Now, I will choose to capture that moment when he’s reading in beautiful lighting, or when he’s doing something crazy like lying down reading literally in the middle of the stairs with his stuffed dog. But I don’t need to capture it every single day. Over the years, I have literally hundreds of photos of my oldest child (now 7) reading as that is something he has loved since birth. There are reasons to capture the mundane, the everyday. I no longer shoot every moment all day long, but I wait for interesting moments. While in documentary photography, you don’t direct the subject or the general scene, by being intentional about shooting, you still have a lot of control over the final image. You can’t change the color of someone’s shirt or remove logos from clothing. While you can adjust exposure, white balance, dodge and burn, you can’t remove a light switch or cords. No removing pixels in post-production.Documentary shooting means embracing the scene as you encounter it, messes and all. Often, when I shoot lifestyle, I will push clutter out of the way, move furniture, or clear off a table. You let your subjects interact naturally, without interference. You can’t tell your subject to smile, look in a specific direction, point somewhere, “do that again,” etc. If you submit your images to documentary photography contests, these are usually the guidelines laid out: I shoot a blend of lifestyle and documentary, but when I classify an image as pure documentary, it must adhere to specific rules. Ultimately documentary photography is about an authentic representation of the scene you encounter, without the photographer changing or directing the scene.
In this post, I’ll share six tips on shooting documentary with intention!įirst, let’s do a quick run through of the rules of documentary photography.
Today, I pick up my camera far less but have more images that I love because I try to be more intentional when I do pick it up. However, I knew nothing about light or composition and struggled to figure out why I liked some images but not others. Some of my favorite images ever are from that year because of the raw emotions and connections. When I first adopted my husband’s camera back in 2017, I brought it everywhere with me, afraid of missing a single moment. I think that stays with me the most especially because she was so young.Documenting the everyday moments will always be my first love. I wanted to start chest compressions but she had an open gunshot wound and she was already bleeding out so there was nothing I could do to help her. “And there was nothing that I could do to help her. “She was just young - and deceased,” Kindra said of the woman, who was actually 21. She says she saw things she hopes never to see again, including a young woman she guessed to be about 18 who was bleeding out through an open chest wound. You want to stop and help but you still hear gunfire, and I have kids.” In the alleys there were people screaming for help. “There was still gunfire so we were kind of dipping and diving trying to get back to our hotel. “There were multiple bodies on the floor, some that were dead on the scene, some people that were passing out as we were walking through,” she said. At one point her video stops abruptly as another shot rings out. Kindra tossed aside her hot dog and shot video in the moments after the initial bursts of gunfire. Had Kindra and husband Miguel skipped the street dog they figured they would have been at precisely the wrong spot when the gunfire erupted. And it couldn’t have been two minutes after I left the hot dog stand that all of that rang out.” “(Miguel) tried to go right (toward the hotel) and I’m like, ‘No, we came here for the hot dogs, so let’s go grab our hot dogs.’ That’s when we went left and went to the hot dog stand. “They have a lot of street vendors out there and we were gonna go ahead and find a street vendor and grab some hot dogs.,” she said. Then Kindra made one of life’s random, mundane decisions upon which fate turns – for good and sometimes not for good. and bars were turning patrons out onto the sidewalk. Kindra Geivet and her husband Miguel Gomez had taken their son and his friend to Sacramento for a Saturday night concert at the Golden 1 Center, an indoor arena, home of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, a few blocks from the state Capitol.Īfter the show, they tucked the boys away in their hotel room and went out onto K Street, where things were still lively. Far reaching, in fact, all the way to Delano where a local woman walked through the carnage. (KGET) - The tragedy in Sacramento late Saturday night that killed six has had far reaching effects.