describe picture essay

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How to Write an Essay Describing a Picture?

If you are a writer, you must have been wondering how to write an essay describing a certain picture. Here are some tips on how to analyze a photograph and how to choose a theme for your photo essay. You should always start by thinking of the qualities of the image and what it reminds you of. Think about the memories it evokes and what emotions it suggests. The artist who created the picture probably did so with intention: to evoke memories in viewers.

Analysis of a photograph

A well-written picture will contain several elements that make it memorable for the viewer. This combination of elements will evoke different impressions in the mind of the observer. Photographs are created with the purpose of spreading important information and changing the mindset of society on a specific topic. Such photographs deal with social, political, or economic issues. The most effective way to analyze a picture is to set it against its context, or the environment in it’s located in. For instance, a picture of war action might elicit strong reactions from society. In contrast, a picture of a happy family might be well-received.

Before writing an essay on an image, it’s important to define and describe what each element means. This is especially important when writing about photographs that are taken at a distance. To broaden your perspective and distinguish the elements of a photograph, you can stand at least three times the diagonal of the picture. In addition, you’ll be better able to notice any details that the photograph may contain. You should also keep in mind that your first impression of a photo must be comprehensive, rather than detailed.

Identify the medium. What is the medium used to communicate with the audience? Is it video or images? Which medium is the author using? What’s its credibility? How does it affect the viewer? How do the images relate to each other? Essentially, a photograph can serve as a medium of communication. In some cases, a photograph can employ a combination of images and video. By identifying the medium used in the composition, you can decide which of these methods would be best for your purposes.

Besides the visual elements, a good visual analysis paper requires you to consider the composition of the picture. This analysis should be descriptive and explain its meaning. The key points should be highlighted. Then, a good student should use descriptive language. In this way, the picture is more likely to convey his or her ideas. While the analysis process is important, it will also help you strengthen or weaken your initial impressions.

While studying a photo, you should pay special attention to the levels of light and the objects visible and hidden. Look for symbolic elements and use your knowledge of these to analyze the photo. The other elements you need to pay attention to are color, size, lines, and shape. Lastly, you need to consider texture or the softness or harshness of the object. In 2D and 3D art, the texture is essential.

When writing your visual analysis essay, you must take a step beyond superficial reading and literary analysis. Students may feel that their threshold for literary analysis is too high. However, by going down this unconventional path, students will find there are multiple right answers. The beauty of the process is the opportunity to broaden their knowledge and experience. You can help them achieve this goal with Photo Analysis. It is a powerful way to engage students and develop their media literacy.

Choosing a theme

The most obvious way to choose a theme for an essay describing a picture is to go with something you know and experience. The idea is to make the topic easily accessible, so you can focus on that. Some common photo essay themes are experiences and emotions. One great example is Sharon Pannen’s photo series Paper & Stories for Schon! Magazine. It depicts different emotions and stories of the people featured in the photographs.

When describing a picture, you should explore every sense to make the picture come to life. This isn’t just about the visual aspect, so be sure to explore all the sounds, smells, and tastes that the picture evokes. Make the reader feel as though they could touch the picture, so include vivid descriptions of each. The best picture descriptions include vivid descriptive adjectives. Here are a few tips to choose a theme for an essay describing a picture:

Choosing a topic for a photo essay

The best way to choose a topic for a photo essay is to look into the world around you. Photographing what you love can be an excellent choice. Many people are interested in the day-to-day lives of other people. Even those with seemingly mundane jobs can surprise you. If you can find an interesting profession, document it with your camera. If you can’t find a topic that interests you, consider collaborating with another photographer to write a photo essay about the subject matter.

Choosing a topic for photo essays begins with determining what type of subject to write about. It’s important to choose a subject that interests you and is accessible to a large audience. Also, make sure the subject is something you are passionate about, or that you have a broad knowledge of. Once you’ve chosen a subject, make sure the photos are comprehensible to readers. Include captions for each picture and identify close-up, landscapes, portraits, and apertures.

Choosing a topic for photo essays requires an investment of time and empathy. One famous photo essay by Gordon Parks shows how to choose a topic by looking at the life of a boy in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. He spent weeks capturing every aspect of the boy’s life and eventually persuaded the editors to publish the full story. Flavio da Silva’s family stayed in touch with him for years after the publication of the photo essay.

When choosing a topic for a photo essay, consider how it fits with your overall photography style. You might want to use wide-angle shots to establish the scene while close-ups show details and the human form. A photo essay should have a climax or conclusion. A good photo essay should make readers feel the viewer was captivated by a story in pictures. A photo essay is a great way to capture an experience that will stay with them for a long time.

While there are plenty of subjects to choose from, you must choose one that has a universal appeal. For example, if you’re interested in photographing a specific location, you can choose the city’s skyline or the streetlights. Another idea for a photo essay is to document the day of a person or group of people. This type of essay is popular and can involve friends and family.

One way to make a photo essay better is to take more pictures than you normally would. A photo essay that aims to persuade or support a cause should have photographs that reflect this. To improve your chances of selecting the best shots, you should take as many photos as possible. The more photos you take, the better. You can also use more than one of them. If you have enough pictures, you can use them to make the most effective photo essay.

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How to Create an Engaging Photo Essay (with Examples)

Photo essays tell a story in pictures. They're a great way to improve at photography and story-telling skills at once. Learn how to do create a great one.

Learn | Photography Guides | By Ana Mireles

Photography is a medium used to tell stories – sometimes they are told in one picture, sometimes you need a whole series. Those series can be photo essays.

If you’ve never done a photo essay before, or you’re simply struggling to find your next project, this article will be of help. I’ll be showing you what a photo essay is and how to go about doing one.

You’ll also find plenty of photo essay ideas and some famous photo essay examples from recent times that will serve you as inspiration.

If you’re ready to get started, let’s jump right in!

Table of Contents

What is a Photo Essay?

A photo essay is a series of images that share an overarching theme as well as a visual and technical coherence to tell a story. Some people refer to a photo essay as a photo series or a photo story – this often happens in photography competitions.

Photographic history is full of famous photo essays. Think about The Great Depression by Dorothea Lange, Like Brother Like Sister by Wolfgang Tillmans, Gandhi’s funeral by Henri Cartier Bresson, amongst others.

What are the types of photo essay?

Despite popular belief, the type of photo essay doesn’t depend on the type of photography that you do – in other words, journalism, documentary, fine art, or any other photographic genre is not a type of photo essay.

Instead, there are two main types of photo essays: narrative and thematic .

As you have probably already guessed, the thematic one presents images pulled together by a topic – for example, global warming. The images can be about animals and nature as well as natural disasters devastating cities. They can happen all over the world or in the same location, and they can be captured in different moments in time – there’s a lot of flexibility.

A narrative photo essa y, on the other hand, tells the story of a character (human or not), portraying a place or an event. For example, a narrative photo essay on coffee would document the process from the planting and harvesting – to the roasting and grinding until it reaches your morning cup.

What are some of the key elements of a photo essay?

• Tell a unique story – A unique story doesn’t mean that you have to photograph something that nobody has done before – that would be almost impossible! It means that you should consider what you’re bringing to the table on a particular topic.
• Put yourself into the work – One of the best ways to make a compelling photo essay is by adding your point of view, which can only be done with your life experiences and the way you see the world.
• Add depth to the concept – The best photo essays are the ones that go past the obvious and dig deeper in the story, going behind the scenes, or examining a day in the life of the subject matter – that’s what pulls in the spectator.
• Nail the technique – Even if the concept and the story are the most important part of a photo essay, it won’t have the same success if it’s poorly executed.
• Build a structure – A photo essay is about telling a thought-provoking story – so, think about it in a narrative way. Which images are going to introduce the topic? Which ones represent a climax? How is it going to end – how do you want the viewer to feel after seeing your photo series?
• Make strong choices – If you really want to convey an emotion and a unique point of view, you’re going to need to make some hard decisions. Which light are you using? Which lens? How many images will there be in the series? etc., and most importantly for a great photo essay is the why behind those choices.

9 Tips for Creating a Photo Essay

Credit: Laura James

1. Choose something you know

To make a good photo essay, you don’t need to travel to an exotic location or document a civil war – I mean, it’s great if you can, but you can start close to home.

Depending on the type of photography you do and the topic you’re looking for in your photographic essay, you can photograph a local event or visit an abandoned building outside your town.

It will be much easier for you to find a unique perspective and tell a better story if you’re already familiar with the subject. Also, consider that you might have to return a few times to the same location to get all the photos you need.

2. Follow your passion

Most photo essays take dedication and passion. If you choose a subject that might be easy, but you’re not really into it – the results won’t be as exciting. Taking photos will always be easier and more fun if you’re covering something you’re passionate about.

3. Take your time

A great photo essay is not done in a few hours. You need to put in the time to research it, conceptualizing it, editing, etc. That’s why I previously recommended following your passion because it takes a lot of dedication, and if you’re not passionate about it – it’s difficult to push through.

4. Write a summary or statement

Photo essays are always accompanied by some text. You can do this in the form of an introduction, write captions for each photo or write it as a conclusion. That’s up to you and how you want to present the work.

5. Learn from the masters

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Making a photographic essay takes a lot of practice and knowledge. A great way to become a better photographer and improve your storytelling skills is by studying the work of others. You can go to art shows, review books and magazines and look at the winners in photo contests – most of the time, there’s a category for photo series.

6. Get a wide variety of photos

Think about a story – a literary one. It usually tells you where the story is happening, who is the main character, and it gives you a few details to make you engage with it, right?

The same thing happens with a visual story in a photo essay – you can do some wide-angle shots to establish the scenes and some close-ups to show the details. Make a shot list to ensure you cover all the different angles.

Some of your pictures should guide the viewer in, while others are more climatic and regard the experience they are taking out of your photos.

7. Follow a consistent look

Both in style and aesthetics, all the images in your series need to be coherent. You can achieve this in different ways, from the choice of lighting, the mood, the post-processing, etc.

8. Be self-critical

Once you have all the photos, make sure you edit them with a good dose of self-criticism. Not all the pictures that you took belong in the photo essay. Choose only the best ones and make sure they tell the full story.

9. Ask for constructive feedback

Often, when we’re working on a photo essay project for a long time, everything makes perfect sense in our heads. However, someone outside the project might not be getting the idea. It’s important that you get honest and constructive criticism to improve your photography.

How to Create a Photo Essay in 5 Steps

Credit: Quang Nguyen Vinh

1. Choose your topic

This is the first step that you need to take to decide if your photo essay is going to be narrative or thematic. Then, choose what is it going to be about?

Ideally, it should be something that you’re interested in, that you have something to say about it, and it can connect with other people.

2. Research your topic

To tell a good story about something, you need to be familiar with that something. This is especially true when you want to go deeper and make a compelling photo essay. Day in the life photo essays are a popular choice, since often, these can be performed with friends and family, whom you already should know well.

3. Plan your photoshoot

Depending on what you’re photographing, this step can be very different from one project to the next. For a fine art project, you might need to find a location, props, models, a shot list, etc., while a documentary photo essay is about planning the best time to do the photos, what gear to bring with you, finding a local guide, etc.

Every photo essay will need different planning, so before taking pictures, put in the required time to get things right.

4. Experiment

It’s one thing to plan your photo shoot and having a shot list that you have to get, or else the photo essay won’t be complete. It’s another thing to miss out on some amazing photo opportunities that you couldn’t foresee.

So, be prepared but also stay open-minded and experiment with different settings, different perspectives, etc.

5. Make a final selection

Editing your work can be one of the hardest parts of doing a photo essay. Sometimes we can be overly critical, and others, we get attached to bad photos because we put a lot of effort into them or we had a great time doing them.

Try to be as objective as possible, don’t be afraid to ask for opinions and make various revisions before settling down on a final cut.

7 Photo Essay Topics, Ideas & Examples

Credit: Michelle Leman

• Architectural photo essay

Using architecture as your main subject, there are tons of photo essay ideas that you can do. For some inspiration, you can check out the work of Francisco Marin – who was trained as an architect and then turned to photography to “explore a different way to perceive things”.

You can also lookup Luisa Lambri. Amongst her series, you’ll find many photo essay examples in which architecture is the subject she uses to explore the relationship between photography and space.

• Process and transformation photo essay

This is one of the best photo essay topics for beginners because the story tells itself. Pick something that has a beginning and an end, for example, pregnancy, the metamorphosis of a butterfly, the life-cycle of a plant, etc.

Keep in mind that these topics are linear and give you an easy way into the narrative flow – however, it might be difficult to find an interesting perspective and a unique point of view.

• A day in the life of ‘X’ photo essay

There are tons of interesting photo essay ideas in this category – you can follow around a celebrity, a worker, your child, etc. You don’t even have to do it about a human subject – think about doing a photo essay about a day in the life of a racing horse, for example – find something that’s interesting for you.

• Time passing by photo essay

It can be a natural site or a landmark photo essay – whatever is close to you will work best as you’ll need to come back multiple times to capture time passing by. For example, how this place changes throughout the seasons or maybe even over the years.

A fun option if you live with family is to document a birthday party each year, seeing how the subject changes over time. This can be combined with a transformation essay or sorts, documenting the changes in interpersonal relationships over time.

• Travel photo essay

Do you want to make the jump from tourist snapshots into a travel photo essay? Research the place you’re going to be travelling to. Then, choose a topic.

If you’re having trouble with how to do this, check out any travel magazine – National Geographic, for example. They won’t do a generic article about Texas – they do an article about the beach life on the Texas Gulf Coast and another one about the diverse flavors of Texas.

The more specific you get, the deeper you can go with the story.

• Socio-political issues photo essay

This is one of the most popular photo essay examples – it falls under the category of photojournalism or documental photography. They are usually thematic, although it’s also possible to do a narrative one.

Depending on your topic of interest, you can choose topics that involve nature – for example, document the effects of global warming. Another idea is to photograph protests or make an education photo essay.

It doesn’t have to be a big global issue; you can choose something specific to your community – are there too many stray dogs? Make a photo essay about a local animal shelter. The topics are endless.

• Behind the scenes photo essay

A behind-the-scenes always make for a good photo story – people are curious to know what happens and how everything comes together before a show.

Depending on your own interests, this can be a photo essay about a fashion show, a theatre play, a concert, and so on. You’ll probably need to get some permissions, though, not only to shoot but also to showcase or publish those images.

4 Best Photo Essays in Recent times

Now that you know all the techniques about it, it might be helpful to look at some photo essay examples to see how you can put the concept into practice. Here are some famous photo essays from recent times to give you some inspiration.

Habibi by Antonio Faccilongo

This photo essay wan the World Press Photo Story of the Year in 2021. Faccilongo explores a very big conflict from a very specific and intimate point of view – how the Israeli-Palestinian war affects the families.

He chose to use a square format because it allows him to give order to things and eliminate unnecessary elements in his pictures.

With this long-term photo essay, he wanted to highlight the sense of absence and melancholy women and families feel towards their husbands away at war.

The project then became a book edited by Sarah Leen and the graphics of Ramon Pez.

Picture This: New Orleans by Mary Ellen Mark

The last assignment before her passing, Mary Ellen Mark travelled to New Orleans to register the city after a decade after Hurricane Katrina.

The images of the project “bring to life the rebirth and resilience of the people at the heart of this tale”, – says CNNMoney, commissioner of the work.

Each survivor of the hurricane has a story, and Mary Ellen Mark was there to record it. Some of them have heartbreaking stories about everything they had to leave behind.

Others have a story of hope – like Sam and Ben, two eight-year-olds born from frozen embryos kept in a hospital that lost power supply during the hurricane, yet they managed to survive.

Selfie by Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer whose work is mainly done through self-portraits. With them, she explores the concept of identity, gender stereotypes, as well as visual and cultural codes.

One of her latest photo essays was a collaboration with W Magazine entitled Selfie. In it, the author explores the concept of planned candid photos (‘plandid’).

The work was made for Instagram, as the platform is well known for the conflict between the ‘real self’ and the one people present online. Sherman started using Facetune, Perfect365 and YouCam to alter her appearance on selfies – in Photoshop, you can modify everything, but these apps were designed specifically to “make things prettier”- she says, and that’s what she wants to explore in this photo essay.

Tokyo Compression by Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf has an interest in the broad-gauge topic Life in Cities. From there, many photo essays have been derived – amongst them – Tokyo Compression .

He was horrified by the way people in Tokyo are forced to move to the suburbs because of the high prices of the city. Therefore, they are required to make long commutes facing 1,5 hours of train to start their 8+ hour workday followed by another 1,5 hours to get back home.

To portray this way of life, he photographed the people inside the train pressed against the windows looking exhausted, angry or simply absent due to this way of life.

You can visit his website to see other photo essays that revolve around the topic of life in megacities.

Final Words

It’s not easy to make photo essays, so don’t expect to be great at it right from your first project.

Start off small by choosing a specific subject that’s interesting to you –  that will come from an honest place, and it will be a great practice for some bigger projects along the line.

Whether you like to shoot still life or you’re a travel photographer, I hope these photo essay tips and photo essay examples can help you get started and grow in your photography.

Let us know which topics you are working on right now – we’ll love to hear from you!

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Ana Mireles is a Mexican researcher that specializes in photography and communications for the arts and culture sector.

Penelope G. To Ana Mireles Such a well written and helpful article for an writer who wants to inclue photo essay in her memoir. Thank you. I will get to work on this new skill. Penelope G.

Herman Krieger Photo essays in black and white

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18 Immersive Photo Essay Examples & Tips

By Tata Rossi 13 days ago, Professional photography

A photo essay tells a story or evokes emotion through a series of photographs. The essays allow you to be creative and fully explore an idea. Such essays exist in a variety of forms – from photos only to images with brief comments or written essays accompanied by shots. Choose a photo essay example that you can easily do based on your professional level and the equipment you use.

1. Protests

• View the “Resistance” photo essay by David Moore .

A great idea for photo essays for students is to shoot the protest to show its power. You can capture people with signs and banners to demonstrate what they are standing for. Besides, you can learn how to capture moving subjects. Use the best example of photo essay and don’t forget about angles, composition, and framing.

To create a photo essay , go up to the front and photograph the leader of the protesters walking forward. After that, go back to the end of the group to take pictures of families joining the protest. As a result, you will gain experience shooting big groups of people in motion.

2. Transformation

• View the “A Self-Portrait Every Day” photo essay by Noah Kalina .

This idea is all about capturing the way a person changes. You may take photos of a pregnant woman and then capture the same model with a child. By documenting the development of the child for several years, you can tell a great story in the form of a photo essay.

However, you can also create a photo essay about the transformation of different objects. For instance, you can create a time-lapse series to capture the history of a renovated building. While you will have to take a lot of similar photos to bring this idea to life, it will allow you to achieve an impressive result.

3. Local Event

• View the “Monday Marathon” photo essay by Quinn G. Perini .

Whether you are a resident of a large city or a small town, you can find an opportunity to visit a local event, like a marathon or a festival. This is a nice chance to follow modern photography trends and bring photo essay ideas to life.

You can capture the before-and-after stages of the event. Arrive earlier and take pictures of the preparation activities, then shoot the actual event starting with the official beginning.

Keep photographing even when the event is over and capture the cleaning up and disassembling processes.

4. Photowalk

• View the “Empty Campus” photo essay by Elise Trissel .

Explore the location where you live and find interesting objects to capture in the vicinity. Using the most interesting photo essay examples, you can decide how to make the best decisions. Don’t hurry and try to discover which angles you can use to capture the unique atmosphere of each place.

If you live in the city, you may capture architectural details, wide shots of busy streets, or just take photos of passersby and street signs. Think about the details that make every location unique. For instance, you can try capturing reflections to see how they allow you to see the city from an unusual angle. You can find reflections everywhere, so be sure to pay attention to mirrored buildings, puddles, and fountains.

5. Place Over Time

• View the “At Home in the Ozarks” photo essay by Kylee Cole .

If you want to document changes and show how the streets, buildings, and parks in your city change over time, select your favorite locations and start to visit them regularly to capture the way they look during different seasons.

