Photography & Journalism – To Trail Your Story, To Thrill Your Audience

My very first essay on “Find-That-Moment Photography” – a term I invented just now. At almost 81, I have found that journalists in print media do not trouble themselves going after “memorable shots” – if they have a camera at all. To thrill or not to thrill, that is the question!

In the upper image, Paul M Gutierrez shares Joe Galvez’ 07-July-2021 Facebook post describing “the best training ground for photojournalists” thus:

In the rites of passage, (people) usually need to undergo only one gauntlet to become what they are. But in photojournalism, it takes more than one baptism of fire to be a full-fledged photojournalist.
(upper images from Facebook)

No problem. I’m thinking of journalists, not Mr Galvez’ photojournalists, taking photographs while taking notes for their stories. Why not? With sophisticated cellphones taking images of excellent quality, journalists should be able to “illustrate” their stories with their own charming photographs of the scene or interview.

The lower image was taken by me 24 June 2018 with my Lumix FZ100, looking “through” the milking carabao shed early morning across the Amancio Farm Hotel in Cordon, Isabela (visit courtesy of Noime Liangco). From color to B&W, still there is drama.

I took many shots of a scene and the whole farm. Behind 50 years of off-and-on taking photographs at that time, having read technical instructions for photography – and having studied the masters of painting at the excellent library of Xavier University in Cagayan De Oro City in 1968 – I look at a scene differently from the “ordinary eye.”

A “smart” photograph like that attracts the eyes of readers, doesn’t it? Even if the story is dull or uninteresting.

To be clear, I’m a journalist – if self-taught and self-styled – but I have always taken any number of photographs to share any number of them since 1980 when I founded and became Editor In Chief of Habitat, quarterly color magazine of the Los Baños-based Forest Research Institute (now Ecosystems Research & Development Bureau), a publication I patterned after the American National Geographic (editorially admitted).

Mr Galvez says:

Photojournalism is not about photography, per se, but a practice that entails risks and even death. Photojournalism is not for the faint-hearted. To become one, he or she needs to undergo a series of trainings and exposures to any given circumstances in order to be competitive with other counterparts. And of course, to come home alive and (unscathed).

I disagree with all of the above!

Right now I have my Lumix FZ100 digital camera with Intelligent Auto (iA) that takes care of my settings: focus, lighting, opening, speed.

With iA and advanced cellphones, quality photography is now point-and-shoot. Yes.

After many observations on how photojournalists work, I have come to the conclusion that the Philippines is so far the best training ground for photojournalists, and the best setting to practice photojournalism in the world.

I leave Mr Galvez to his dangerous photography while I’m cheerful taking countless photographs to trail my story and sometimes to thrill my readers. Even in Agriculture? Yes!@517