Photography Speaker Assignment

On Wednesday, April 16, Bruce Squiers from The Schenectady Daily Gazette visited our journalism class. Squiers is a long time photographer who was been working with the Gazette for the past 20 years. He came to our class to discuss both photojournalism and visual literacy. Throughout his presentation he touched on the many key points of being both a journalist and photographer, along with how to just take a better picture!
Visual literacy is a key element of photojournalism and often helps editors chose certain pictures to go along with certain articles in a newspaper or magazine. A particular image may come to mind when you think of a certain word or event, for example when someone mentions the attacks on September 11 many people automatically picture the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. Another key part of visual literacy is understanding and becoming interested in things that you normally wouldn’t care to photograph.
The decisive moment is another important part to good photography. French photographer, Henri Cartier Bresson, first introduced the decisive moment theory. Bresson explains this as the one moment when all elements in the picture are perfectly in sync. Bresson has said, “the eye, the mind, and the heart must be aligned.”
Perspective can drastically change a photo, and once it is changed no two photos will ever look alike. Perspective can be changed by moving the position you are in to get a new angle on whatever is being photographed, the only way to change the perspective on the photo is to physically move from the spot you are in and go to a new location. The new technology that claims to change perspective with just a lens seems to be untrue, because as long as you remain in the same spot yet change the lens; it is still the same picture with the same perspective and nothing within the photo has moved.