• View the “Last Moments” photo essay by Ross Taylor .

You don’t necessarily have to focus on profound photo essay topics to evoke emotions. Capturing pets enjoying their worry-free and untroubled life seems like an easy but interesting activity.

Choose any animal – from a domestic bird to a dog, cat, or horse. For more emotional images, use such pet photography ideas when your pet is still a baby and recreate these shots when it is older or is in its final days.

7. Street Style

• View the Tribal Street Photography photo essay by Hans Eijkelboom .

People often express themselves with the help of clothes. The way passers-by on the streets are dressed may reflect the clothing style of a whole society. That’s why you can travel around the world and capture people’s outfits in various areas. When taking portrait photos in the streets, you can also include some of the surroundings to put them in the context.

You can ask people in the streets to pose for you or try to capture them in movement. Select a suitable location for taking photos and create a photo essay to document what kinds of people one can meet in this location. When doing urban photography , you should ask people for permission before taking photos of them. You can ask their contacts and send them your photos later.

8. Abandoned Building

• View the “Lost Collective” photo essay by Bret Pattman .

Old buildings are excellent architecture photography essay topics for students since you can capture a large number of elements. They allow you to imagine what a particular street looked like in the past. You may use a photo essay example for students as references.

Get approval before going in, but mind that such places are far from being totally safe. Bring various lenses: the macro lenses – for details and the wide-angle one – when you want to include many elements in one shot.

9. Alternative Lifestyles

• View the “Last Nomad Hippies” photo essay by Roberto Palomo .

Some people decide to lead a lifestyle that differs from the one generally accepted by society. Explore different areas and look for people with an unusual way of living. You can capture candid photos of regular people or take pictures of a person with an unusual hobby.

Take pictures of those, who reside in extraordinary conditions, representatives of various subcultures, or the LBGTQ community. These photo essay topics show other people that it is okay to go out of their comfort zone and run against the wind.

10. Social Issues

• View the “Juveniles in Prison” photo essay by Isadora Kosofsky .

The best photo essay examples for students are related to social issues, like unemployment, domestic violence, gender discrimination, and more. Address the topic carefully and look for a proper perspective.

Your shots may draw the people’s attention to a truly burning and relevant matter and have a stronger effect than any text.

11. Behind the Scenes

• View the “Follow Me” photo essay by Marius Masalar .

If you are going to visit an event, get ready to take some behind-the-scenes photos. For instance, you can document the preparations for a festival. Capture the work of the lead event planner and other professionals to tell the story of the festival from an unusual angle.

Alternatively, you can capture the events happening backstage during a drama production. Take pictures of actors and actresses when they are getting ready for the performance. Try capturing the emotions of the main lead and show how stage workers make final preparations. You can also document the work of designers and makeup professionals.

12. Landmarks

• View the “Volte-Face” photo essay by Oliver Curtis .

The pictures of landmarks are typically taken from a certain spot. One of the best photo essay ideas is to try shooting sights from various angles. You will also have an opportunity to improve your composition and your framing skills.

If you take a look at any pictorial essay example, you will see that the variety of perspectives is endless: through the streets, in the morning, afternoon, and evening, with a drone or including reflections.

    • View the “Family” photo essay by Olivia Moore .

You can capture the way family members interact with each other and demonstrate the strong connection they share. In some cases, it makes sense to focus on capturing candid photos when doing family photography .

However, you may also opt for a different approach and focus on more difficult social topics. For instance, if you want to examine the issue of immigration, you can take pictures of a family from another country. In addition, you may show how families cope with other social issues, including poverty or unequal access to healthcare.

14. A Day in the Life

• View the “A Day in the Life of Carlos Gaytan” photo essay by Sandy Noto .

One of the best photo essays concepts is related to a day in a person’s life. The main character can be any person – a relative, family member, teacher, writer, or policeman.

People are generally interested in finding out facts about the lives and daily routines of others. The life of every human is incredible, especially if you learn it in more detail. This idea is especially suitable for taking documentary photos. For instance, you can select any photo essay sample you like and then capture a portrait of a person with the tools they use for their work.

15. Education

• View the “School Day” photo essay by Nancy Borowick .

You can also take great photos in the classroom capturing the interactions of teachers and their students. Avoid distracting them, as it will be easier for you to take natural shots. Using a variety of settings, you can make your photo essay more engaging. For instance, you may visit chemistry labs, capture teachers during a break, and take photos in other locations.

• View the “Meals From the Motherland” photo essay by James Tran .

You can also focus on specific meals to create a professional photo essay about food. To make it more attention-grabbing, try using different food photography ideas .

For instance, you can take photos of popular meals, capture the meals made by a specific person, or document cooking traditions in different countries. When taking photos in a restaurant, pay attention to the surroundings as well to capture the unique atmosphere of a place.

17. Capture the Neighbors

• View the “Our Neighbors” photo essay by Jeanne Martin .

Regardless of the place where you live, you have to establish good relationships with your neighbors. People who live nearby can also be great models for professionals who specialize in portrait photography. To implement this idea, make sure to capture people at home or in front of their houses to include some of the surroundings in your photo essay.

You will discover many interesting facts about people who live nearby. Shooting a photo essay will allow you to learn them better and establish a strong connection with them. This way, you can create a sense of community and discover what holds its members together.

18. Climate Change

• View the “Effects of Climate Change” photo essay by Sanya Gupta .

It is possible to a variety of photo story ideas bring to life examining the impact of climate change. Travel to places most affected by climate change, for instance, glaciers or famous resorts.

Capture the way the continuous drought has influenced the environment, animals, and the inhabitants. As an alternative, take pictures of environmentalist protests or inexhaustible energy sources.

Photo Essay Tips for Students

Explore your topic . An in-depth exploration of the main topic of your photo essay will help you find the best ideas for conveying your message. You can also find some sources for inspiration and useful materials. This stage allows you to learn more about your subject and select the best way of organizing your photo essay.

Create a storyboard . Using a storyboard, you can better understand what shots you need to take and what order can help you to tell a story in the best way. It will also allow you to create the right mood.

Take as many pictures as you can . To create a compelling story, make sure to take a lot of photos. It will allow you to choose the best pictures for your photo essay. Besides, you will always have backup photos if some of your pictures get damaged.

Experiment with different techniques . By changing the angle and using a variety of editing techniques, you can transform the way your photos look. When taking photos, try using different angles to capture the subject in the best way. You can also try changing the distance from the model, using black-and-white film, or employing a range of developing methods.

Add text . While some photographers create photo essays without text, it can still help you bring your point across more clearly and make it easier for a viewer to understand what you imply. By providing extra information, such as some facts, you can change the perception of your image. If you don’t know how to write descriptions, you can hire a professional writer to perform this task.

Enhance your photos . To edit your pictures, make sure to use professional photo editing software like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop. Using the available tools, you can improve and change your photos. They allow you to fix issues with lighting, adjust WB, make colors richer, crop your pics to improve the composition, and perform other tasks. In case you need to edit your photos in a consistent style, you can use Photoshop Actions or Lightroom Presets.

In some cases, your pictures may require more advanced editing. If you see that your skills are insufficient or if you don’t have enough time, you can outsource the task of enhancing your photos to the FixThePhoto team. They will professionally enhance your pictures for a budget price. Their prices start from $1.50 per photo.

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To streamline your workflow and quickly edit your essay photos like a pro, make sure to apply these actions to your photos. Even if you use a photo essay example when taking pictures, you can utilize these actions to give your images a professional feel, tweak colors, edit lighting, and improve the overall look of your pics.

In this bundle, you will find actions created by experienced professionals who used recent photo enhancement trends to create convenient editing tools. Here, you will find a collection of brushes, patterns, overlays, and other effects for editing your photos in a realistic way.

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• Speaking exams
• Typical speaking tasks

Describe a photo or picture

In some speaking exams you have to talk about photos or pictures. The video and tips below will help you to do really well in this type of speaking exam.

Instructions

Watch the video of two students describing photos as part of a speaking exam. Then read the tips below.

Examiner : OK. You each have a picture. You’ve got one minute to look at your picture. Describe all that you can see in the picture and explain what you think is happening.

Melissa : In the picture there is a man lying in the middle of the road and there is a car and a motorbike there. I believe there is a car accident and that guy is almost dying. And people are trying to save his life and in the bottom-right of the picture there’s a reporter holding a camera. And there is a policewoman or policeman and he’s trying to tell his partner to come, I think.

Kelvin : So, in my picture there are three men. They’re holding water guns and shooting at each other. And they are laughing and I think they’re very excited about this. I think they could be celebrating some kind of festival because you know in Thailand they celebrate their New Year by splashing water on each other, so I think the two men in the photo are tourists. They have gone to Thailand to celebrate this festival. Yes.

Here are our top tips for describing a photo or a picture in an exam.

• Look at your picture carefully and take a few moments to think before you start talking.
• Talk for all the time you are given. If you have one minute to do the task, use every second.
• Practise the useful language below so you can explain which part of the picture you are talking about.
• Panic if you don’t know the words for all the things in the picture. You don’t need to know all the words for everything in the picture if you know what to say when you don't know an exact word.  
• Get distracted and start talking about something else. Focus on the photo or picture.
• Panic if your mind goes blank. Take a deep breath, look at the picture and start again.

If you are asked to describe a photo or a picture in the exam, here is some language you can use:

What is in the picture?

In the picture I can see ... There ’ s / There are ... There isn’t a ... / There aren’t any ...

Say what is happening with the present continuous

The man is ...ing The people are ...ing It’s raining.

Where in the picture?

At the top/bottom of the picture ... In the middle of the picture ... On the left/right of the picture ... next to in front of behind near on top of under

If something isn’t clear

It looks like a ... It might be a ... He could be ...ing Maybe it’s a ...

Check your understanding: gap fill - prepositions

Check your understanding: multiple choice - describing the photo, worksheets and downloads.

You can practise this at home with any picture or family photo. Tell us if this advice was helpful to you.

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What is a Photo Essay? 9 Photo Essay Examples You Can Recreate

A photo essay is a series of photographs that tell a story. Unlike a written essay, a photo essay focuses on visuals instead of words. With a photo essay, you can stretch your creative limits and explore new ways to connect with your audience. Whatever your photography skill level, you can recreate your own fun and creative photo essay.

9 Photo Essay Examples You Can Recreate

• Photowalk Photo Essay
• Transformation Photo Essay
• Day in the Life Photo Essay
• Event Photo Essay
• Building Photo Essay
• Historic Site or Landmark Photo Essay
• Behind the Scenes Photo Essay
• Family Photo Essay
• Education Photo Essay

Stories are important to all of us. While some people gravitate to written stories, others are much more attuned to visual imagery. With a photo essay, you can tell a story without writing a word. Your use of composition, contrast, color, and perspective in photography will convey ideas and evoke emotions.

To explore narrative photography, you can use basic photographic equipment. You can buy a camera or even use your smartphone to get started. While lighting, lenses, and post-processing software can enhance your photos, they aren’t necessary to achieve good results.

Whether you need to complete a photo essay assignment or want to pursue one for fun or professional purposes, you can use these photo essay ideas for your photography inspiration . Once you know the answer to “what is a photo essay?” and find out how fun it is to create one, you’ll likely be motivated to continue your forays into photographic storytelling.

1 . Photowalk Photo Essay

One popular photo essay example is a photowalk. Simply put, a photowalk is time you set aside to walk around a city, town, or a natural site and take photos. Some cities even have photowalk tours led by professional photographers. On these tours, you can learn the basics about how to operate your camera, practice photography composition techniques, and understand how to look for unique shots that help tell your story.

Set aside at least two to three hours for your photowalk. Even if you’re photographing a familiar place—like your own home town—try to look at it through new eyes. Imagine yourself as a first-time visitor or pretend you’re trying to educate a tourist about the area.

Walk around slowly and look for different ways to capture the mood and energy of your location. If you’re in a city, capture wide shots of streets, close-ups of interesting features on buildings, street signs, and candid shots of people. Look for small details that give the city character and life. And try some new concepts—like reflection picture ideas—by looking for opportunities to photographs reflections in mirrored buildings, puddles, fountains, or bodies of water.

2 . Transformation Photo Essay

With a transformation photography essay, you can tell the story about change over time. One of the most popular photostory examples, a transformation essay can document a mom-to-be’s pregnancy or a child’s growth from infancy into the toddler years. But people don’t need to be the focus of a transformation essay. You can take photos of a house that is being built or an urban area undergoing revitalization.

You can also create a photo narrative to document a short-term change. Maybe you want to capture images of your growing garden or your move from one home to another. These examples of photo essays are powerful ways of telling the story of life’s changes—both large and small.

3 . Day in the Life Photo Essay

Want a unique way to tell a person’s story? Or, perhaps you want to introduce people to a career or activity. You may want to consider a day in the life essay.

With this photostory example, your narrative focuses on a specific subject for an entire day. For example, if you are photographing a farmer, you’ll want to arrive early in the morning and shadow the farmer as he or she performs daily tasks. Capture a mix of candid shots of the farmer at work and add landscapes and still life of equipment for added context. And if you are at a farm, don’t forget to get a few shots of the animals for added character, charm, or even a dose of humor. These types of photography essay examples are great practice if you are considering pursuing photojournalism. They also help you learn and improve your candid portrait skills.

4 . Event Photo Essay

Events are happening in your local area all the time, and they can make great photo essays. With a little research, you can quickly find many events that you could photograph. There may be bake sales, fundraisers, concerts, art shows, farm markets, block parties, and other non profit event ideas . You could also focus on a personal event, such as a birthday or graduation.

At most events, your primary emphasis will be on capturing candid photos of people in action. You can also capture backgrounds or objects to set the scene. For example, at a birthday party, you’ll want to take photos of the cake and presents.

For a local or community event, you can share your photos with the event organizer. Or, you may be able to post them on social media and tag the event sponsor. This is a great way to gain recognition and build your reputation as a talented photographer.

5. Building Photo Essay

Many buildings can be a compelling subject for a photographic essay. Always make sure that you have permission to enter and photograph the building. Once you do, look for interesting shots and angles that convey the personality, purpose, and history of the building. You may also be able to photograph the comings and goings of people that visit or work in the building during the day.

Some photographers love to explore and photograph abandoned buildings. With these types of photos, you can provide a window into the past. Definitely make sure you gain permission before entering an abandoned building and take caution since some can have unsafe elements and structures.

6. Historic Site or Landmark Photo Essay

Taking a series of photos of a historic site or landmark can be a great experience. You can learn to capture the same site from different angles to help portray its character and tell its story. And you can also photograph how people visit and engage with the site or landmark. Take photos at different times of day and in varied lighting to capture all its nuances and moods.

You can also use your photographic essay to help your audience understand the history of your chosen location. For example, if you want to provide perspective on the Civil War, a visit to a battleground can be meaningful. You can also visit a site when reenactors are present to share insight on how life used to be in days gone by.

7 . Behind the Scenes Photo Essay

Another fun essay idea is taking photos “behind the scenes” at an event. Maybe you can chronicle all the work that goes into a holiday festival from the early morning set-up to the late-night teardown. Think of the lead event planner as the main character of your story and build the story about him or her.

Or, you can go backstage at a drama production. Capture photos of actors and actresses as they transform their looks with costuming and makeup. Show the lead nervously pacing in the wings before taking center stage. Focus the work of stagehands, lighting designers, and makeup artists who never see the spotlight but bring a vital role in bringing the play to life.

8. Family Photo Essay

If you enjoy photographing people, why not explore photo story ideas about families and relationships? You can focus on interactions between two family members—such as a father and a daughter—or convey a message about a family as a whole.

Sometimes these type of photo essays can be all about the fun and joy of living in a close-knit family. But sometimes they can be powerful portraits of challenging social topics. Images of a family from another country can be a meaningful photo essay on immigration. You could also create a photo essay on depression by capturing families who are coping with one member’s illness.

For these projects on difficult topics, you may want to compose a photo essay with captions. These captions can feature quotes from family members or document your own observations. Although approaching hard topics isn’t easy, these types of photos can have lasting impact and value.

9. Education Photo Essay

Opportunities for education photo essays are everywhere—from small preschools to community colleges and universities. You can seek permission to take photos at public or private schools or even focus on alternative educational paths, like homeschooling.

Your education photo essay can take many forms. For example, you can design a photo essay of an experienced teacher at a high school. Take photos of him or her in action in the classroom, show quiet moments grading papers, and capture a shared laugh between colleagues in the teacher’s lounge.

Alternatively, you can focus on a specific subject—such as science and technology. Or aim to portray a specific grade level, document activities club or sport, or portray the social environment. A photo essay on food choices in the cafeteria can be thought-provoking or even funny. There are many potential directions to pursue and many great essay examples.

While education is an excellent topic for a photo essay for students, education can be a great source of inspiration for any photographer.

Why Should You Create a Photo Essay?

Ultimately, photographers are storytellers. Think of what a photographer does during a typical photo shoot. He or she will take a series of photos that helps convey the essence of the subject—whether that is a person, location, or inanimate object. For example, a family portrait session tells the story of a family—who they are, their personalities, and the closeness of their relationship.

Learning how to make a photo essay can help you become a better storyteller—and a better photographer. You’ll cultivate key photography skills that you can carry with you no matter where your photography journey leads.

If you simply want to document life’s moments on social media, you may find that a single picture doesn’t always tell the full story. Reviewing photo essay examples and experimenting with your own essay ideas can help you choose meaningful collections of photos to share with friends and family online.

Learning how to create photo essays can also help you work towards professional photography ambitions. You’ll often find that bloggers tell photographic stories. For example, think of cooking blogs that show you each step in making a recipe. Photo essays are also a mainstay of journalism. You’ll often find photo essays examples in many media outlets—everywhere from national magazines to local community newspapers. And the best travel photographers on Instagram tell great stories with their photos, too.

With a photo essay, you can explore many moods and emotions. Some of the best photo essays tell serious stories, but some are humorous, and others aim to evoke action.

You can raise awareness with a photo essay on racism or a photo essay on poverty. A photo essay on bullying can help change the social climate for students at a school. Or, you can document a fun day at the beach or an amusement park. You have control of the themes, photographic elements, and the story you want to tell.

5 Steps to Create a Photo Essay

Every photo essay will be different, but you can use a standard process. Following these five steps will guide you through every phase of your photo essay project—from brainstorming creative essay topics to creating a photo essay to share with others.

Step 1: Choose Your Photo Essay Topics

Just about any topic you can imagine can form the foundation for a photo essay. You may choose to focus on a specific event, such as a wedding, performance, or festival. Or you may want to cover a topic over a set span of time, such as documenting a child’s first year. You could also focus on a city or natural area across the seasons to tell a story of changing activities or landscapes.

Since the best photo essays convey meaning and emotion, choose a topic of interest. Your passion for the subject matter will shine through each photograph and touch your viewer’s hearts and minds.

Step 2: Conduct Upfront Research

Much of the work in a good-quality photo essay begins before you take your first photo. It’s always a good idea to do some research on your planned topic.

Imagine you’re going to take photos of a downtown area throughout the year. You should spend some time learning the history of the area. Talk with local residents and business owners and find out about planned events. With these insights, you’ll be able to plan ahead and be prepared to take photos that reflect the area’s unique personality and lifestyles.

For any topic you choose, gather information first. This may involve internet searches, library research, interviews, or spending time observing your subject.

Step 3: Storyboard Your Ideas

After you have done some research and have a good sense of the story you want to tell, you can create a storyboard. With a storyboard, you can write or sketch out the ideal pictures you want to capture to convey your message.

You can turn your storyboard into a “shot list” that you can bring with you on site. A shot list can be especially helpful when you are at a one-time event and want to capture specific shots for your photo essay. If you’ve never created a photo essay before, start with ten shot ideas. Think of each shot as a sentence in your story. And aim to make each shot evoke specific ideas or emotions.

Step 4: Capture Images

Your storyboard and shot list will be important guides to help you make the most of each shoot. Be sure to set aside enough time to capture all the shots you need—especially if you are photographing a one-time event. And allow yourself to explore your ideas using different photography composition, perspective, and color contrast techniques.

