important in your family it's important if you can do it for other people because, uh, you know, we just don't have enough stories in our lives when I'm enough memories and so it's it's important to create them, but it's also important to be able to find him and access him. So if you're making all these memories that's what today was all about is about making those memories findable and so now if you're organized, you confined your memories and you'll be able to call him up and and tell your kids what they went through or tell your kids what silly things they did and and what cute things they did because you you know you you confined him, you've done the due diligence and so it's important to do it I know it seems like I'm telling you to do a job but really it's gonna pay off in the end if you if you just get organized you have a question a question just curious because of your system that you know you can have the photos and you can have the documents well while you're doing this do you have any of like maybe his drawings or his parents feelings we've been videotaping as well and so we've got little interviews with them and stuff like that that are going here usually when it comes to like pictures and things documents all photograph because I think they're prettier yeah, yeah, they're prettier when their photographs so I've photographed like ekgs and you know things like that, you know, like I photographed what drugs like his dad all point out this is such and such a drag because his dad is in medical school right now so he's really knowledgeable about what's going on and so he's like oh that's that drug and that's this drug you know and stuff but that's gotta be rough because he's with his he's got to be with his kid as much as he can but he's still gotta study for his exams and he's gotta work on you know he's got to go to his rounds and all that kind of stuff too, so it's just a very difficult situation, but so all photographed the bags of drugs and stuff like that to try and you know, so that because that seems it's important to the process. So I was just wondering, because if you got any words or something from him, from his point of view to add into the to the book because it's you taking in the story. So I just wondered if there's anything from, like, yeah, and and that's that could be pulled from the videos. So we've been interviewing him and talking about random things and that's. So, like, I hate charlie, you know that that would be a good thing to go in there. But then he the other days, he loves charlie, and so, you know, you could have, like, I hate charlie one day, and then I loved charlie, and I stand there like you're different pages or something like that. How old is he? He's five. Yeah, super sweet kid.