Telling a story with your pictures.

Pictures should always tell a story. The story can be simple or complex but there should be a clarity of thought evident in all your shots.

Years of working as a news photographer taught me the importance of paying attention to the story telling being delivered by each picture.

Seeing some young people unloading kayaks for an afternoon run down the local river, I immediately thought of my other blog --- London Daily Photo.

I shot images of the unloading, the launching and the paddling. The first two images are rich with lots of action. I am especially fond of the composition of the unloading picture with the curved jogging trail adding a wonderful sense of energy to the image.

These images just didn't happen, but I didn't set them up either. I scouted each scene, found the angle that held the most promise and then shot the action using the best frame capture mode of my Fuji Finepix HS10.

Some mention should be made of Photoshop. All images were enhanced using Photoshop. Each picture had the endpoints adjusted with Levels and the overall brightness of each image was modified using Curves. After hitting the images with a little Saturation, each picture was sharpened using Unsharp Mask.

This is the approach that one should strive for when shooting such stuff as vacation pictures. The holiday photo album will be far more interesting, if you do.