You may need to take a hundred images or more to get ten perfect ones for your photographic essay. Or, you may find that you want to add more photos to your story and expand your picture essay concept.

Also, remember to look for special unplanned, moments that help tell your story. Sometimes, spontaneous photos that aren’t on your shot list can be full of meaning. A mix of planning and flexibility almost always yields the best results.

Step 5: Edit and Organize Photos to Tell Your Story

After capturing your images, you can work on compiling your photo story. To create your photo essay, you will need to make decisions about which images portray your themes and messages. At times, this can mean setting aside beautiful images that aren’t a perfect fit. You can use your shot list and storyboard as a guide but be open to including photos that weren’t in your original plans.

You may want to use photo editing software—such as Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop— to enhance and change photographs. With these tools, you can adjust lighting and white balance, perform color corrections, crop, or perform other edits. If you have a signature photo editing style, you may want to use Photoshop Actions or Lightroom Presets to give all your photos a consistent look and feel.

You order a photo book from one of the best photo printing websites to publish your photo story. You can add them to an album on a photo sharing site, such as Flickr or Google Photos. Also, you could focus on building a website dedicated to documenting your concepts through visual photo essays. If so, you may want to use SEO for photographers to improve your website’s ranking in search engine results. You could even publish your photo essay on social media. Another thing to consider is whether you want to include text captures or simply tell your story through photographs.

Choose the medium that feels like the best space to share your photo essay ideas and vision with your audiences. You should think of your photo essay as your own personal form of art and expression when deciding where and how to publish it.

Photo Essays Can Help You Become a Better Photographer

Whatever your photography ambitions may be, learning to take a photo essay can help you grow. Even simple essay topics can help you gain skills and stretch your photographic limits. With a photo essay, you start to think about how a series of photographs work together to tell a complete story. You’ll consider how different shots work together, explore options for perspective and composition, and change the way you look at the world.

Before you start taking photos, you should review photo essay examples. You can find interesting pictures to analyze and photo story examples online, in books, or in classic publications, like Life Magazine . Don’t forget to look at news websites for photojournalism examples to broaden your perspective. This review process will help you in brainstorming simple essay topics for your first photo story and give you ideas for the future as well.

Ideas and inspiration for photo essay topics are everywhere. You can visit a park or go out into your own backyard to pursue a photo essay on nature. Or, you can focus on the day in the life of someone you admire with a photo essay of a teacher, fireman, or community leader. Buildings, events, families, and landmarks are all great subjects for concept essay topics. If you are feeling stuck coming up with ideas for essays, just set aside a few hours to walk around your city or town and take photos. This type of photowalk can be a great source of material.

You’ll soon find that advanced planning is critical to your success. Brainstorming topics, conducting research, creating a storyboard, and outlining a shot list can help ensure you capture the photos you need to tell your story. After you’ve finished shooting, you’ll need to decide where to house your photo essay. You may need to come up with photo album title ideas, write captions, and choose the best medium and layout.

Without question, creating a photo essay can be a valuable experience for any photographer. That’s true whether you’re an amateur completing a high school assignment or a pro looking to hone new skills. You can start small with an essay on a subject you know well and then move into conquering difficult ideas. Maybe you’ll want to create a photo essay on mental illness or a photo essay on climate change. Or maybe there’s another cause that is close to your heart.

Whatever your passion, you can bring it to life with a photo essay.

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How to Create a Photo Essay in 9 Steps (with Examples)

Photo Editing , Tutorials

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What is a photo essay?

• Photo essays vs photo stories
• How photo essays help you
• 9 Steps to create photo essays

How to share your photo essays

Read Time: 11 minutes

Gather up a handful of images that seem to go together, and voila! It’s a photo essay, right? Well… no. Though, this is a common misconception.

In reality, a photo essay is much more thoughtful and structured than that. When you take the time to craft one, you’re using skills from all facets of our craft – from composition to curation.

In this guide, you’ll learn what makes a photo essay an amazing project that stretches your skills. You'll also learn exactly how to make one step by step.

• Photo essay vs photo story

A photo essay is a collection of images based around a theme, a topic, a creative approach, or an exploration of an idea. Photo essays balance visual variety with a cohesive style and concept.

What's the difference between a photo essay and a photo story?

The terms photo essay and photo story are often used interchangeably. Even the dictionary definition of “photo essay” includes using images to convey either a theme or a story.

But in my experience, a photo essay and a photo story are two different things. As you delve into the field of visual storytelling, distinguishing between the two helps you to take a purposeful approach to what you’re making .

The differences ultimately lie in the distinctions between theme, topic and story.

Themes are big-picture concepts. Example: Wildness

Topics are more specific than themes, but still overarching. Example : Wild bears of Yellowstone National Park

Stories are specific instances or experiences that happen within, or provide an example for, a topic or theme. Example: A certain wild bear became habituated to tourists and was relocated to maintain its wildness

Unlike a theme or topic, a story has particular elements that make it a story. They include leading characters, a setting, a narrative arc, conflict, and (usually) resolution.

With that in mind, we can distingush between a photo essay and a photo story.

Themes and Topics vs Stories

A photo essay revolves around a topic, theme, idea, or concept. It visually explores a big-picture something .

This allows a good deal of artistic leeway where a photographer can express their vision, philosophies, opinions, or artistic expression as they create their images.

A photo story  is a portfolio of images that illustrate – you guessed it – a story.

Because of this, there are distinct types of images that a photo story uses that add to the understanding, insight, clarity and meaning to the story for viewers. While they can certainly be artistically crafted and visually stunning, photo stories document something happening, and rely on visual variety for capturing the full experience.

A photo essay doesn’t need to have the same level of structured variety that a photo story requires. It can have images that overlap or are similar, as they each explore various aspects of a theme.

Photo essays can be about any topic. If you live in a city, consider using your nature photography to make an essay about the wildlife that lives in your neighborhood . 

The role of text with photos

A photo story typically runs alongside text that narrates the story. We're a visual species, and the images help us feel like we are there, experiencing what's happening. So, the images add significant power to the text, but they're often a partner to it.

This isn’t always the case, of course. Sometimes photo stories don’t need or use text. It’s like reading a graphic novel that doesn’t use text. Moving through the different images that build on each other ultimately unveils the narrative.

Photo essays don’t need to rely on text to illuminate the images' theme or topic. The photographer may use captions (or even a text essay), or they may let the images speak for themselves.

Definitions are helpful guidelines (not strict rules)

Some people categorize photo essays as either narrative or thematic. That's essentially just calling photo stories “narrative photo essays” and photo essays “thematic photo essays.”

But, a story is a defined thing, and any writer/editor will tell you themes and topics are not the same as stories. And we use the word “story” in our daily lives as it’s defined. So, it makes far more sense to name the difference between a photo essay and a photo story, and bask in the same clarity writers enjoy .

Photo stories illustrate a particular experience, event, narrative, something that happened or is happening.

Photo essays explore an idea, concept, topic, theme, creative approach, big-picture something .

Both photo essays and photo stories are immensely powerful visual tools. And yes, the differences between them can certainly be blurred, as is always the case with art.

Simply use this distinction as a general guideline, providing extra clarity around what you’re making and why you're making it.

To dig into specific types of images used to create powerful photo stories, check out this training: 6 Must-Have Shots for a Photo Story. 

Meanwhile, let’s dig deeper into photo essays.

Photo essays are a chance to try new styles or techniques that stretch your skills and creativity. This image was part of an essay exploring simplicity and shape, and helped me learn new skills in black and white post-processing.

How photo essays improve your photography

Creating photo essays is an amazing antidote if you’ve ever felt a lack of direction or purpose in your photography. Photo essays help build your photographic skills in at least 3 important ways.

1. You become more strategic in creating a body of work

It's easy to get stuck in a rut of photographing whatever pops up in front of you. And when you do, you end up with a collection of stand-alone shots.

These singles may work fine as a print, a quick Instagram post, or an addition to your gallery of shots on your website. But amassing a bunch of one-off shots limits your opportunities as a photographer for everything from exhibits to getting your work published.

Building photo essays pushes you to think strategically about what you photograph, why, and how. You're working toward a particular deliverable – a cohesive visual essay – with the images you create.

This elevates your skills in crafting your photo essay, and in how you curate the rest of your work, from galleries on your website to selecting images to sell as prints .

2. You become more purposeful in your composition skills

Composition is so much more than just following the rule of thirds, golden spirals, or thinking about the angle of light in a shot.

Composition is also about thinking ahead in what you’re trying to accomplish with a photograph – from what you’re saying through it to its emotional impact on a viewer – and where it fits within a larger body of work.

Photo essays push you to think critically about each shot – from coming up with fresh compositions for familiar subjects, to devising surprising compositions to fit within a collection, to creating compositions that expand on what’s already in a photo essay.

You’re pushed beyond creating a single pleasing frame, which leads you to shoot more thoughtfully and proactively than ever.

(Here’s a podcast episode on switching from reactive shooting to proactive shooting.)

3. You develop strong editing and curation skills

Selecting which images stay, and which get left behind is one of the hardest jobs on a photographer’s to-do list. Mostly, it’s because of emotional attachment.

You might think it’s an amazing shot because you know the effort that went into capturing it. Or perhaps when you look at it, you get a twinge of the joy or exhilaration you felt the moment you captured it. There’s also the second-guessing that goes into which of two similar images is the best – which will people like more? So you’re tempted to just show both.

Ultimately, great photographers appear all the more skilled because they only show their best work. That in and of itself is a skill they’ve developed through years of ruthlessly editing their own work.

Because the most powerful photo essays only show a handful of extraordinary images, you’re bound to develop the very same critical skill (and look all the more talented because of it).

Photo essays are also a great stepping stone to creating photo stories. If you’re interested in moving beyond stand-alone shots and building stories, shooting photo essays will get your creative brain limbered up and ready for the adventure of photo stories.

A photo essay exploring the natural history of a favorite species is an exciting opportunity for an in-depth study. For me, that was a photo essay on emotive images of the American dipper (Cinclus mexicanus) as it hunts in streams. 

9 Simple steps to create your photo essays

1. clarify your theme.

Choose a theme, topic, or concept you want to explore. Spend some time getting crystal clear on what you want to focus on. It helps to write out a few sentences, or even a few paragraphs noting:

• What you want the essay to be about
• What kinds of images you want to create as part of it
• How you’ll photograph the images
• The style, techniques, or gear you might use to create your images
• What “success” looks like when you’re done with your photo essay

You don’t have to stick to what you write down, of course. It can change during the image creation process. But fleshing your idea out on paper goes a long way in clarifying your photo essay theme and how you’ll go about creating it.

2. Create your images

Grab your camera and head outside!

As you’re photographing your essay, allow yourself some freedom to experiment. Try unusual compositions or techniques that are new to you.

Stretch your style a little, or “try on” the style of other photographers you admire who have photographed similar subjects.

Photo essays are wonderful opportunities to push yourself outside of your comfort zone and grow as a photographer.

Remember that a photo essay is a visually cohesive collection of images that make sense together. So, while you might stretch yourself into new terrain as you shoot, try to keep that approach, style, or strategy consistent.

Don’t be afraid to create lots of images. It’s great to have lots to choose from in the editing process, which comes up next.

3. Pull together your wide edit

Once you’ve created your images, pull together all the images that might make the cut. This could be as many as 40-60 images. Include anything you want to consider for the final essay in the wide edit.

From here, start weeding out images that:

• are weaker in composition or subject matter
• stand out like a sore thumb from the rest of the collection
• Are similar to other stronger images in the collection

It's helpful to review the images at thumbnail size. You make more instinctive decisions and can more easily see the body of work as a whole. If an image is strong even at thumbnail size to stand out from similar frames while also partnering well with other images in the collection, that's a good sign it's strong enough for the essay.

4. Post-process your images for a cohesive look

Now it’s time to post-process the images. Use whatever editing software you’re comfortable with to polish your images.

Again, a photo essay has a cohesive visual look. If you use presets, filters, or other tools, use them across all the images.

5. Finalize your selection

It’s time to make the tough decisions. Select only the strongest for your photo essay from your group of images.

Each image should be strong enough to stand on its own and make sense as part of the whole group.

Many photo essays range from 8-12 images. But of course, it varies based on the essay. The number of images you have in your final photo essay is up to you.

Remember, less is more. A photo essay is most powerful when each image deserves to be included.

6. Put your images in a purposeful order

Create a visual flow with your images. Decide which image is first, and build from there. Use compositions, colors, and subject matter to decide which image goes next, then next, then next in the order.

Think of it like music: notes are arranged in a way that builds energy, or slows it down, surprise listeners with a new refrain, or drop into a familiar chorus. How the notes are ordered creates emotional arcs for listeners.

How you order your images is similar.

Think of the experience a viewer will have as they look at one image, then the next, and the next. Order your images so they create the experience you want your audience to have.

7. Get feedback

The best photographers make space for feedback, even when it’s tough to hear. Your work benefits from not just hearing feedback, but listening to it and applying what you learn from it.

Show your photo essay to people who have different sensibilities or tastes. Friends, family members, fellow photographers – anyone you trust to give you honest feedback.

Watch their reactions and hear what they say about what they’re seeing. Use their feedback to guide you in the next step.

8. Refine, revise, and finalize

Let your photo essay marinate for a little while. Take a day or two away from it. Then use your freshened eyes and the feedback you received from the previous step to refine your essay.

Swap out any selects you might want to change and reorder the images if needed.

9. Add captions

Even if you don’t plan on displaying captions with your images, captioning your images is a great practice to get into. It gives context, story, and important information to each image. And, more than likely, you will want to use these captions at some point when you share your photo essay, which we dive into later in this article.

Add captions to the image files using Lightroom, Bridge, or other software programs.

Create a document, such as a Google or Word doc, with captions for each image.

In your captions, share a bit about the story behind the image, or the creation process. Add whatever makes sense to share that provides a greater understanding of the image and its purpose.

Photo essays allow you to explore deliberate style choices, such as a focus on shapes, patterns, textures, and lines. Since each photo is part of a larger essay, it encourages you to be bold with choices you might not otherwise make. 

5 Examples of amazing nature photo essays

1. “how the water shapes us” from the nature conservancy.

This gorgeous essay, crafted with the work of multiple photographers, explores the people and places within the Mississippi River basin. Through the images, we gain a sense of how the water influences life from the headwater all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Notice how each photographer is tasked with the same theme, yet approaches it with their own distinct style and vision. It is a wonderful example of the sheer level of visual variety you can have while maintaining a consistent style or theme.

View it here

2. “A Cyclist on the English Landscape” from New York Times’ The World Through A Lens series

This photo essay is a series of self-portraits by travel photographer Roff Smith while “stuck” at home during the pandemic. As he peddled the roads making portraits, the project evolved into a “celebration of traveling at home”. It’s a great example of how visually consistent you can be inside a theme while making each image completely unique.

3. “Vermont, Dressed In Snow” from New York Times’ The World Through A Lens series

This essay by aerial photographer Caleb Kenna uses a very common photo essay theme: snow. Because all images are aerial photographs, there’s a consistency to them. Yet, the compositions are utterly unique from one another. It’s a great example of keeping viewers surprised as they move from one image to the next while still maintaining a clear focus on the theme.

4. “Starling-Studded Skies” from bioGraphic Magazine

This beautiful essay is by Kathryn Cooper, a physicist trained in bioinformatics, and a talented photographer. She used a 19th century photographic technique, chronophotography, to create images that give us a look at the art and science of starling murmurations. She states: “I’m interested in the transient moments when chaos briefly changes to order, and thousands of individual bodies appear to move as one.” This essay is a great example of deep exploration of a concept using a specific photographic technique.

View it here   (Note: must be viewed on desktop)

5. “These Scrappy Photos Capture the Action-Packed World Beneath a Bird Feeder” from Audubon Magazine

This photo essay from conservation photographer Carla Rhodes explores the wildlife that takes advantage of the bounty of food waiting under bird feeders . Using remote camera photography , Rhodes gives viewers a unique ground-level perspective and captures moments that make us feel like we’re in conversation with friends in the Hundred Acre Woods. This essay is a great example of how perspective, personality, and chance can all come into play as you explore both an idea and a technique.

25 Ideas for creative photo essays you can make

The possibilities for photo essays are truly endless – from the concepts you explore to the techniques you use and styles you apply.

Choose an idea, hone your unique perspective on it, then start applying the 9 simple steps from above. 

• The life of a plant or animal (your favorite species, a species living in your yard, etc)
• The many shapes of a single species (a tree species, a bird species, etc)
• How a place changes over time
• The various moods of a place
• A conservation issue you care about
• Math in nature
• Urban nature
• Seasonal changes
• Your yard as a space for nature
• Shifting climate and its impacts
• Human impacts on environments
• Elements: Water, wind, fire, earth
• Day in the life (of a person, a place, a stream, a tree…)
• Outdoor recreation (birding, kayaking, hiking, naturalist journaling…)
• Wildlife rehabilitation
• Lunar cycles
• Sunlight and shadows
• Your local watershed
• Coexistence

As you zero in on a photo essay theme, consider two things: what most excites you about an idea, and what about it pushes you out of your comfort zone. The heady mix of joy and challenge will ensure you stick with it. 

Your photo essay is ready for the world! Decide how you’d like to make an impact with your work. You might use one or several of the options below.

1. Share it on your website

Create a gallery or a scrollytelling page on your website. This is a great way to drive traffic to your website where people can peruse your photo essay and the rest of the photography you have.

Putting it on your website and optimizing your images for SEO helps you build organic traffic and potentially be discovered by a broader audience, including photo editors.

2. Create a scrollytelling web page

If you enjoy the experience of immersive visual experiences, consider making one using your essay. And no, you don’t have to be a whiz at code to make it happen.

Shorthand helps you build web pages with scrollytelling techniques that make a big impression on viewers. Their free plan allows you to publish 3 essays or stories.

3. Create a Medium post

If you don’t have a website and want to keep things simple, a post on Medium is a great option.

Though it’s known for being a platform for bloggers, it’s also possible to add images to a post for a simple scroll.

And, because readers can discover and share posts, it’s a good place for your photos to get the attention of people who might not otherwise come across it.

4. Share it on Instagram

Instagram has changed a lot over the last couple of years, but it’s still a place for photographers to share their work thoughtfully.

There are at least 3 great ways to share your photo essay on the platform.

– Create a single post for each image. Add a caption. Publish one post per day until the full essay is on your feed. Share each post via Instagram Stories to bring more attention and interaction to your photo essay.

– Create a carousel post. You can add up 10 photos to a carousel post, so you may need to create two of them for your full photo essay. Or you might create a series of carousel posts using 3-4 images in each.

– Create a Reel featuring your images as a video.  The algorithm heavily favors reels, so turning your photo essay into a video experience can get it out to a larger audience.

I ran a “create a reel” challenge in my membership community. One member created a reel with her still images around a serious conservation issue. It gathered a ton of attention and landed her opportunities to share her message through YouTube and podcast interviews and publishing opportunities. Watch it here.

5. Exhibit it locally

Reach out to local galleries, cafes, pubs, or even the public library to see if they’re interested in hanging your photo essay for display. Many local businesses and organizations happily support the work of local artists.

6. Pitch your photo essay to publications

One of the best ways to reach an audience with your work is to get it published. Find publications that are a great fit for the theme and style of your photo essay, then pitch your essay for consideration. You gain a fantastic opportunity to share your work widely and can earn a paycheck at the same time.

Remember that if you want to get your photo essay published, you may want to hold back from sharing it publicly before you pitch it to publications.

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How to Make a Photo Essay

Last Updated: September 27, 2023 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Heather Gallagher . Heather Gallagher is a Photojournalist & Photographer based in Austin, Texas. She runs her own photography studio named "Heather Gallagher Photography" which was voted Austin's Best Family Photographer and top 3 Birth Photographers in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Heather specializes in family Photojournalism and has over 15 years of experience documenting individuals, families, and businesses all over the world. Her clients include Delta Airlines, Oracle, Texas Monthly, and her work has been featured in The Washington Post and The Austin American Statesman. She is a member of the International Association of Professional Birth Photographers (IAPBP). There are 11 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 287,429 times.

