4 Tools You Can Use To Control Focus And Flow When Sequencing Your Images

Creativity - Storytelling  Comment
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Viewers search for significant changes between images presented together and the significance of the changes between them. It’s continuity. Every screenwriter needs to create it. Every storyboard needs to interpret it. Every director needs to guide it. Every editor needs to refine it. If you’re a still photographer, you may be called to do all of these things.

Continuity lies at the heart of the art of visual storytelling. The types of images selected and the transitions made between images presented in groups are powerful tools for visual communication. Sequences can provide useful comparisons and contrasts between separate images. They set a pace and rhythm for looking. Carefully orchestrated, they can create the illusion of moving in time, forward or backward, linearly or non-linearly. The best sequences make images, both collectively and individually, clearer, more meaningful, and more moving.

Photographers can use continuity to guide explorations on site and find more images; use a storyboard as a checklist to make sure no angle goes uncovered. Photographers can use continuity to find missing gaps or resolve challenging transitions in ongoing projects, update a storyboard and find out what you’ve got too much of and what you don’t have enough of, or find bridges to connect disparate images. Photographers can use continuity to edit, sequence, and present existing work more effectively; fine-tune an existing story to make it richer and more compelling or create a new one.

There are many classic strategies for sequencing images and creating transitions between them. They’re tools, not rules, that can be applied in many ways. How you apply them ultimately becomes a part of your style.


Because of persistence, this pair of images reads as one unit or a serial image.


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Tips To Help You How To Sequence Your Images Like A Pro

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Clouds roll in.

The sky clears.

Sequence can enhance images and may even change the stories they tell.

 

Sequence

How you present your images can be as important as which ones you select. It’s the art of sequencing (and it is an art), which involves specific techniques that you can learn. What are some of the guiding principles involved? Here are a few.

Quality

Start strong. Finish strong. Make getting there interesting. Whether a symphony, a novel, or an exhibit, it’s good advice for arranging any creative project.

Identifying your strongest image is essential. It sets the highest level of quality, against which all others will be measured. It alone may help you create an appropriate structure for the rest of your work. This singular image is often used to lead a body of work (in the announcement of your project and possibly as the first images seen in the sequence), becoming the most frequently viewed image.

While you may want to arrange your images from strongest to weakest for your own information, you certainly don’t want to present them to other people this way. Instead, you want to tease out your strongest images along the way, sustaining attention toward a strong finish.

While not every image you include in a project needs to be equally strong, a majority of images included should be representative of your best work. The rest should be almost as good. Use lesser images only when they help illustrate essential points that would otherwise be overlooked or add complexity and dimension.

No amount of arranging will make up for the lack of high-quality work. It may be easier to build mass into a project by including lesser amid stronger works; this is rarely an effective strategy. Quality makes the primary impact. Volume is secondary. Even if taken to an extreme, a large dose of average work is far less impressive than a small dose of high-quality work.

To sequence a project, you can use the metaphor of building a fence. The strongest pieces can be thought of as posts. The less strong pieces can be thought of as rails. You want to start and end with the very strongest pieces to create a strong structure. You want to periodically reinforce runs of less strong units with one or more stronger units. You don’t want long runs of rails without posts, or the structure may fail. A fence made only of posts becomes something else entirely, a wall with no variation or grace. The number of strong pieces you include determines how long your fence can be before it gets weak or falls apart.

Story

It’s helpful to identify the story you’re telling. This will impact not only your selection of images but also your presentation of them. Think of each individual picture as a chapter in a book. Simple phrases and sentences can help you. You can logline the entire story, and you can also logline single images (if not every image, then key images that mark transitions) to better understand the function they serve.

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Every Picture Tells A Story … But How Does It Tell It?

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Visual stories can be simple or complex, quiet or dramatic, short or long ... the possibilities are endless.

Even in abstract images things happen, at the very least formal elements interact.

Sometimes stories are told with images through their relationships with other images.

Every picture tells a story. Every picture? Every picture!

Even abstract images tell stories. The stories they tell are not about their subjects. By definition, they don’t have subjects. Or do they? They have themselves. So they tell stories about themselves. They tell stories about the things that make them – color, line, texture, shape, proportion, etc. How all of those things relate is a drama of form.

How many kinds of stories are there? There are scientific stories that tell us what things are and how they work. There are historical stories that tell us how things were, how they changed, and what they’ve become today – some even speculate about how things will be tomorrow. There are emotional stories that tell us how people respond emotionally to things. There may be more kinds of stories, but these are the big ones. When it comes to images, the stories they tell are usually only about a few kinds of things. The images themselves. The things images contain. The processes things go through. The feelings people have in response to things and processes. The concepts created through interpretation. Things: Nouns. Processes: Verbs. Feelings: Adjectives and Adverbs. Concepts: Abstract Ideas.

So if every picture tells a story, one way to determine the strength of an image is to ask, “How strong is the story?” Put another way, one way to improve your images is to tell stronger stories. A story doesn’t have to be big or dramatic to be strong; it just has to be told well. Tell stories strongly. Tell them with stronger form; tell them by more clearly delineating actions; tell them by disclosing emotional responses more passionately; tell them by inspiring us to find the bigger picture beyond each picture or group of pictures.


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Three Keys To Analyzing Images – Content, Form & Feeling

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1 Realistic images emphasize content.

2 Graphic images emphasize form.

3 Expressionistic images emphasize feeling.

4 Impressionistic images may evoke content, form, and/or feeling.

 

Making verbal statements about visual images can be challenging. But, it’s also very useful. Learning to make useful statements about images can help you clarify the type of work you’re looking at or making. It can help you identify an artist’s intentions, including your own. It can help give you direction. It can help you improve your images. It can help you develop projects and predict outcomes. It can help you more effectively communicate with others. When it comes to appreciating and making images, words can be very useful. You don’t need to have a degree or be a professional writer to use words well. Sometimes, a few simple words can end up being the most useful – especially if they’re the right words.

One useful way to comment on images is to discuss three important and related aspects of images - content, form, and feeling. While all images have these dimensions, you can describe the kind of image a work of art is based on how it weights these three concerns. 

Here are several types of images that weigh these concerns differently.


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The Art of Visual Storytelling – Sarah Leen & John Paul Caponigro

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Tuesday, December 14, 2021 – 6:00-7:00 pm (Mountain Time)
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Creativity Continues at Santa Fe Workshops with The Art of Visual Storytelling, a conversation between photo editor Sarah Leen and photographic artist John Paul Caponigro.

During this informative and captivating hour, Sarah and John Paul discuss personal projects and how they often lead us deeper into creativity and to our greatest growth both personally and professionally. But how do you start and sustain them towards completion?

Sarah and John Paul dive deeply into the craft of visual storytelling, essential skills for every photographer that will inspire a lifetime of creative exploration. Through the fine art of deliberate image selection, you can transform a collection of photographs into a compelling, dynamic narrative. Join them to learn strategies for choosing, combining, and sequencing diverse images into cohesive bodies of work for presentation online, in print, or for exhibition. We’ll celebrate personal projects as our best way to discover and develop our authentic visual voices. You’ll see real-world examples and hear the stories behind them that are sure to inspire you. This program finishes with a lively question and answer session open to all participants.

Join Santa Fe Workshops worldwide community of photographers and writers as Creativity Continues this fall.

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