Photo essays are an increasingly popular medium for journalists, bloggers, and advertisers alike. Whether you’re trying to show the emotional impact of a current news story or share your hobby with friends and family, images can capture your topic in a personal, emotional, and interesting way. Creating a photo essay can be as easy as choosing a topic, getting your images, and organizing the essay.

Things You Should Know

• Reflect long and hard on your topic, considering your audience, current events, and whether to go for a thematic or narrative approach.
• Create an outline, including your focus image, establishing shot, clincher, and other image details.
• When you finally take your photos, remember to take more photos than you think you need and don't be afraid to let the project change as you create it.

Finding Your Topic

• Offer a photo essay of your place of business as a training tool.
• Use a photo essay about your business as a sales or social tool by publishing it on your website or social media page.
• Create a how to photo essay to help others learn about your hobby, so they can take it up as well. [4] X Research source

• Thematic subjects are big ideas including things like local gun laws, at-risk youth, or welcoming home soldiers.
• Narrative essays can include a day in the life, how to tutorials, or progression series that show changes over time such as tracking a building project.
• If you have been given a commission or specific publication to work with, you may need to choose a topic that will fit a thematic or narrative approach as outlined by the publication. Make sure you are aware of any publication guidelines in advance.

Organizing Your Shoot

• Consider how difficult it will be to get permission to photograph your subjects. If you already have relationships established, it will be easier. If not, allow for extra time to get permission and/or waivers.
• Schools, daycares, and other places with kids typically have more regulations on who can be photographed and for what purposes. You’ll usually need to get parental approval, in addition to permission from those in charge. [7] X Research source

• Consider doing interviews with people involved prior to the shoot. Ask things like, “What’s the most interesting thing you do during this event?” or “How long have you been involved with this organization?”
• These interviews are also a great opportunity to ask for permission and get waivers.
• If you’re going to visit a job site, charitable event, or other large group activity, ask the person or persons in charge to explain what you’re doing to everyone before you arrive. [8] X Research source

Capturing Your Images

• Many new photographers stay away from high ISO shots because they allow more light through producing a “busy” image. However, these images are often easier to edit later as there’s more information to work with. [11] X Research source
• If it’s very bright in your location or you’ve set up artificial lighting, a low ISO is likely adequate, For darker areas, you’ll likely need to use a higher ISO.
• If you need one second to capture an image with a base ISO of 100, you’ll need one eighth of a second to capture with an ISO of 800. [13] X Research source

• Even snapping candid shots, which you may need to capture quickly, take a few moments to think about how objects are placed to make the most impact.
• Always think about how the main subject’s surroundings play into the overall image, and try to create different levels and points of interest.
• You can change composition as part of the editing process in some cases, so if you can’t line up the shot just right, don’t let it deter you from capturing the image you want. [14] X Research source

Organizing the Essay

• If you’re doing a day in the life photo essay about a frustrated person working in an office, an image of that person struggling to open the front door against the wind might be an apt focus shot.
• If your essay is about the process of building a home, your focus image may be something like a contractor and architect looking at blue prints with the framed up home in the background.
• If your essay is about a family reunion, the focus image may be a funny shot of the whole family making faces, pretending to be fighting, or a serious photo of the family posed together. Capture whatever seems natural for the family. [18] X Research source

• Regardless of essay type, you’ll need a focus image to grab attention.
• Use an overall shot to give context to your essay. Where is it, when is it happening, who’s involved, what’s going on, and why should someone be interested? The five “W’s” of journalism are a great way to determine what your overall shot should capture.
• Find your final image. This should be something provocative that asks your viewer to think about the topic.
• Between the focus and overall shot and ending image, include a series of images that move the viewer from the lead-in shots to its result. Use images that build in intensity or draw the viewers further into the essay.

• If the images aren’t telling the story, ask your friends to look at your other photos and ask, “I wanted this image to make this point. You got a different idea. Would any of these images make this point to you more clearly?”
• If the others like the images you’ve chosen, you may still want to ask them to look at your other photos and tell you if they think any of the images you didn’t include should be added in. They may see something you missed. [20] X Research source

• If you're commissioned to add photos to an essay, you should make sure images reflect the written word, but also add emotion and context the writing could not capture. For example, an essay on poverty may include an image of a child and parent living on the street could capture more emotional context.
• Captions should only include information the viewer could not derive from the photo itself. For instance, you can include a date, the subject’s name, or a statistic relevant to your subject in the caption.
• If you choose not to have any text or just a title and some introductory and/or closing words, make sure you convey all necessary information succinctly. [21] X Research source

Expert Q&A

• Be creative with your topics. However, something as simple as "things I like" will suffice so long as you stay creative. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Make sure you're familiar with your camera. It will make the photo composition a lot easier. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Don't get discouraged. It may take several tries to get the desired results in your photos. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

• ↑ http://digital-photography-school.com/5-photo-essay-tips/
• ↑ Heather Gallagher. Professional Photojournalist & Photographer. Expert Interview. 8 April 2020.
• ↑ http://improvephotography.com/30816/10-ideas-creative-photo-essays/
• ↑ http://www.apogeephoto.com/how-to-create-a-photo-essay/
• ↑ https://petapixel.com/how-to-create-a-photo-essay/
• ↑ http://photo.journalism.cuny.edu/week-5/
• ↑ http://clickitupanotch.com/2010/12/creating-a-photo-essay/
• ↑ https://photographylife.com/what-is-iso-in-photography
• ↑ https://wiredimpact.com/blog/how-to-make-a-photo-essay-nonprofit/
• ↑ http://digital-photography-school.com/5-tips-for-creating-a-photo-essay-with-a-purpose/
• ↑ https://www.format.com/magazine/resources/photography/how-to-make-photo-essay-examples

About This Article

To make a photo essay, start by selecting a subject that is easy to capture and that inspires you, like a friend or a family pet. Then, decide if you want to present your photo essay as thematic, which shows specific examples of a big idea, or narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end. Next, create an outline of your essay to determine which photos you’ll need, like an establishing shot. Finally, take your photos, select which images you want to use in your essay, and organize them according to your theme before adding text to explain the essay. To learn how to capture the best images, keep scrolling! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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17 Awesome Photo Essay Examples You Should Try Yourself

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If you’re looking for a photo essay example (or 17!), you’ve come to the right place. But what is the purpose of a photo essay? A photo essay is intended to tell a story or evoke emotion from the viewers through a series of photographs. They allow you to be creative and fully explore an idea. But how do you make one yourself? Here’s a list of photo essay examples. Choose one that you can easily do based on your photographic level and equipment.

Top 17 Photo Essay Examples

Here are some fantastic ideas to get you inspired to create your own photo essays!

17. Photograph a Protest

16. Transformation Photo Essays

15. Photograph the Same Place

14. Create a Photowalk

13. Follow the Change

12. Photograph a Local Event

11. Photograph an Abandoned Building

10. Behind the Scenes of a Photo Shoot

9. Capture Street Fashion

8. Landmark Photo Essay

7. Fathers & Children

6. A Day In the Life

5. Education Photo Essay

4. Fictitious Meals

3. Photograph Coffee Shops Using Cafenol

2. Photograph the Photographers

1. Capture the Neighbors

Photo essays tell stories. And there are plenty of amazingly interesting stories to tell! Photographing photo essays is a great way to practice your photography skills while having fun. You might even learn something! These photo essay examples are here to provide you with the inspiration to go out and tell your own stories through photos!

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Free English Lessons

How to describe a picture in english – video.

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In this lesson, you can learn how to describe a picture in English.

Describing a picture is useful in many english exams; you need to describe a picture in english for exams like fce , toeic or pte., it’s also a good way to practise your general english skills. take an interesting picture, and try to describe it in english. you can practise your speaking and learn some new english vocabulary, in this lesson, you can learn how to describe a picture in english in clear, detailed language. we’ll show you how to build an answer step-by-step., quiz: how to describe a picture.

Test your knowledge of the vocabulary for describing pictures.

This quiz has ten questions reviewing the language from the lesson, followed by four descriptions of photographs, which you need to complete, with a total of ten gaps to fill.

You’ll get your score out of 20 at the end, when you click ‘Finish Quiz’. Then, click ‘Restart Quiz’ to have another go, or ‘View Questions’ to see the correct answers.

Quiz Summary

0 of 14 Questions completed

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You have already completed the quiz before. Hence you can not start it again.

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You must sign in or sign up to start the quiz.

You must first complete the following:

0 of 14 Questions answered correctly

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Earned Point(s): 0 of 0 , ( 0 ) 0 Essay(s) Pending (Possible Point(s): 0 )

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A perfect score! Congratulations!

1 . Question

Which is correct?

• There are several people having a picnic.
• There is several people having a picnic..

Is ‘people’ singular or plural?

2 . Question

The picture _________ a village in the mountains.

Which word goes in the gap?

• demonstrates

3 . Question

There are some cows in a field _______ the grass.

Which form of the verb goes in the gap?

4 . Question

In the ________, there’s a man reading a newspaper.

Which two options can go in the gap?

5 . Question

_____ the bottom, we can see a table with some cakes on it.

Which preposition goes in the gap?

6 . Question

There’s someone else _____ the right, but they’ve got their back to the camera.

7 . Question

In the ______ left, we can see a flock of birds.

8 . Question

I _________ they’ve had an argument, because they both look quite angry.

Which verb is not possible in the gap?

The option you need to choose is for expressing certainty, not speculating, which is what the other three verbs are used for.

9 . Question

There are a lot of damaged trees, so _________ there’s been a storm.

Which words are possible in the gap? Choose as many as you think are right.

Only adverbs are grammatically correct in the gap, not verbs.

10 . Question

It _________ be a very cold place, because they’re all wearing hats and scarves.

Which option is correct in the gap?

This time, you need a modal verb that speculates about something that’s certain – the evidence is the hats and scarves, so there’s no doubt that it’s cold.

11 . Question

Complete the sentence using a word from the box in each gap. There are two words that you don’t need to use.

There’s an elephant on the right, and a man who we can’t quite see on the left, her some bananas. In fact, there are three people there, which we can tell from the shadows at the .

12 . Question

There’s a huge building in the middle of the picture, with some beautiful flower beds in the . We can also see a crane in the background, and a large unfinished building in the right.

13 . Question

We can see a church in the middle and the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa on the . There’s also a bicycle in the bottom , but the surprising thing is there’s nobody in the picture, so it was taken very early in the morning.

14 . Question

Complete the sentence using a word from the box in each gap. There are three words that you don’t need to use.

The picture a man skiing and one other person is visible in the on the right. The man in the centre be quite experienced, because the slope’s very steep.

1. Summarize What You See

What’s the best way to start your description?

Start with a summary, giving a general description of what’s in the picture and what you can see.

It’s useful to imagine that the person you’re talking to can’t see the picture. Think: what does the other person need to know? What do you need to say so that other people can understand what’s in the picture?

Let’s do an example.

You want to summarize what you see in one or two simple sentences. How could you do that?

You could say:

• There are several small boats next to a beach.
• The picture shows a beach, with many small boats in the water nearby.

Simple summaries like this make it easy to understand the general contents of the picture.

Let’s do one more:

What could you say here?

Here are some possible answers:

• There are three people cooking in a kitchen.
• The picture shows three young friends cooking together.

Okay, now it’s your turn. Here’s another picture:

You need to make a summary of what you see.

You can use these phrases:

• The picture shows…

Pause the video, and make one or two sentences. You can write down your answers if you want.

Okay, after your summary, you can start giving more detail about what you see in the picture.

2. Talking About Where Things Are

To start giving detail, you can talk about where things are in the picture.

Here’s some useful language to help you do this:

• On the left, there’s a girl with dark, curly hair. She’s holding half a cauliflower .
• In the middle, there’s a man who’s chopping vegetables.
• At the bottom, we can see a counter with many different vegetables on it.

When talking about photos, you might also need the phrases:

• In the background…
• In the foreground…

For example:

• In the foreground, there’s a sandy beach with three metal anchors on it.
• In the middle, there are several small boats, which are close to the beach.
• In the background, we can see the blue sea stretching to the horizon.

Let’s put all of this language together in another example:

Think first: what could you say about this picture?

Okay, let’s look at what you could say:

• On the left, there’s a cat sitting on a table.
• On the right, there’s a man standing, though we can’t see his face.
• In the background, we can see blue sky and snowy mountains.

Now it’s your turn! Here’s a picture:

Pause the video, and make at least three sentences. Use the useful language you saw in this section.

Again, you can write your sentences down if you want to!

Okay? What’s next?

3. Adding More Detail to Your Description

Now, the person you’re talking to should have a good general idea about what’s in the picture you’re describing, and where things are.

Next, you should start describing your picture in more detail.

Let’s look at a picture you’ve seen before:

When adding detail, don’t try to describe everything in the picture. It’s not necessary or useful. You should add detail to the most important parts of the picture.

So, for this picture, what do you think the most important parts are?

Probably, the person who took this photo took it because of the people. So, you should focus your description on the two people.

Think: what do they look like, and what are they doing?

• The two people both look unhappy or irritated.
• They’re sitting at the kitchen table together, but they aren’t talking to each other.
• The man is staring down at the table, while the woman is stirring her tea with a spoon.

That’s just three sentences, but they add a lot of detail to your description.

Let’s try one more:

In this picture, what do you think you should focus on in your description? Fairly obviously, you should talk about the horses.

• The horses are running through the grass.
• Two of them are black, but the one in the middle is white and grey.
• They don’t have saddles or anything, so they could be wild horses.

Again, you can see that you can do a lot with just a few sentences.

Alright, now it’s your turn!

Let’s take a picture you’ve already seen:

Pause the video and make at least three sentences to describe the picture in detail. Try to include as much important information as you can.

How was that? If you want more practice, you can do the same exercise with other pictures from this lesson, or you could use your own pictures!

At this point, you’ve described the picture in detail. So, what else can you do?

4. Speculating About the Picture

Speculating … What does that mean?

Speculating means talking about possibilities.

For example, look at this picture:

Think about some questions:

Why are the umbrellas there? Who put them there?

By trying to answer questions like this, you are speculating; you’re talking about possibilities and giving your opinion about the picture.

Speculating can help you to make a longer, more detailed answer when talking about a picture.

Let’s do an example:

• I suppose it might be some kind of art project.
• Maybe one person put an umbrella up there as a joke, and then other people started doing it, too.

Let’s look at one more picture:

Think, if you wanted to speculate about this picture, what could you say?

Another way to think about it: what questions could you ask yourself about this picture?

Possible ideas are: who made the footprints, and why? Where were they going? Where is the person who made the footprints now?

There are other possibilities, of course, so feel free to use your own ideas, too!

Okay, so what could you say to speculate about this picture?

Here are some examples:

• The footprints must have been made by a climber or a mountaineer .
• The person who made the footprints might be standing on top of the mountain now.

In our examples, you’ve seen some useful language which you can use to speculate about a picture. Do you remember?

You can use language like:

• [He] might…

Let’s practise using these once more with another picture:

Could you make four sentences, using the useful language we just saw?

Let’s do an example together:

• I suppose the guy is a climber, or he’s on an adventure holiday.
• Maybe he climbed something, and now he’s on the way down.
• He must have a lot of experience, because his body language is quite relaxed.
• He might be focusing on what he’s doing, but he might just be enjoying the view!

Okay, now it’s your turn. Let’s take another of our pictures:

Can you make four sentences to speculate about this picture, using the language you’ve learned in this section? Pause the video and think about your answers!

Now, you have one more thing to do.

5. Speculating About the Context of the Picture

When you speculate, you can speculate about what you can see in the picture. However, you can—and should—speculate about what you can’t see, too.

How’s this possible? Well, think about this picture:

You can think about questions like: where and when was the picture taken? Who took the picture? What was the photographer doing there?

• I think this could be in the USA, or maybe Russia.
• It’s a good photo, so perhaps it was taken by a professional nature photographer.

You see? Talking about what you can’t see in the picture can be very useful, and can help to add details to your answer.

Let’s do one more example:

What could you say about this picture?

Let’s do this one together. You could say:

• This must be somewhere tropical, like the Caribbean or the Maldives.
• Perhaps it was taken by a tourist who came to the beach on one of those boats.

Okay, one more. This time, you have to do it yourself!

Here’s your picture:

Make at least two sentences to speculate about the context of the picture. Think about where and when it was taken, who took it, and what the photographer was doing there.

How was that? Hopefully you feel more confident describing pictures in English now.

Let’s put everything you’ve learned together and practise making longer, fluent descriptions.

6. Making a Longer Answer

When you describe a picture, you should:

• Give a summary of what you see.
• Talk about where things are in the picture.
• Add details.
• Speculate about what’s in the picture.
• Speculate about the context of the picture.

Let’s make a longer answer together. We’ll start with a picture we’ve used already:

Here’s a possible longer answer:

• In the picture, there are two people sitting at a table, looking unhappy. There’s a woman on the left and a man on the right. In the middle of the picture, we can see some things on the table, like cups of tea, biscuits, milk and so on. The two people look sad or irritated , and they aren’t speaking to each other. They’re both looking down at the table. I suppose they had a fight and now they aren’t talking to each other, or they might just be bored and not have anything to talk about. I guess it’s a stock photo because otherwise, why would the photographer be in the kitchen with them?

Do you think you could make an answer like this? Remember, all the language you need is in this lesson. You just need to take the things you practised in each part, and then put them together.

Let’s do one more example together:

• The picture shows umbrellas hanging in the air. In the foreground, we can see a streetlight, and the umbrellas fill the picture from left to right. The umbrellas are of many different colours, mostly bright colours like pink, yellow or green. They’re hanging from wires. I can see at least four lines of umbrellas hanging down in this way, but there could be even more. Maybe this is some sort of art project. It might also be a festival or tradition, that people decorate the street with colourful umbrellas like this. I suppose the picture was taken in a city or town, though I can’t tell where exactly. Perhaps the photographer was a tourist, and was just walking around the city when he saw this amazing and strange scene.

Alright, now it’s your turn. We’ll give you a new picture:

Pause the video and try to make a longer answer, like we just did. Follow the same structure.

Finished? I don’t think so! You should practise as much as you can. Take the other pictures from the lesson, and make longer answers about them, too.

Practise your answers several times, until you can do it fluently and comfortably. Post your responses on the Oxford Online English YouTube channel and we’ll give you feedback!

Do you want more practice with vocabulary? Watch our lesson to get advice on keeping a vocabulary notebook .

Thanks for watching!

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Pictures That Tell Stories: Photo Essay Examples

Like any other type of artist, a photographer’s job is to tell a story through their pictures. While some of the most creative among us can invoke emotion or convey a thought with one single photo, the rest of us will rely on a photo essay.

In the following article, we’ll go into detail about what a photo essay is and how to craft one while providing some detailed photo essay examples.

What is a Photo Essay? 

A photo essay is a series of photographs that, when assembled in a particular order, tell a unique and compelling story. While some photographers choose only to use pictures in their presentations, others will incorporate captions, comments, or even full paragraphs of text to provide more exposition for the scene they are unfolding.

A photo essay is a well-established part of photojournalism and have been used for decades to present a variety of information to the reader. Some of the most famous photo essayists include Ansel Adams , W. Eugene Smith, and James Nachtwey. Of course, there are thousands of photo essay examples out there from which you can draw inspiration.

Why Consider Creating a Photo Essay?

As the old saying goes, “a picture is worth 1000 words.” This adage is, for many photographers, reason enough to hold a photo essay in particularly high regard.

For others, a photo essay allow them to take pictures that are already interesting and construct intricate, emotionally-charged tales out of them. For all photographers, it is yet another skill they can master to become better at their craft.

As you might expect, the photo essay have had a long history of being associated with photojournalism. From the Great Depression to Civil Rights Marches and beyond, many compelling stories have been told through a combination of images and text, or photos alone. A photo essay often evokes an intense reaction, whether artistic in nature or designed to prove a socio-political point.

Below, we’ll list some famous photo essay samples to further illustrate the subject.

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Famous Photo Essays

“The Great Depression” by Dorothea Lange – Shot and arranged in the 1930s, this famous photo essay still serves as a stark reminder of The Great Depression and Dust Bowl America . Beautifully photographed, the black and white images offer a bleak insight to one of the country’s most difficult times.

“The Vietnam War” by Philip Jones Griffiths – Many artists consider the Griffiths’ photo essay works to be some of the most important records of the war in Vietnam. His photographs and great photo essays are particularly well-remembered for going against public opinion and showing the suffering of the “other side,” a novel concept when it came to war photography.

Various American Natural Sites by Ansel Adams – Adams bought the beauty of nature home to millions, photographing the American Southwest and places like Yosemite National Park in a way that made the photos seem huge, imposing, and beautiful.

“Everyday” by Noah Kalina – Is a series of photographs arranged into a video. This photo essay features daily photographs of the artist himself, who began taking capturing the images when he was 19 and continued to do so for six years.

“Signed, X” by Kate Ryan – This is a powerful photo essay put together to show the long-term effects of sexual violence and assault. This photo essay is special in that it remains ongoing, with more subjects being added every year.

Common Types of Photo Essays

While a photo essay do not have to conform to any specific format or design, there are two “umbrella terms” under which almost all genres of photo essays tend to fall. A photo essay is thematic and narrative. In the following section, we’ll give some details about the differences between the two types, and then cover some common genres used by many artists.

⬥ Thematic 

A thematic photo essay speak on a specific subject. For instance, numerous photo essays were put together in the 1930s to capture the ruin of The Great Depression. Though some of these presentations followed specific people or families, they mostly told the “story” of the entire event. There is much more freedom with a thematic photo essay, and you can utilize numerous locations and subjects. Text is less common with these types of presentations.

⬥ Narrative 

A narrative photo essay is much more specific than thematic essays, and they tend to tell a much more direct story. For instance, rather than show a number of scenes from a Great Depression Era town, the photographer might show the daily life of a person living in Dust Bowl America. There are few rules about how broad or narrow the scope needs to be, so photographers have endless creative freedom. These types of works frequently utilize text.

Common Photo Essay Genres

Walk a City – This photo essay is when you schedule a time to walk around a city, neighborhood, or natural site with the sole goal of taking photos. Usually thematic in nature, this type of photo essay allows you to capture a specific place, it’s energy, and its moods and then pass them along to others.

The Relationship Photo Essay – The interaction between families and loved ones if often a fascinating topic for a photo essay. This photo essay genre, in particular, gives photographers an excellent opportunity to capture complex emotions like love and abstract concepts like friendship. When paired with introspective text, the results can be quite stunning. 

The Timelapse Transformation Photo Essay – The goal of a transformation photo essay is to capture the way a subject changes over time. Some people take years or even decades putting together a transformation photo essay, with subjects ranging from people to buildings to trees to particular areas of a city.

Going Behind The Scenes Photo Essay – Many people are fascinated by what goes on behind the scenes of big events. Providing the photographer can get access; to an education photo essay can tell a very unique and compelling story to their viewers with this photo essay.

Photo Essay of a Special Event – There are always events and occasions going on that would make an interesting subject for a photo essay. Ideas for this photo essay include concerts, block parties, graduations, marches, and protests. Images from some of the latter were integral to the popularity of great photo essays.

The Daily Life Photo Essay – This type of photo essay often focus on a single subject and attempt to show “a day in the life” of that person or object through the photographs. This type of photo essay can be quite powerful depending on the subject matter and invoke many feelings in the people who view them.

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Photo Essay Ideas and Examples

One of the best ways to gain a better understanding of photo essays is to view some photo essay samples. If you take the time to study these executions in detail, you’ll see just how photo essays can make you a better photographer and offer you a better “voice” with which to speak to your audience.

Some of these photo essay ideas we’ve already touched on briefly, while others will be completely new to you. 

Cover a Protest or March  

Some of the best photo essay examples come from marches, protests, and other events associated with movements or socio-political statements. Such events allow you to take pictures of angry, happy, or otherwise empowered individuals in high-energy settings. The photo essay narrative can also be further enhanced by arriving early or staying long after the protest has ended to catch contrasting images. 

Photograph a Local Event  

Whether you know it or not, countless unique and interesting events are happening in and around your town this year. Such events provide photographers new opportunities to put together a compelling photo essay. From ethnic festivals to historical events to food and beverage celebrations, there are many different ways to capture and celebrate local life.

Visit an Abandoned Site or Building  

Old homes and historical sites are rich with detail and can sometimes appear dilapidated, overgrown by weeds, or broken down by time. These qualities make them a dynamic and exciting subject. Many great photo essay works of abandoned homes use a mix of far-away shots, close-ups, weird angles, and unique lighting. Such techniques help set a mood that the audience can feel through the photographic essay.

Chronicle a Pregnancy

Few photo essay topics could be more personal than telling the story of a pregnancy. Though this photo essay example can require some preparation and will take a lot of time, the results of a photographic essay like this are usually extremely emotionally-charged and touching. In some cases, photographers will continue the photo essay project as the child grows as well.

Photograph Unique Lifestyles  

People all over the world are embracing society’s changes in different ways. People live in vans or in “tiny houses,” living in the woods miles away from everyone else, and others are growing food on self-sustaining farms. Some of the best photo essay works have been born out of these new, inspiring movements.

Photograph Animals or Pets  

If you have a favorite animal (or one that you know very little about), you might want to arrange a way to see it up close and tell its story through images. You can take photos like this in a zoo or the animal’s natural habitat, depending on the type of animal you choose. Pets are another great topic for a photo essay and are among the most popular subjects for many photographers.

Show Body Positive Themes  

So much of modern photography is about showing the best looking, prettiest, or sexiest people at all times. Choosing a photo essay theme like body positivity, however, allows you to film a wide range of interesting-looking people from all walks of life.

Such a photo essay theme doesn’t just apply to women, as beauty can be found everywhere. As a photo essay photographer, it’s your job to find it!

Bring Social Issues to Life  

Some of the most impactful social photo essay examples are those where the photographer focuses on social issues. From discrimination to domestic violence to the injustices of the prison system, there are many ways that a creative photographer can highlight what’s wrong with the world. This type of photo essay can be incredibly powerful when paired with compelling subjects and some basic text.

Photograph Style and Fashion

If you live in or know of a particularly stylish locale or area, you can put together an excellent thematic photo essay by capturing impromptu shots of well-dressed people as they pass by. As with culture, style is easily identifiable and is as unifying as it is divisive. Great photo essay examples include people who’ve covered fashion sub-genres from all over the world, like urban hip hop or Japanese Visual Kei. 

Photograph Native Cultures and Traditions  

If you’ve ever opened up a copy of National Geographic, you’ve probably seen photo essay photos that fit this category. To many, the traditions, dress, religious ceremonies, and celebrations of native peoples and foreign cultures can be utterly captivating. For travel photographers, this photo essay is considered one of the best ways to tell a story with or without text.

Capture Seasonal Or Time Changes In A Landmark Photo Essay

Time-lapse photography is very compelling to most viewers. What they do in a few hours, however, others are doing over months, years, and even decades. If you know of an exciting landscape or scene, you can try to capture the same image in Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, and put that all together into one landmark photo essay.

Alternatively, you can photograph something being lost or ravaged by time or weather. The subject of your landmark photo essay can be as simple as the wall of an old building or as complex as an old house in the woods being taken over by nature. As always, there are countless transformation-based landmark photo essay works from which you can draw inspiration.

Photograph Humanitarian Efforts or Charity  

Humanitarian efforts by groups like Habitat for Humanity, the Red Cross, and Doctors Without Borders can invoke a powerful response through even the simplest of photos. While it can be hard to put yourself in a position to get the images, there are countless photo essay examples to serve as inspiration for your photo essay project.

How to Create a Photo Essay

There is no singular way to create a photo essay. As it is, ultimately, and artistic expression of the photographer, there is no right, wrong, good, or bad. However, like all stories, some tell them well and those who do not. Luckily, as with all things, practice does make perfect. Below, we’ve listed some basic steps outlining how to create a photo essay

Steps To Create A Photo Essay

Choose Your Topic – While some photo essayists will be able to “happen upon” a photo story and turn it into something compelling, most will want to choose their photo essay topics ahead of time. While the genres listed above should provide a great starting place, it’s essential to understand that photo essay topics can cover any event or occasion and any span of time

Do Some Research – The next step to creating a photo essay is to do some basic research. Examples could include learning the history of the area you’re shooting or the background of the person you photograph. If you’re photographing a new event, consider learning the story behind it. Doing so will give you ideas on what to look for when you’re shooting.  

Make a Storyboard – Storyboards are incredibly useful tools when you’re still in the process of deciding what photo story you want to tell. By laying out your ideas shot by shot, or even doing rough illustrations of what you’re trying to capture, you can prepare your photo story before you head out to take your photos.

This process is especially important if you have little to no control over your chosen subject. People who are participating in a march or protest, for instance, aren’t going to wait for you to get in position before offering up the perfect shot. You need to know what you’re looking for and be prepared to get it.

Get the Right Images – If you have a shot list or storyboard, you’ll be well-prepared to take on your photo essay. Make sure you give yourself enough time (where applicable) and take plenty of photos, so you have a lot from which to choose. It would also be a good idea to explore the area, show up early, and stay late. You never know when an idea might strike you.

Assemble Your Story – Once you develop or organize your photos on your computer, you need to choose the pictures that tell the most compelling photo story or stories. You might also find some great images that don’t fit your photo story These can still find a place in your portfolio, however, or perhaps a completely different photo essay you create later.

Depending on the type of photographer you are, you might choose to crop or digitally edit some of your photos to enhance the emotions they invoke. Doing so is completely at your discretion, but worth considering if you feel you can improve upon the naked image.

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Best Photo Essays Tips And Tricks

Before you approach the art of photo essaying for the first time, you might want to consider with these photo essay examples some techniques, tips, and tricks that can make your session more fun and your final results more interesting. Below, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best advice we could find on the subject of photo essays. 

⬥ Experiment All You Want 

You can, and should, plan your topic and your theme with as much attention to detail as possible. That said, some of the best photo essay examples come to us from photographers that got caught up in the moment and decided to experiment in different ways. Ideas for experimentation include the following: 

Angles – Citizen Kane is still revered today for the unique, dramatic angles used in the film. Though that was a motion picture and not photography, the same basic principles still apply. Don’t be afraid to photograph some different angles to see how they bring your subject to life in different ways.

Color – Some images have more gravitas in black in white or sepia tone. You can say the same for images that use color in an engaging, dynamic way. You always have room to experiment with color, both before and after the shoot.

Contrast – Dark and light, happy and sad, rich and poor – contrast is an instantly recognizable form of tension that you can easily include in your photo essay. In some cases, you can plan for dramatic contrasts. In other cases, you simply need to keep your eyes open.

Exposure Settings – You can play with light in terms of exposure as well, setting a number of different moods in the resulting photos. Some photographers even do random double exposures to create a photo essay that’s original.

Filters – There are endless post-production options available to photographers, particularly if they use digital cameras. Using different programs and apps, you can completely alter the look and feel of your image, changing it from warm to cool or altering dozens of different settings.

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If you’re using traditional film instead of a digital camera, you’re going to want to stock up. Getting the right shots for a photo essay usually involves taking hundreds of images that will end up in the rubbish bin. Taking extra pictures you won’t use is just the nature of the photography process. Luckily, there’s nothing better than coming home to realize that you managed to capture that one, perfect photograph. 

⬥ Set the Scene 

You’re not just telling a story to your audience – you’re writing it as well. If the scene you want to capture doesn’t have the look you want, don’t be afraid to move things around until it does. While this doesn’t often apply to photographing events that you have no control over, you shouldn’t be afraid to take a second to make an OK shot a great shot. 

⬥ Capture Now, Edit Later 

Editing, cropping, and digital effects can add a lot of drama and artistic flair to your photos. That said, you shouldn’t waste time on a shoot, thinking about how you can edit it later. Instead, make sure you’re capturing everything that you want and not missing out on any unique pictures. If you need to make changes later, you’ll have plenty of time! 

⬥ Make It Fun 

As photographers, we know that taking pictures is part art, part skill, and part performance. If you want to take the best photo essays, you need to loosen up and have fun. Again, you’ll want to plan for your topic as best as you can, but don’t be afraid to lose yourself in the experience. Once you let yourself relax, both the ideas and the opportunities will manifest.

⬥ It’s All in The Details 

When someone puts out a photographic essay for an audience, that work usually gets analyzed with great attention to detail. You need to apply this same level of scrutiny to the shots you choose to include in your photo essay. If something is out of place or (in the case of historical work) out of time, you can bet the audience will notice.

⬥ Consider Adding Text

While it isn’t necessary, a photographic essay can be more powerful by the addition of text. This is especially true of images with an interesting background story that can’t be conveyed through the image alone. If you don’t feel up to the task of writing content, consider partnering with another artist and allowing them tor bring your work to life.

Final Thoughts 

The world is waiting to tell us story after story. Through the best photo essays, we can capture the elements of those stories and create a photo essay that can invoke a variety of emotions in our audience.

No matter the type of cameras we choose, the techniques we embrace, or the topics we select, what really matters is that the photos say something about the people, objects, and events that make our world wonderful.

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Photo Essay

We all know that photographs tell a story. These still images may be seen from various perspectives and are interpreted in different ways. Oftentimes, photographers like to give dramatic meaning to various scenarios. For instance, a blooming flower signifies a new life. Photographs always hold a deeper meaning than what they actually are.

In essay writing , photographs along with its supporting texts, play a significant role in conveying a message. Here are some examples of these kinds of photo-text combinations.

What is Photo Essay? A photo essay is a visual storytelling method that utilizes a sequence of carefully curated photographs to convey a narrative, explore a theme, or evoke specific emotions. It goes beyond individual images, aiming to tell a cohesive and impactful story through the arrangement and combination of pictures.

Photo Essay Format

A photo essay is a series of photographs that are intended to tell a story or evoke a series of emotions in the viewer. It is a powerful way to convey messages without the need for many words. Here is a format to guide you in creating an effective photo essay:

1. Choose a Compelling Topic

Select a subject that you are passionate about or that you find intriguing. Ensure the topic has a clear narrative that can be expressed visually.

2. Plan Your Shots

Outline the story you wish to tell. This could involve a beginning, middle, and end or a thematic approach. Decide on the types of shots you need (e.g., wide shots, close-ups, portraits, action shots) to best tell the story.

3. Take Your Photographs

Capture a variety of images to have a wide selection when editing your essay. Focus on images that convey emotion, tell a story, or highlight your theme.

4. Edit Your Photos

Select the strongest images that best convey your message or story. Edit for consistency in style, color, and lighting to ensure the essay flows smoothly.

5. Arrange Your Photos

Order your images in a way that makes sense narratively or thematically. Consider transitions between photos to ensure they lead the viewer naturally through the story.

6. Include Captions or Text (Optional)

Write captions to provide context, add depth, or explain the significance of each photo. Keep text concise and impactful, letting the images remain the focus.

7. Present Your Photo Essay

Choose a platform for presentation, whether online, in a gallery, or as a printed booklet. Consider the layout and design, ensuring that it complements and enhances the visual narrative.

8. Conclude with Impact

End with a strong image or a conclusion that encapsulates the essence of your essay. Leave the viewer with something to ponder , reflecting on the message or emotions you aimed to convey.

Best Photo Essay Example?

One notable example of a powerful photo essay is “The Photographic Essay: Paul Fusco’s ‘RFK Funeral Train'” by Paul Fusco. This photo essay captures the emotional journey of the train carrying the body of Robert F. Kennedy from New York to Washington, D.C., after his assassination in 1968. Fusco’s images beautifully and poignantly document the mourning and respect shown by people along the train route. The series is a moving portrayal of grief, unity, and the impact of a historical moment on the lives of ordinary individuals. The photographs are both artistically compelling and deeply human, making it a notable example of the potential for photo essays to convey complex emotions and historical narratives.

Photo Essay Examples and Ideas to Edit & Download

• A Day in the Life Photo Essay
• Behind the scenes Photo Essay
• Event Photo Essay
• Photo Essay on Meal
• Photo Essay on Photo walking
• Photo Essay on Protest
• Photo Essay on Abandoned building
• Education photo essay
• Photo Essay on Events
• Follow the change Photo Essay
• Photo Essay on Personal experiences

Photo Essay Examples & Templates

1. narrative photo essay format example.

nytimes.com

2. Student Photo Essay Example

3. Great Depression Essay Example

thshistory.files.wordpress.com

4. Example of Photo Essay

weresearchit.co.uk

5. Photo Essay Examples About Nature

cge-media-library.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com

6. Travel Photo Example

theguardian.com

7. Free Photo Essay Example

vasantvalley.org

Most Interesting Photo Essays of 2019

Now that you are educated with the fundamentals of photo essays, why not lay eyes on some great photo essays for inspiration. To give you a glimpse of a few epitomes, we collected the best and fascinating photo essays for you. The handpicked samples are as follows:

8. Toys and Us

journals.openedition.org

This photo essay presents its subject which is the latest genre of photography, toy photography. In this type of picture taking, the photographer aims to give life on the toys and treat them as his/her model. This photography follows the idea of a toy researcher, Katrina Heljakka, who states that also adults and not only children are interested in reimagining and preserving the characters of their toys with the means of roleplay and creating a story about these toys. This photo essay is based on the self-reflection of the author on a friend’s toys in their home environment.

9. The Faces of Nature Example

godandnature.asa3.org

This photo essay and collection caters the creativity of the author’s mind in seeing the world. In her composition, she justified that there are millions of faces that are naturally made that some of us have not noticed. She also presented tons of photos showing different natural objects that form patterns of faces. Though it was not mentioned in the essay itself, the author has unconsciously showcased the psychological phenomenon, pareidolia. This is the tendency to translate an obscure stimulus that let the observer see faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns, or even hearing concealed messages in music.

10. The Country Doctor Example

us1.campaign-archive.com

This photo essay depicts the medical hardships in a small rural town in Colorado called Kremling. For 23 days, Smith shadowed Dr. Ernest Ceriani, witnessing the dramatic life of the small town and capturing the woeful crisis of the region. The picture in this photographic essay was photographed by Smith himself for Life magazine in 1948 but remained as fascinating as it was posted weeks ago.

11. New York City Coffeehouses

lens.blogs.nytimes.com

Café Latte, cappuccino, espresso, or flat white—of course, you know these if you have visited a coffee shop at least once. However, the photographer of this photo essay took it to a whole new level of experience. Within two to three days of visiting various coffee places, Mr. Gavrysh stayed most of his day observing at the finest details such as the source of the coffee, the procedure of delivering them, and the process of roasting and grounding them. He also watched how did the baristas perfect the drinks and the reaction of the customers as they received their ordered coffee with delights in their faces. Gavrysh did not mean to compose a coffeehouse guide, but to make a composition that describes modern, local places where coffee is sipped and treated with respect.

12. Hungry Planet: What The World Eats

13. Photo Essay Example

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14. Photo Essay in PDF

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15. Sample Photo Essay Example

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16. Basic Photo Essay Example

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17. Printable Photo Essay Example

One of the basic necessity of a person to live according to his/her will is food. In this photo essay, you will see how these necessities vary in several ways. In 2005, a pair of Peter Menzel and Faith D’ Aluisio released a book that showcased the meals of an average family in 24 countries. Ecuador, south-central Mali, China, Mexico, Kuwait, Norway, and Greenland are among the nations they visited.  This photo essay is written to raise awareness about the influence of environment and culture to the cost and calories of the foods laid on the various dining tables across the globe.

Photo essays are not just about photographic aesthetics but also the stories that authors built behind those pictures. In this collection of captivating photo essays, reflect on how to write your own. If you are allured and still can’t get enough, there’s no need for you to be frantic about. Besides, there are thousands of samples and templates on our website to browse. Visit us to check them all out.

What are good topics for a photo essay?

• Urban Exploration: Document the unique architecture, street life, and cultural diversity of urban environments.
• Environmental Conservation: Capture the beauty of natural landscapes or document environmental issues, showcasing the impact of climate change or conservation efforts.
• Everyday Life in Your Community: Showcase the daily lives, traditions, and activities of people in your local community.
• Family Traditions: Document the customs, rituals, and special moments within your own family or another family.
• Youth Culture: Explore the lifestyle, challenges, and aspirations of young people in your community or around the world.
• Behind-the-Scenes at an Event: Provide a backstage look at the preparation and execution of an event, such as a concert, festival, or sports competition.
• A Day in the Life of a Profession: Follow a professional in their daily activities, offering insights into their work, challenges, and routines.
• Social Issues: Address important social issues like homelessness, poverty, immigration, or healthcare, raising awareness through visual storytelling.
• Cultural Celebrations: Document cultural festivals, ceremonies, or celebrations that showcase the diversity of traditions in your region or beyond.
• Education Around the World: Explore the various facets of education globally, from classrooms to the challenges students face in different cultures.
• Workplace Dynamics: Capture the atmosphere, interactions, and diversity within different workplaces or industries.
• Street Art and Graffiti: Document the vibrant and dynamic world of street art, capturing the expressions of local artists.
• Animal Rescues or Shelters: Focus on the efforts of organizations or individuals dedicated to rescuing and caring for animals.
• Migration Stories: Explore the experiences and challenges of individuals or communities affected by migration.
• Global Food Culture: Document the diversity of food cultures, from local markets to family meals, showcasing the role of food in different societies.

How to Write a Photo Essay

First of all, you would need to find a topic that you are interested in. With this, you can conduct thorough research on the topic that goes beyond what is common. This would mean that it would be necessary to look for facts that not a lot of people know about. Not only will this make your essay interesting, but this may also help you capture the necessary elements for your images.

Remember, the ability to manipulate the emotions of your audience will allow you to build a strong connection with them. Knowing this, you need to plan out your shots. With the different emotions and concepts in mind, your images should tell a story along with the essay outline .

1. Choose Your Topic

• Select a compelling subject that interests you and can be explored visually.
• Consider the story or message you want to convey. It should be something that can be expressed through images.

2. Plan Your Essay

• Outline your narrative. Decide if your photo essay will tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end, or if it will explore a theme or concept.
• Research your subject if necessary, especially if you’re covering a complex or unfamiliar topic.

3. Capture Your Images

• Take a variety of photos. Include wide shots to establish the setting, close-ups to show details, and medium shots to focus on subjects.
• Consider different angles and perspectives to add depth and interest to your essay.
• Shoot more than you need. Having a large selection of images to choose from will make the editing process easier.

4. Select Your Images

• Choose photos that best tell your story or convey your theme.
• Look for images that evoke emotion or provoke thought.
• Ensure there’s a mix of compositions to keep the viewer engaged.
• Sequence your images in a way that makes narrative or thematic sense.
• Consider the flow and how each image transitions to the next.
• Use juxtaposition to highlight contrasts or similarities.

6. Add Captions or Text (Optional)

• Write captions to provide context or additional information about each photo. Keep them brief and impactful.
• Consider including an introduction or conclusion to frame your essay. This can be helpful in setting the stage or offering a final reflection.

7. Edit and Refine

• Review the sequence of your photos. Make sure they flow smoothly and clearly convey your intended story or theme.
• Adjust the layout as needed, ensuring that the visual arrangement is aesthetically pleasing and supports the narrative.

8. Share Your Essay

• Choose the right platform for your photo essay, whether it’s a blog, online publication, exhibition, or print.
• Consider your audience and tailor the presentation of your essay to suit their preferences and expectations.

Types of Photo Essay

Photo essays are a compelling medium to tell a story, convey emotions, or present a perspective through a series of photographs. Understanding the different types of photo essays can help photographers and storytellers choose the best approach for their project. Here are the main types of photo essays:

1. Narrative Photo Essays

• Purpose: To tell a story or narrate an event in a chronological sequence.
• Characteristics: Follows a clear storyline with a beginning, middle, and end. It often includes characters, a setting, and a plot.
• Examples: A day in the life of a firefighter, the process of crafting traditional pottery.

2. Thematic Photo Essays

• Purpose: To explore a specific theme, concept, or issue without being bound to a chronological sequence.
• Characteristics: Centers around a unified theme, with each photo contributing to the overall concept.
• Examples: The impact of urbanization on the environment, the beauty of natural landscapes.

3. Conceptual Photo Essays

• Purpose: To convey an idea or evoke a series of emotions through abstract or metaphorical images.
• Characteristics: Focuses on delivering a conceptual message or emotional response, often using symbolism.
• Examples: Loneliness in the digital age, the concept of freedom.

4. Expository or Informative Photo Essays

• Purpose: To inform or educate the viewer about a subject with a neutral viewpoint.
• Characteristics: Presents factual information on a topic, often accompanied by captions or brief texts to provide context.
• Examples: The process of coffee production, a day at an animal rescue center.

5. Persuasive Photo Essays

• Purpose: To convince the viewer of a particular viewpoint or to highlight social issues.
• Characteristics: Designed to persuade or elicit action, these essays may focus on social, environmental, or political issues.
• Examples: The effects of plastic pollution, the importance of historical preservation.

6. Personal Photo Essays

• Purpose: To express the photographer’s personal experiences, emotions, or journeys.
• Characteristics: Highly subjective and personal, often reflecting the photographer’s intimate feelings or experiences.
• Examples: A personal journey through grief, documenting one’s own home during quarantine.

7. Environmental Photo Essays

• Purpose: To showcase landscapes, wildlife, and environmental issues.
• Characteristics: Focuses on the natural world or environmental challenges, aiming to raise awareness or appreciation.
• Examples: The melting ice caps, wildlife in urban settings.

8. Travel Photo Essays

• Purpose: To explore and present the culture, landscapes, people, and experiences of different places.
• Characteristics: Captures the essence of a location, showcasing its uniqueness and the experiences of traveling.
• Examples: A road trip across the American Southwest, the vibrant streets of a bustling city.

How do you start a picture essay?

1. choose a compelling theme or topic:.

Select a theme or topic that resonates with you and has visual storytelling potential. It could be a personal project, an exploration of a social issue, or a visual journey through a specific place or event.

2. Research and Conceptualize:

Conduct research on your chosen theme to understand its nuances, context, and potential visual elements. Develop a conceptual framework for your photo essay, outlining the key aspects you want to capture.

3. Define Your Storytelling Approach:

Determine how you want to convey your narrative. Consider whether your photo essay will follow a chronological sequence, a thematic structure, or a more abstract and conceptual approach.

4. Create a Shot List:

Develop a list of specific shots you want to include in your essay. This can help guide your photography and ensure you capture a diverse range of images that contribute to your overall narrative.

5. Plan the Introduction:

Think about how you want to introduce your photo essay. The first image or series of images should grab the viewer’s attention and set the tone for the narrative.

6. Consider the Flow:

Plan the flow of your photo essay, ensuring a logical progression of images that tells a cohesive and engaging story. Consider the emotional impact and visual variety as you sequence your photographs.

7. Shoot with Purpose:

Start capturing images with your conceptual framework in mind. Focus on images that align with your theme and contribute to the overall narrative. Look for moments that convey emotion, tell a story, or reveal aspects of your chosen subject.

8. Experiment with Perspectives and Techniques:

Explore different perspectives, compositions, and photographic techniques to add visual interest and depth to your essay. Consider using a variety of shots, including wide-angle, close-ups, and detail shots.

9. Write Descriptive Captions:

As you capture images, think about the accompanying captions. Captions should provide context, additional information, or insights that enhance the viewer’s understanding of each photograph.

What are the key elements of a photo essay?

1. Theme or Topic:

Clearly defined subject matter or theme that unifies the photographs and tells a cohesive story.

2. Narrative Structure:

An intentional narrative structure that guides the viewer through the photo essay, whether chronological, thematic, or conceptual.

3. Introduction:

A strong introduction that captures the viewer’s attention and sets the tone for the photo essay.

4. Captivating Images:

A series of high-quality and visually compelling images that effectively convey the chosen theme or story.

5. Variety of Shots:

A variety of shots, including wide-angle, close-ups, detail shots, and different perspectives, to add visual interest and depth.

6. Sequencing:

Careful sequencing of images to create a logical flow and emotional impact, guiding the viewer through the narrative.

7. Captions and Text:

Thoughtful captions or accompanying text that provide context, additional information, or insights, enhancing the viewer’s understanding.

8. Conclusion:

A concluding section that brings the photo essay to a satisfying close, leaving a lasting impression on the viewer.

Purpose of a Photo Essay

With good writing skills , a person is able to tell a story through words. However, adding images for your essay will give it the dramatic effect it needs. The photographs and the text work hand in hand to create something compelling enough to attract an audience.

This connection goes beyond something visual, as photo essays are also able to connect with an audience emotionally. This is to create an essay that is effective enough to relay a given message.

5 Tips for Creating a Photo Essay

• Don’t be afraid to experiment. Find the right angle and be dramatic with your description, just be creative.
• Pay attention to detail. Chances are, your audience will notice every single detail of your photograph.
• Shoot everything. Behind a single beautiful photo is a hundred more shots.
• Don’t think twice about editing. Editing is where the magic happens. It has the ability to add more drama to your images.
• Have fun. Don’t stress yourself out too much but instead, grow from your experience.

What is a photo essay for school?

A school photo essay is a visual storytelling project for educational purposes, typically assigned to students. It involves creating a narrative using a series of carefully curated photographs on a chosen theme.

How many pictures should be in a photo essay?

The number of pictures in a photo essay varies based on the chosen theme and narrative structure. It can range from a few impactful images to a more extensive series, typically around 10-20 photographs.

Is a photo essay a story?

Yes, a photo essay is a visual storytelling form. It uses a series of carefully curated photographs to convey a narrative, evoke emotions, or communicate a specific message or theme.

What makes a photo essay unforgettable?

An unforgettable photo essay is characterized by a powerful theme, emotionally resonant images, a well-crafted narrative structure, attention to detail, and a connection that leaves a lasting impact on viewers.

Photo Essay Generator

Text prompt

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Create a Photo Essay on the theme of urban exploration.

Discuss the story of a local community event through a Photo Essay.

How to describe an image or diagram in academic task 1

In this podcast, you get a complete and detailed tutorial on how to describe a diagram/graphic for your IELTS academic writing task 1 .

We also cover those same eight steps in the article below, so give it a thorough read when preparing for your IELTS academic writing exam.

Describing a diagram for IELTS academic writing: task 1

Describing a diagram or a graphic for your IELTS exam can seem like a scary task. However, all you need to do is have a clear understanding of what is expected of you.

Strategy for describing a diagram

Let’s begin with the general outline. First , pay attention to the title of the diagram – this will tell you what the diagram shows.

Next , examine the diagram. Pay close attention to:

• The main parts of the diagram
• The relationship between these parts
• Any further explanations

Lastly , keep in mind that your text must contain at least 150 words. Try to spend around 20 minutes on this task.

Remember that you have to describe the diagram itself, not why it is used.

Organize a structure for your description

Create a plan for your description. The structure usually contains three parts: the introduction, the main body of text, and the summary.

Don’t worry if you don’t know any technical words. Use your own words to describe the diagram.

• Introduction In the introduction of your Diagram Description write about the purpose of the diagram.
• The main body of text Use the main body of text to outline a step-by-step explanation of the diagram.
• Summary In the summary sum up the principal idea of the diagram. Usually, one short paragraph is enough.

8 Steps to describe a diagram for IELTS academic writing: task 1

Now that we know how to structure the overall description of a diagram, we can continue onto other important parts that will gain you better marks.

Here’s a list of eight steps to help you write an excellent description for a diagram, and in turn gain you good marks!

So let’s do this together, step-by-step.

Read the title and the image of the diagram, and write about it – this will be your introduction.

This image clearly illustrates the carbon cycle.

Describe the diagram in detail – this will be your main body of text.

Carbon-dioxide is released into the atmosphere by aquatic and terrestrial life respiration or the decomposition of plant and animal life. This CO2 is used in photosynthesis for the growth of plants and nourishment of animals. These organisms die and decompose. This decomposition and waste are transformed into carbon. Carbon-dioxide is diffused into the ocean through precipitation when gases in the atmosphere are transformed to water. If the decomposition of carbon in the seabed and land is interrupted, it leads to the development of fossil fuels, such as oil, coal and gas. These fossil fuels are extracted from the earth for human use. During manufacturing processes, factories release fossil fuel emissions (including CO2) back into the atmosphere.

Add sequencing words to your text in order to connect your descriptive sentences and make it flow better.

Firstly , Carbon-dioxide is released into the atmosphere by aquatic and terrestrial life respiration or the decomposition of plant and animal life. Next , this CO2 Is used in photosynthesis for the growth of plants and nourishment of animals. Once these organisms die and decompose, this waste and decomposition is transformed into carbon. Additionally , carbon-dioxide is diffused into the ocean through precipitation when gases in the atmosphere are transformed to water.

Make sure to include passive form in the description to define an action that is done.

In the ocean, this CO2 is converted into sedimentation in the seabed.

Make sure you paraphrase your second and third lines to avoid redundancy

Next, this CO2 is used in photosynthesis for the growth of plants and nourishment of animals.

Once these organisms die, they are transformed into carbon.

Paraphrasing: plants and animals = organisms.

Include conditionals and adverb clauses to indicate possible outcomes when describing the diagram.

Real conditional If the decomposition of carbon in the seabed and land is interrupted, it leads to the development of fossil fuels, such as oil, coal and gas. Adverb Clause

Write a clear summary of the principle idea of the diagram in one short paragraph.

This graph clearly indicates the cycle of carbon through the land and oceans.

Read through your written work to check for any errors.

Here’s our final text – proofread it for any mistakes and errors.

Firstly, carbon-dioxide is released into the atmosphere by aquatic and terrestrial life respiration or the decomposition of plant and animal life.

Next, this CO2 Is used in photosynthesis for the growth of plants and nourishment of animals. Once these organisms die and decompose, this waste and decomposition is transformed into carbon. Additionally, carbon-dioxide is diffused into the ocean through precipitation when gases in the atmosphere are transformed to water. In the ocean, this CO2 is converted into sedimentation in the seabed through the decomposition of marine animals. If the decomposition of carbon in the seabed and land is interrupted, it leads to the development of fossil fuels, such as oil, coal and gas. These fossil fuels are extracted from the earth for human use. During manufacturing processes, factories release fossil fuel emissions (including CO2) back into the atmosphere.

This diagram clearly indicates the cycle of carbon through the land and oceans.

More useful IELTS Academic Task 1 lessons:

• How to describe a pie chart
• Bar Chart IELTS
• How to describe a map
• Describe an image 
• Describe a natural process
• How to describe a table
• How to paraphrase
• Line graph sample answer
• Marking criteria for Task 1
• Map vocabulary for IELTS Task 1
• How to describe a flow chart
• Essential skills for Task 1
• How to get band 9 for academic task 1
• How to describe a process diagram

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• Sample Task 2 Questions 2022
• Introduction to Paraphrasing
• Model Band 9 Essay
• Five Band 9 Words
• Model Band 7 Essay
• Differences Band 9 vs Band 7 Essay
• Band 6.5 Essay
• Academic Collocations
• Topic Sentences
• Discuss Both Views
• Tutorial: To What Extent Essays
• Paraphrasing Introductions
• Essay Structures
• Essay Plans
• Describe a Pie Chart
• Using Percentages
• Map Vocabulary
• Describe Flow Charts
• Describe a Bar Chart
• How to get Band 9
• AT 1 Sample Questions 2022
• Describe a Graphic
• GT Task 1 Questions 2022
• IELTS Vocabulary
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3 Tips for Writing Long Descriptions of Pictures

Describe what you see/what is visually evident. Long text alternatives for pictures verbally describe the appearance for the benefit of people who are unable to see them. They should simply answer the question, "What does the image look like?"

1. Describe From General to Specific

Be logical. In order to be easily understood, image descriptions of pictures should describe according to some logical sequence. Begin with a general overview of what the picture is or portrays, focusing first on an overview before providing details. Following the overview, various portions of the picture can be detailed, in some type of orderly fashion. One tactic is to explain the foreground, mid-ground, and background. In general, provide directions from the perspective of the viewer looking at the picture. For example, refer to the left or right side of a picture as if one was standing in front of it in a gallery. However, when describing people within a photo, it is better to use their perspective. This applies when mentioning a subject's "left hand" or "right shoulder."

2. Describe Objectively and Accurately. Don't Describe Motivations or Intentions.

Be objective. Descriptions of pictures should be straightforward and factual. They should avoid interpretations or emotional responses.

3. Be Descriptive. Try to Use Vivid, Imaginative Language.

Image descriptions should utilize vivid terminology to describe various features of the picture. For instance:

Contact ITSS

Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide

A design professor from Denmark once drew for me a picture of the creative process, which had been the subject of his doctoral dissertation. “Here,” he said. “This is what it looks like”:

Nothing is wasted though, said the design professor, because every bend in the process is helping you to arrive at your necessary structure. By trying a different angle or creating a composite of past approaches, you get closer and closer to what you intend. You begin to delineate the organic form that will match your content.

The remarkable thing about personal essays, which openly mimic this exploratory process, is that they can be so quirky in their “shape.” No diagram matches the exact form that evolves, and that is because the best essayists resist predictable approaches. They refuse to limit themselves to generic forms, which, like mannequins, can be tricked out in personal clothing. Nevertheless, recognizing a few basic underlying structures may help an essay writer invent a more personal, more unique form. Here, then, are several main options.

Narrative with a lift

Take, for example, Jo Ann Beard’s essay “The Fourth State of Matter.” The narrator, abandoned by her husband, is caring for a dying dog and going to work at a university office to which an angry graduate student has brought a gun. The sequence of scenes matches roughly the unfolding of real events, but there is suspense to pull us along, represented by questions we want answered. In fact, within Beard’s narrative, two sets of questions, correlating to parallel subplots, create a kind of double tension. When the setting is Beard’s house, we wonder, “Will she find a way to let go of the dying dog, not to mention her failing marriage?” And when she’s at work, we find ourselves asking, “What about the guy with the gun? How will he impact her one ‘safe place’?”

One interesting side note: trauma, which is a common source for personal essays, can easily cause an author to get stuck on the sort of plateau Kittredge described. Jo Ann Beard, while clearly wrestling with the immobilizing impact of her own trauma, found a way to keep the reader moving both forward and upward, until the rising tension reached its inevitable climax: the graduate student firing his gun. I have seen less-experienced writers who, by contrast, seem almost to jog in place emotionally, clutching at a kind of post-traumatic scar tissue.

The whorl of reflection

Let’s set aside narrative, though, since it is not the only mode for a personal essay. In fact, most essays are more topical or reflective, which means they don’t move through time in a linear fashion as short stories do.

One of the benefits of such a circling approach is that it seems more organic, just like the mind’s creative process. It also allows for a wider variety of perspectives—illuminating the subject from multiple angles. A classic example would be “Under the Influence,” Scott Russell Sanders’s essay about his alcoholic father. Instead of luring us up the chronological slope of plot, Sanders spirals around his father’s drinking, leading us to a wide range of realizations about alcoholism: how it gets portrayed in films, how it compares to demon-possession in the Bible, how it results in violence in other families, how it raises the author’s need for control, and even how it influences the next generation through his workaholic over-compensation. We don’t read an essay like this out of plot-driven suspense so much as for the pleasure of being surprised, again and again, by new perspective and new insight.

The formal limits of focus

My own theory is that most personal essayists, because of a natural ability to extrapolate, do not struggle to find subjects to write about. Writer’s block is not their problem since their minds overflow with remembered experiences and related ideas. While a fiction writer may need to invent from scratch, adding and adding, the essayist usually needs to do the opposite, deleting and deleting. As a result, nonfiction creativity is best demonstrated by what has been left out. The essay is a figure locked in a too-large-lump of personal experience, and the good essayist chisels away all unnecessary material.

Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting” is an odd but useful model. She limits that essay to a single evening walk in London, ostensibly taken to buy a pencil. I suspect Woolf gave herself permission to combine incidents from several walks in London, but no matter. The essay feels “brought together” by the imposed limits of time and place.

As it happens, “Street Haunting” is also an interesting prototype for a kind of essay quite popular today: the segmented essay. Although the work is unified by the frame of a single evening stroll, it can also be seen as a combination of many individual framed moments. If we remove the purpose of the journey—to find a pencil—the essay falls neatly into a set of discrete scenes with related reveries: a daydreaming lady witnessed through a window, a dwarfish woman trying on shoes, an imagined gathering of royalty on the other side of a palace wall, and eventually the arguing of a married couple in the shop where Woolf finally gets her pencil.

Dipping into the well

Our attention to thematic unity brings up one more important dynamic in most personal essays. Not only do we have a horizontal movement through time, but there is also a vertical descent into meaning. As a result, essayists will often pause the forward motion to dip into a thematic well.

In fact, Berry uses several of these loops of reflective commentary, and though they seem to be digressions, temporarily pulling the reader away from the forward flow of the plot, they develop an essential second layer to the essay.

Braided and layered structures

Want an example? Look at Judith Kitchen’s three-page essay “Culloden,” which manages to leap back and forth quite rapidly, from a rain-pelted moor in 18th-century Scotland to 19th-century farms in America to the blasted ruins of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the author’s birthday. The sentences themselves suggest the impressionistic effect that Kitchen is after, being compressed to fragments, rid of the excess verbiage we expect in formal discourse: “Late afternoon. The sky hunkers down, presses, like a lover, against the land. Small sounds. A far sheep, faint barking. . . .” And as the images accumulate, layer upon layer, we begin to feel the author’s fundamental mood, a painful awareness of her own inescapable mortality. We begin to encounter the piece on a visceral level that is more intuitive than rational. Like a poem, in prose.

Coming Full Circle

First of all, endings are related to beginnings. That’s why many essays seem to circle back to where they began. Annie Dillard, in her widely anthologized piece “Living Like Weasels,” opens with a dried-out weasel skull that is attached, like a pendant, to the throat of a living eagle—macabre proof that the weasel was carried aloft to die and be torn apart. Then, at the end of the essay, Dillard alludes to the skull again, stating, “I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.”

See how deftly Dillard accomplishes this effect simply by positing one last imagined or theoretical possibility—a way of life she hopes to master, that we ourselves might master: “Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.” Yes, the essay has come full circle, echoing the opening image of the weasel’s skull, but it also points away, beyond itself, to something yet to be realized. The ending both closes and opens at the same time.

All diagrams rendered by Claire Bascom. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Volume I, issue 1 of The Essay Review .

This essay is fabulously This essay is fabulously useful! I’ll be showing it to my creative writing students semester after semester, I’m sure. I appreciate the piece’s clarity and use of perfect examples.

I love the succinct diagrams and cited writing examples. Very instructive and useful as A.P. comments above. I also loved that I had read the Woolf journey to buy a pencil–one of my favorite essays because it is such a familiar experience–that of observing people.

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How to Describe an Image with Examples | Picture Description Examples

Picture description is an important task in English Proficiency tests such as Duolingo English Test as well as in general writing and speaking tasks in English Language. Describing images can be an interesting activity if you focus on the simple rules of describing a photo . Here are some general rules you must consider while completing a picture description task.

General Rules of Describing an Image

While writing the description of a photo, first you need to introduce the main point of focus. Let’s see how:

Introduction:

In Picture description tasks, your first sentence should be the general impression on the photo . Talk about the main point of focus of the photo. For example, think about “What is the main focus of this photo?” Here is a picture description example:

First, let’s write an introduction of the photo:

” The picture shows a woman sitting on the first step of a stone staircase which is filled with autumn leaves.”

Add significant details and location of objects in Picture Description

In your following sentences, write other specific details and what object is found where in the picture. For example:” She has a camera in her lap and is holding an autumn leaf in her hand. She is wearing a white pants and a checked shirt with a sweater on her shoulders.”

Add a speculation to conclude picture Description

In your last sentences, add a speculation; for Example: “I guess the woman is a tourist who is visiting a particular destination ” or ” I think the autumn season at this place is at peak.” or ” I believe this photo has been taken by a stock photographer. “

Don’t forget to include adjectives

The use of adjectives or descriptive phrases make a writing more descriptive, vivid and interesting.

The use of adjectives in the above description has been highlighted in bold.

Picture Description Examples

Image description example 1.

The picture shows a wooden hut or cabin under the shade of trees. There is a woman dressed in white tee and jeans standing outside the door. The wooden doors of the hut are wide open and there is dark inside. Some foliage is covering the slanting roof and surrounding area of the hut.It looks like the hut is the part of a public park.

Picture Description Example 2

This is photo of a metal stand with some horseshoes sitting on the top of it. There are two pales of water under and beside the stand. There is some other wooden stuff around it and there is some kind of machine partly visible in the picture. It looks like it is an old workshop from a village or the olden times where horses were kept.

Picture Description Example 3

The picture shows some stone structures raised on pedestals in a gallery.Most structures in the background appear to be stone sculptures of human figures. The foreground illustrates the floor with blocked grey pattern. The roof of the gallery covers a large part of the picture and has a square pattern. I believe this photo has been taken in an art gallery and all the sculptures are carved by famous sculptors from the history.

Picture Description Example 4

The picture Shows a fancy white cake with floral decorations. The cake is on the table surrounded by some illuminated candles and other eatables in the background. The cake has some burning candles on top with sparkles coming out. It is the main focus of the photo although some people can be seen in the blurred background. It seems like it is a wedding cake.

Picture Description Example 5

The picture depicts a beautiful scene of a man rowing a boat through the water with oar. The man is facing opposite to the camera.The golden water is creating ripples under the boat and there are golden brown trees on both side of the lake against the blue summer sky. The red colour of the boat and man’s hat create a beautiful contrast with the golden brown colour of the trees and water.

These were simple image description examples for English language learners and English Proficiency test takers. Find more here: Picture Description

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Basic guidelines on how to write an essay describing a picture.

So, you need to write an essay describing a picture. Are you struggling to know how to go about such a thing? Are you feeling like you’re at a loss and don’t know where to turn? Well, don’t worry. Here are the basic guidelines you need to know when you really want to hire someone to do my online class for me :

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Choosing words carefully

Perhaps you think that describing a picture is actually quite a simple process. Well, think again! You should describe the picture in question with so much colorful flair that your reader can’t ignore it. So think wisely about the vocabulary you use. Your choice of words will make all the difference in this type of essay. Think long and hard about which adjectives you use to make the description come to life.

Describe the picture with all five senses in mind

You should describe the chosen picture so that it touches upon all five senses. Describing a picture isn’t just about the visual aspect. If you are, say, describing a picture of a market place, you should describe the sounds, smells and tastes as much as the sights, and make the reader feel as though they could put out their hand and touch the descriptive scene.

Show, don’t tell

‘Show don’t tell’ is an important rule to learn when it comes to describing something. So instead of writing: ‘There were lots of people in the market place buying and selling’, you could instead write: ‘The market was so busy that people were bumping into one another, amongst the vibrant colors and rich smells of the luscious fruit and vegetables.’

The picture in contextual terms

If the picture in question is a work of art, your paper should also describe the picture contextually. You may want to write about the historical time of its creation, what life was like at that time and how the artist conveyed this, how the picture compares to others by the same artist etc. Don’t just think about describing the picture itself – also think about it from a wider point of view.

The form of the essay

Like any other essay, this paper will consist of an introduction, body text and conclusion.

• The body text (chapters) should include the above information.
• The introduction should introduce the picture in question. You should also state your aims and objectives for your paper and say what conclusions you hope to arrive at.
• The conclusion should restate the aims, summarize the main points and conclude in a poignant, professional and punchy manner.

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How To Ace GCSE English Language Paper 1: Question 5

A Guide to Describing a Picture

Describing a picture in English Language Paper 1, Question 5, is a chance to demonstrate your command of language and your ability to engage the reader's senses and emotions. 

Use these strategies to create a vivid, structured, and cohesive description that not only captures the essence of the picture but also showcases your linguistic skills. 

Remember, practice is key. Experiment with different pictures, moods, and registers to refine your technique.

Expand Your Vocabulary

Ambitious Vocabulary gets you marks. Employ a range of descriptive words and phrases. I probably don’t need to tell you to avoid generic terms like 'nice' or 'good’. The adjective weak is fine but pusillanimous is better and will bag you extra marks. 

When revising write down any words you read that you haven’t encountered before. Look them up. Use a thesaurus to find synonyms. or better still, an app like Wordflex – try it, you’ll love it! The English Language is rich with idioms. As with single words, write them down and commit them to memory. Use them!

On the exam before writing, create a word bank related to the picture. I get my students to write words, phrases, and idiomatic expressions around the picture. Put down anything that comes to mind. Stormy scene? Wet, windy; once you start your brain will take you to other more interesting words; brooding, tempestuous, lashing rain and idioms like “ride the storm” 

Borrow from a Genius

 “…the sea went on boiling and booming,” is a wonderful description of a rough ocean from The Iron Man by Ted Hughes. Why not use ‘boiling and booming’ in your work? 

Use existing knowledge of texts you have read to apply rich language to another situation. There is nothing wrong with doing this if used in an appropriate situation since it shows you understand the intent and effect of the language. 

Audience and Register

The mark scheme for question 5 gives top marks for a ‘ register that is convincing and compelling for the audience. ’ 

Convincing Register

I encourage my students to decide on an overall mood for the picture first. Is it melancholic, joyous, tranquil, or turbulent? Your language should mirror this mood. Create a description that aligns with this mood and connects to the audience. 

For instance, if the picture is serene, a calm and soothing tone should be adopted. Conversely, a chaotic scene might call for a more intense and urgent register. For example: For a tranquil scene, use phrases like 'a gentle breeze', 'whispers of the leaves', or 'the calm waters'

Variety is Key

Sentence starters: .

Remember KS2 SATS when you had to learn all those pesky parts of speech? Now’s the time to use them. 

Begin sentences with different parts of speech. For example, use adjectives. 

Colours always work well here e.g. Crimson dust contrasts with the bright blue of the sky: verbs 'Rustling, the leaves dance like revellers at a wedding party: adverbs 'Gently, the river meanders on its journey to the formidable stone seawall.

Discourse Markers: 

Always use these to connect ideas. Examples include 'additionally', 'briefly', 'consequently', and 'meanwhile'. Especially good at the start of paragraphs as these linking words create flow.

(see fluent paragraphs later on)

You could also include…

Fronted Adverbial Clauses

Cast your mind back, these were also in your KS2 SATS. FACs set the scene or add context, e.g., 'Under the blazing sun , the desert stretched endlessly'.

Figurative (nonliteral) language

Literary devices such as simile and personification work well as these are descriptive devices. 

Similes compare two things using like or as, for example, “The beast had tough skin like the metal of a tank” 

Avoid, avoid, avoid cliches such as “bright as a button”, “sharp as a tack”, “blind as a bat” and “brave as a lion”… ad nauseam .

Katya Balen’s, October October is stacked full of similes, many as wonderful as this; 

“… they’re singing night songs … like secrets wrapped up in the darkness.” 

Personification

Personification assigns human/ animal traits to non-living things. It’s very useful when creating mood as animals in particular are often associated with certain traits, for example “ the sea clawed at the shoreline like an angry tiger”. 

Immediately we get a strong emotion and a sense of power by virtue of the associations with a tiger. Wouldn’t work quite as well if we replaced tiger with hamster – agred? 

Conditional sentences

Basically, sentences that start with ‘if’. I’m a big fan of conditions as they show that you can employ various language techniques as per the mark scheme. 

Conditional sentences are complex as they use a mix of tenses to describe a hypothetical future, for example: 

‘If the fog clears, we will see the true intricacy that lies beyond the horizon.’

Tense? Something to consider. 

I would always encourage my students to use present simple. It has an immediacy that works well with description and is used by many great writers. 

One of the AQA Q5 papers asks you to describe a photograph of an old man”

He stares thoughtfully. The lines etched in his face are a testament to his vast experience; like train tracks that lead to stories of past glory. 

He is staring thoughtfully. The lines that were etched in his face are a testament to his vast experience; like train tracks that led to past glory.

Which works best? 

Organizational Mastery

Structural Features: Utilize a variety of sentence lengths and structures; a short sentence, followed by a long complex sentence, then another short sentence, shows the examiner you have a grasp of pace. Like a dancer performing a few neat steps before an exuberant leap with flamboyant gestures:

Empty skies. Briefly, a flurry of feathers and energetic beating of wings punctuated with argumentative squawking gives way to an unspoken truce. Stillness. 

Mix types of sentences for rhythm and emphasis. 

Make use of simple, compound and complex sentences to introduce ideas that add depth to your description. For a picture of a bustling market, talk about the 'symphony of haggling voices' or 'the mosaic of colours from the fruit stalls'. Adding ‘sound’ and other senses to your picture is a powerful way to create a more visceral experience for the reader. 

Fluent Paragraphs: 

Ensure your paragraphs flow naturally. Start with an overview of the scene and then zoom in on specific details. Circling back to how these details contribute to the overall effect will tie off a paragraph nicely. 

Create a 5 paragraph plan. 

I believe this is the minimum number of paragraphs needed to get level 5 and above. You could choose a sense for each paragraph i.e., sight sound touch smell taste. Create a mind map and populate it with words phrases, idioms and expressions.  

Use the Senses to Improve Detail

Focus on: vivid colours, shapes, movements, contrasts, and scenery. As you are describing a picture, these points will be the most obvious so dig a little deeper into the details, style and texture rather than just the objects in the image themselves. This increases your chance of mentioning something unique compared to other students.

Focus on volume, pitch, rhythm and nature sounds vs urban sounds. For example: birds chirping, waves crashing, city buzz and any music. 

Focus on exploring textures and physical sensations.: temperature, texture, pressure, pain/comfort.

For example The warmth of the sun, the roughness of bark, the softness of silk.

Focus on evoking memories and feelings through scents: Fragrances, natural vs artificial smells, intensity. For example freshly baked bread, rain on pavement, perfume.

Focus on describing flavours and food experiences. Consider the emotions and flavours invoked by a favourite meal or something you ate that is revolting. This may spark some interesting descriptors for non-edible items.

For example; Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami, texture of food. A piece of ripe fruit, a gourmet meal or childhood sweets. “The sweet yet salty spring sea air” or “The greasy tang of polluted skies hitting your lips” 

Good luck and happy writing!

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How to Describe a Picture in English

How to describe a picture in English?

You could be asked to talk about a picture in the IELTS test. Or in any other test.

You may also need to talk about a picture as part of a presentation or in conversation.

It’s a useful skill to have in English. It helps you to describe things you can see very clearly to others.

So, let’s take a look at how to do it.

Table of Contents

Introducing The Main Picture

When talking about the picture or photograph, the first thing you want to say is a general description of it.

You do not need to go into detail immediately. Just introduce what the picture is of — or who it is of — and say one or two sentences about it.

So, if you were talking about the picture above, you might say:

This is a picture of a man. He is jumping in the air and it looks like he is on a beach somewhere.

That is a perfect introduction to the picture. Even if we cannot see the picture, we have a very clear idea of what the picture is in our mind.

You could also say:

This picture shows a man in a pair of shorts. He is on the beach and he is jumping up very high.

If you are introducing a photograph that you took yourself, then you can say this:

I took this picture when I was on vacation with my friend in Greece. He was feeling very happy that day, laughing and jumping around on the beach. So I took a picture of him just as he jumped in the air.

You don’t need to think of details or make it too complex.

Just give a brief introduction of what the picture is, who the person is, what they are doing and where they are.

That is all you need to say at this stage.

The Main Subject

Now you can talk about the main subject of the picture in detail.

The main subject of the picture could be a person or an object. It could be an animal too.

Usually, a picture has a subject. That is the next thing you talk about.

If the Subject is a Person or People

If the subject is a person or people, you need to describe them.

Talk about:

• what the people are doing
• what they look like
• the appearance on their face
• the clothes they are wearing

If you know the person in the picture — or you took the photograph — you need to add more information.

• who the person is
• when the picture was taken
• where you were
• what you were doing

So, if we use the first picture as an example we could say the following:

He is a young black man. He is jumping up high. He looks very happy because he is smiling and has a cheerful expression on his face. He is just wearing a pair of shorts and it looks like he is on a beach somewhere.

Now if you took the picture, you could say this:

This is a picture of my friend Alex. We were on holiday in Greece last summer and we went to the beach. We were walking on the beach and Alex started jumping around on the sand. As he jumped into the air, I took a picture of him.

But It Could Be A Picture Of An Object

If it’s an object you need to think about the following things:

• what object can you see?
• can you name the object?
• can you describe the object?
• what about the surroundings of the object?

Take a look at the picture above of the house below.

How to talk about this?

We could say:

This is a picture of a red house. It looks like it is in the middle of a field, probably the countryside. The house is red and the windows are painted white. The house looks kind of small and it also looks empty. I don’t think anyone lives in this house.

In this description, I mention the red house — so we know what it is and what colour it is.

I mention the surroundings — a field and maybe the countryside.

Then I give more description of the house — the colour, the windows and the size.

I also say that I think the house is empty. It doesn’t matter if the house is empty or not — this is just my opinion.

But if I took the picture, I could add more detail.

I could say:

• where I took the picture
• when I took the picture
• why I took the picture

In short, add a little story to the description.

It could sound something like this:

I was walking near my parents’ house. They live in a small town and as I walked across these fields, I saw this house in the middle of nowhere. It was in the summer, and I just looked at this strange house and had a strong desire to take a picture of it.

But What If The Picture Is Of An Animal?

If the picture is of an animal, you can use similar ways you use to describe a person.

• what the animal is doing
• what it looks like
• the appearance on the animal’s face

Now take a look at the picture of the dog below.

We could talk about it like this:

This is a picture of a dog. I don’t know what kind of dog it is, but it has very short hair and has a light brown colour. It looks like someone has caught the attention of the dog and it’s raising its paw at the person. Its ears are raised too, like the dog is excited or listening to something.

In this description, I say what the animal is — a dog.

Then a give a brief description of the dog — its hair and colour.

Then I talk about what the dog is doing and why. I also mention the dog’s ears.

If you took the picture yourself, you need to add some elements of story.

• what relationship do you have with the animal? (People often take pictures of their own pets)
• where you were at the time of the picture
• when you took it

It might look something like this:

This is my dog, Bingo. Me and my brother were playing with him in my backyard a few weeks ago and I took this picture just as he raised his paw. My brother was about to throw a ball for Bingo.

Now we have more of a story attached to the picture of the dog.

We know the dog’s name and we know he is male.

Plus, we have some more detail of where it happened and who was there.

Talking About The Background

Once you have described the main subject — the person, the object or the animal — then you have to describe the background.

You can give a general description of the background — just as you do with the main subject of the picture — then you can go into detail.

So if we look at the man jumping on the beach again, what can we see in the background?

You can describe the background generally like this:

In the background, there is a beach and a large part of the picture is the blue sky. There are some clouds in the sky. And if we look at the beach, we can see some people in the far distance.

That is all you need to say. You mention the main things you can see in the background:

• some clouds
• people on the beach

No need to talk about anything else at this stage.

Let’s look at the picture of the red house again.

Now this picture is a little different. Because we need to talk about the background and the foreground.

The foreground is the part of the picture that is at the front.

In this picture of the house, we need to talk about that too.

So we could say:

In the background, it is mostly sky. The sky looks overcast and grey. And the house is standing on a field. We can see green fields all around the house and in the foreground too. And at the very front of the picture — out of focus — there are some flowers.

And finally, let’s look at the picture of the dog. There is not much to see, but we still have to describe what is there.

In the background, it looks like a wooden fence and a gate behind the dog. And the dog is sitting on a section of concrete. Maybe it is a backyard of someone’s house. There are some cracks in parts of the concrete.

That is all we need to say for each of the three pictures. When you first start to describe the background, just give a brief introduction to what you can see. It is enough.

The next thing we can do is talk about it in detail.

How To Talk About The Details

Once you give your introduction to the background, you can talk about it in more detail.

Let’s look at the man on the beach again.

To talk about the sky might be a little difficult. But we can say what we think or feel about it.

And we can add some more detail when talking about the people on the beach. And if we look clearly, we can see the sea and maybe two or three boats on the sea.

So we could say this:

The sky is very blue, and there are very few clouds. I think this picture must have been taken in the summer. It just looks hot to me. And there are quite a few people in the background. I can see one man lying down on the sand — maybe he is sunbathing. The other people are wearing beach clothes — shorts and t-shirts. And in the far distance, I can see the sea. And on the sea, there are two or three boats, it is not very clear. One boat looks like it has a very high sail.

If you cannot see something very clearly in the picture, don’t worry. It doesn’t matter if you say two or three boats, for example. No one is going to correct you on this.

Just say what you can see.

What about the picture of the red house?

Again, just try to describe what you can see.

You might say something like this:

The house looks like it is built on a ridge on one of the fields. The ground rises up slightly in front of the house. And in the background, it looks like the land is rising down again in the opposite direction. There is nothing on the grass. Only grass. No flowers or anything else there. But there are flowers in the foreground. They are white. I don’t know what kind of flowers they are, as they are out of focus. And between the grass and the flowers, it looks like a path. The ground is grey, and it goes from one side of the picture to the other.

Notice in this section, I said what is not on the grass — nothing, only grass, no flowers or anything else.

It is perfectly acceptable to say what is not in the background, but you cannot just say there is nothing here, nothing there, nothing over there.

The way I say there is nothing is that I focus on one subject of the picture — the grass — and then say what I cannot see on it. Because often we do see things on grass — flowers, birds and the occasional cow.

So that covers how to talk about the main subject and the background. But all three of these pictures are quite simple — just one main object and a plain and simple background with not much going on.

What if the picture was more complex?

How To Describe A Picture with More Complex Details

How to describe a picture that has more content and more details?

Take a look at the picture below.

Notice all the different things in it?

Think about these questions before you begin to talk about the picture.

• what is this a picture of?
• how could you describe this picture in two or three sentences?
• what is the main subject of the picture?
• what is in the background?
• what is in the foreground?

Let’s try to answer all of these questions now.

What Is This A Picture Of?

This is a picture of a woman in a kitchen. The kitchen is white and very modern and has a lot of space. The woman is making something on the stove.

So that’s a basic description of what we can see in the picture. This is an ideal introduction, and it tells us everything we need to know for the beginning.

What Is The Main Subject Of The Picture?

There is a woman in the centre of the picture. She is standing behind a stove and she is stirring something in a pot on top of the stove. She seems happy as she is smiling. And she is wearing a thick grey cardigan.

That tells us a great deal about the main subject. It’s very clear and simple.

What Is In The Background?

Now this is where it gets a little complicated…

Unlike the previous pictures which have a very simple background, this picture has more things in it — plus they are in different parts of the picture.

This is where we use phrases like:

• to the left
• to the right
• at the bottom
• in the top right corner

Let’s look at an example of how to describe the background.

In the background of the picture, we can see the kitchen. Directly behind the woman is a counter — and on the counter is a sink. There are also some books on the counter. To the far left of the picture, we can see a few books stacked together. There is a small orange-coloured object holding the books in place. And at the other end of the counter, there are a few more books leaning against a cabinet. Above the counter are some cupboards. They all have white doors. It looks like there are five of them in total. There are some more cupboards below the counter. The sink looks like it is made of stainless steel. We can see the tap above the sink. In the background, to the right, there is a cabinet. In the cabinet is an oven and what looks like a microwave oven, too. They both look like very modern designs and they are both silver.

That gives a very clear description of what we can see in the background of the picture.

Notice that the description is all in order of location. It doesn’t jump from one part of the background to another.

So it talks in order of:

• the counter
• what is on the counter
• the left of the counter
• the right of the counter
• above the counter
• below the counter
• the right of the background and what we can see there

This is the best way to describe details in a picture. Do not jump from one part of the picture to another as it sounds confusing to the listener.

What Is In The Foreground?

And then you describe the foreground. It doesn’t matter if you describe the background or the foreground first. But make sure you stick to one part and describe all of that before moving to the next part.

You can use the same phrases as you used to talk about the background.

Let’s take a look at an example:

In the foreground, there is a shelf. It is white and l think it is made of marble. There are a few objects on the shelf. To the far left, there is a bowl of lemons. The bowl is white and there are many lemons in it — maybe more than ten. Behind the bowl of lemons, and to the left, is an orange-coloured pepper mill. And then to the far right of the shelf, there are some green vegetables. The vegetables look very leafy. Just to the left of the vegetables, and closer to the middle of the shelf, are three ceramic pots. They are all white and have light-brown lids.

Now there may be some vocabulary that you don’t know in the above description — words such as:

But you should get a clear idea of how to use phrases such as:

These are the kind of words and phrases that can help you explain where things are in the picture.

And if you follow the steps like that, you should be able to describe any picture at all!

But what if you don’t know the name of the objects you are describing?

How To Describe Things You Don’t Know The Name Of

If you see something in the picture and you know what it is in your own language, but you don’t know how to say it in English — don’t worry!

You can talk around it.

This gives you the opportunity to talk more and use more English. This is perfect if you are doing the IELTS speaking test!

Let’s take the picture of the kitchen and apply this technique.

In the last part, we talked about the foreground. Let’s try again — but this time we will talk around the objects we don’t know the name of.

In the foreground, there is a shelf. It is white. I don’t know the name of the material the shelf is made from, but it is a kind of stone. People often use it in their home as it looks beautiful. To the far left of the picture, there is a bowl. Inside the bowl is a lot of fruit. I can’t remember the name of this fruit, but it is yellow and has a very bitter taste. People often use it for cooking and you can make tea with it as well. Inside the bowl are ten of these fruits. And behind the bowl is another thing I don’t know the name of. You can often find this in a kitchen. People use it to make pepper into very small pieces. You turn the top and the pepper comes out the bottom in tiny little pieces.

Do you get the idea?

By describing things this way, you will find that you can actually talk for much longer.

And the examiner may give you extra marks for doing this too!

Talk About Your Impressions And Thoughts Of The Picture

A good thing to do when describing any picture is to give your thoughts on the picture.

There is no right or wrong answer when doing this, as you are just expressing your personal opinions. But it is a valuable thing to do, especially if you are in the IELTS speaking test.

Let’s go through all the pictures and look at some examples.

The Beach Picture

I really like this picture. I like the way the man is jumping in the air and I like the big smile on his face. It just looks like a really happy and positive photograph. And it looks like really nice weather in the picture too. It looks like it must be a hot day and the sun shining brightly. No wonder the man is smiling!

The Red House Picture

This place looks very bleak to me. Even on a nice summer day, it seems like it would be desolate and not an inviting place. And the red house is empty, which makes the place seem even more bleak. In the daytime, this place may be okay, but I don’t think I would like to be there at night. I imagine the house would be pretty scary at night.

The Dog Picture

The dog in the picture looks so nice. His fur looks really silky. I bet he’s a really friendly dog, I just have a good feeling about him.

The Kitchen Picture

This picture doesn’t look like a real photograph at all. It looks like advertising. No one has a kitchen like that in real life. And the woman is wearing a thick cardigan in the kitchen. Do people wear clothes like that if they are cooking? It doesn’t seem right. And the rest of the kitchen is so neat and tidy. My kitchen is not like that. I don’t know any kitchen that looks like that!

Remember — you don’t have to say what you think the examiner wants to hear. You can just be honest and say what comes into your mind.

Notice in the dog picture description, the speaker is saying things about the dog — how they imagine the dog to be in real life.

Of course, they don’t know the dog, so how could they know?

But it doesn’t matter. You can just give your opinion of what you think the dog is like in your imagination.

Describe The Picture By Telling A Story

If you are showing someone a picture or making a presentation using a photograph that you took yourself, then you can tell a story about it.

People love to hear stories, and by showing a picture that you took yourself, this is the perfect opportunity to tell the story.

We looked at some short story introductions earlier, but let’s look in more detail.

I took this picture of my friend Alex when we went on holiday last year. We went to this great beach, and the weather was just fantastic. Alex was in a really good mood that day and was jumping around on the sand. As he jumped in the air, I grabbed my camera and took a picture of him. It just shows him at the right angle as he is smiling and leaping in the air.

I was with my friend and my dog, Bingo. It was a few weeks ago, and Bingo wanted to play with us. My friend had a ball and threw it at Bingo for him to catch it. He was just about to throw the ball, and I took a picture of Bingo.

I was out in a field near where my friend lives. He lives in the countryside and this house sat in the middle of a field. I asked him if anyone lived there and he said no. He said the house has been empty for as long as he can remember. It didn’t look very inviting. There was no glass in the windows and inside was completely empty.

If it is your picture, you must have a story to tell about it. And if you are doing a presentation using a photograph, then telling a story to accompany it is a great thing to do.

Please read my article on How To Tell A Story for more advice about using story and storytelling.

Describing a picture or photograph should be easy. As long as you describe the picture in order, you should be fine.

Just remember the order:

• the main subject
• the background
• the foreground
• the details of other objects, people or things in the picture
• your thoughts or opinions

If you follow these steps, you should be able to describe or talk about any picture in English.

Take a look at some pictures on the internet and try to describe them by yourself right now. The more you practice, the more you will improve.

And remember — let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

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10 thoughts on “how to describe a picture in english”.

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In Maryland, female migrant laborers face an uncertain future as sea levels rise – photo essay

For the women who pick and prepare Maryland’s famous crab, the once profitable work is far more uncertain – and the climate crisis has had a damaging impact

In the evening light, Maribel Malagón stepped outside into a rain storm.

It was late October and Malagón, 53, had worked all day picking crab off the eastern shore of Maryland . That night, she and a handful of other seasonal workers walked to a neighbor’s house for an evening of prayer. On the way, Malagón clutched a pendant of St Judas, the patron saint of lost causes, that hung around her neck; she hoped he would hear her prayers for more work.

About an hour later, when the women were ready to call it a night, the coastal waters had risen so high that the road leading back to their house was completely submerged.

“We didn’t know which way to go. We were afraid that we would fall into the ditches,” Malagón said in Spanish, thinking back on that night two years ago. To make it back home, the women waded through knee-high murky waters. “The island is changing every year.”

For more than 20 years, Malagón has been coming to work in crab processing plants on Hoopers Island, one of the many island communities in the Chesapeake Bay.

Hoopers Island, a chain of small islands linked by causeways, has been the center of the state’s seafood industry since the early 1900s. Due to its low-lying nature, the region has faced erosion and destructive storms over the years.

But rising sea levels are increasing the frequency of flooding, creating uncertainty for the village’s watermen and their families, who have long depended on the seafood industry for their livelihoods. The situation is especially worrying for female migrants such as Malagón, who have limited job prospects back home in Mexico and wonder how long they will be able to work on the island.

Twenty-four years ago, when Malagón first arrived on the island, her output was prolific. With the precision of a machine and a sharp tiny knife in hand, she would break off the claws, crack open the shells, remove the legs, and scrape out the white meat into containers in seconds. She estimates picking between 40 and 48lb of crab meat in her eight-hour shift.

Now, she says 10 hours could go by, and she’ll only have picked 30lb. She suspects the crab population has decreased in number and size over the years.

“The crab was huge in my first years here. Our hands would hurt from how big they were. We produced a lot of pounds, but unfortunately, we were paid $2 a pound back then,” said Malagón, who works for one of the five crab houses that remain.

Aubrey Vincent, the owner of Lindy’s Seafood, a processing plant on the island, said wages have significantly increased for her employees. They make about $16 an hour, compared to four or five years ago when they made $7.52 an hour, she said.

Some employers pay workers per pound, so the more abundant the catch and meatier the crabs, the more money the women can send home.

“For the past five or six years at least, the work is not 100% consistent every season, and it seems to sometimes vary across workplaces,” said Julia Coburn, director of projects and special initiatives at Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM), an advocacy group that supports workers in the region.

“The workers are coming with certain expectations about what they can pick in a season and how much pay they can take home, and that’s changing. It’s having a widespread impact on their families beyond their immediate circumstances.”

Vincent said the unpredictable nature of the work has to do more with shifting environmental conditions and weather than any fluctuations in crab availability. She described an industry at odds with numerous economic conditions.

“You’ve got a certain amount of costs [of doing business] that have gone up, just like everybody else’s expenses,” she said.

Crab populations fluctuate yearly and have always been difficult to predict. But recent years have raised concerns among the state’s seafood houses, which have relied on the temporary worker program since the 1980s, to stay open.

Each winter, when crabs are in semi-hibernation, Maryland and Virginia conduct a survey to estimate the number of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. In the mid-1990s to the late 2000s, there was a dramatic decline in the blue crab population. Biologists, as well as the federal and state governments, believed that the problem was due to overfishing and poor water quality, causing a decline in habitat and food, which ultimately led to restrictions on the number of crabs caught for commercial sale in 2008.

The 2022 survey estimated 227 million crabs, the lowest ever recorded in the survey’s 33-year history . This led to new limits on the number of male and female crabs watermen could harvest. In 2023, the population bounced back to 323 million , a 40% increase; while these figures are encouraging, scientists urge continued vigilance based on low numbers of juvenile crabs.

Today, researchers believe overfishing is less likely to be the sole contributing factor, and instead argue that factors related to the climate crisis could be affecting blue crab reproduction and survival.

“We’re certainly seeing evidence in the data that reproductive success is declining,” said Tom Miller, a professor of fisheries science at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences who studies blue crab populations.

The climate crisis could affect the blue crab population in other ways. With shorter winters, crabs could face a longer fishing period, meaning more of them would be caught, said Miller. However, he added that the impact is unclear and an active area of research. Ocean acidification may also contribute to the shells of blue crabs becoming less strong, making them more susceptible to predators.

Conservationists also believe pollution and the recent decline in the Bay’s underwater grasses is probably contributing to low blue crab numbers. Another factor could be the presence of the invasive blue catfish in the Chesapeake Bay.

“They’re going to be doubly impacted by not only shorter winters, but the shells will become less strong than they once were. There’s a lot changing in the world for crabs,” said Miller.

The 2024 blue crab winter dredge survey results will be released in May .

Despite the unpredictable and temporary nature of the work, many women in central Mexico vie for these positions when recruiters come to towns, hoping to score work authorization.

“What we make here in a day would take us a week to make back home,” said Elia Ramírez Rangel, a crab-picker from Hidalgo.

For women in particular, there is a dearth of job opportunities in their communities in Mexico and abroad in the US. For some, crab-picking is their best chance of finding sustainable work, said Coburn.

“There is no source of work back home,” a laborer working on the island for 14 years said in Spanish. She spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity for fear of employer retaliation.

In 1996, she left Mexico to make a living picking crabs in the Carolinas. She described having to make the arduous decision to leave her two children, aged nine and 11, in the care of her sister and family friends. Over the years, with her earnings and faith in God, she said she was able to afford a house and basic necessities like food and clothing for her children, who are now grown.

“It’s been very difficult for me to be far away from them. Even though they’re grown up, I still feel like there’s a void,” she said in Spanish. “When I left them, I didn’t see their achievements, for example, in school. I missed their birthdays.”

In 2021, women made up just 12% of H-2B visa recipients to the US . On Hoopers Island, these women often describe coming to the US for work out of necessity. For nine months out of the year, they report leaving their families and children behind for a steady, albeit seasonal, paycheck.

Some workers, like Malagón, come to Hoopers Island year after year to work in the local seafood industry, so long as their seasonal work visas are granted. Her father spent decades picking under the hot sun in California’s farmlands as a bracero. At the age of 22, she said poverty and desperation led her to follow in her father’s footsteps; later, she switched to picking crabs, a job her father described to her more suited for women.

Over the course of the 20th century, crab-picking in the US became gendered and racialized work. Research shows picking crab meat was work delegated to women based on beliefs that their hands are typically smaller and more nimble. Some scholars argue hiring immigrant workers was a way to pay women less for the work.

Crab houses say they have turned to workers from Mexico in recent decades because of a local labor shortage. In order to obtain visas, they need to prove local workers are not able to fulfill those jobs. Before the 1980s it was low-paid work largely carried out by Black women .

The journey from central Mexico to Maryland involves an arduous three-day journey by bus. For Malagón, the biggest sacrifice has been the time spent away from her sisters, mother and son.

“Leaving was horrible,” said Malagón, who sends money home to her ageing father. Seasons spent laboring abroad have allowed her to transform her family’s once-dilapidated property in the countryside of Guanajuato into a comfortable living space.

“The grace of God has given me license to build everything I wanted. I have comforts that I didn’t have before,” Malagón said in Spanish. “We used to sleep on the floor when we were kids, but now, thank God, we have beds. We’ve got a fridge, we’ve got a TV.”

With the rising cost of living and less predictable hours, some women report earning less than they once did.

Previously, working 10-hour days six days a week could earn them $280 a week, but now, with workers reporting dwindling crab harvests, they sometimes only work three to four days a week and for shorter periods of time. Vincent said women have the opportunity to earn above their hourly rate if they are more productive.

Other crab-house owners acknowledge that workers may take home less pay depending on the harvest. Jay Newcomb, the former owner of Old Salty’s, a popular crab house and restaurant on the upper island, said his employees make $5 a pound or $17.50 an hour.

“That can fluctuate due to the quality of crabs, males versus females, the size of the crabs. Some days it may be better but we have to pay whatever is the highest,” said Newcomb, who downsized his operations in 2021 and sold Old Salty’s to open a smaller restaurant on nearby Taylors Island.

The federal average rate is currently $16.42 an hour.

To fill their idle hours, many of the women make phone calls home, watch TV together, or look for ways to earn extra income. Currently, workers in Maryland’s seafood industry are exempt from minimum wage and overtime protections under state law .

Without public transportation, they often pay or rely on favors from acquaintances to drive them 40 minutes to the nearest city of Cambridge for errands.

Over time the repetitive hand motion of picking crab can result in arthritis, back pain, allergies to crab meat, and cuts to their hands from working quickly with the knives used to cut the shells open, according to CDM. Vincent acknowledged that crab picking, like other production jobs, can be physically demanding.

The advocacy group also said that women are disincentivized from reporting work-related issues or take sick days because their immigration status is tied to their employer, making them susceptible to labor abuses. Vincent said she provides an anonymous tip line where employees can report issues.

Despite the challenges, the women emphasize that they are grateful for the opportunity to work and note that there have been some improvements over time.

Today migrant workers have successfully gained more labor protections in part due to laborer testimony and a coalition of groups such as CDM, which have fought for policies that improve working conditions.

Some women have begun organizing a Comité de Defensa, where they discuss ongoing issues such as Covid-19 vaccine information, accessing healthcare in this remote region, and how to report work-related injuries. Part of that work also involves disseminating information about their rights with other women on the island and their families, many of whom are also contractors.

The view from the cabin where Malagón rents from her employer overlooks the Honga River estuary and distant pine forests. A tree directly outside the house that once provided shade and a place to hang dry clothes was swept away in a storm recently, leaving only a small stump behind.

This three-and-a-half-mile stretch of land known as Hoopersville is the middle island of the three that make up Hoopers, dividing the Honga River from the Chesapeake Bay.

Surrounded by a lush ecosystem of marshland, wildlife and tall seagrass, the women are also geographically and socially isolated.

Nestled in Dorchester county, a tight-knit community with predominantly conservative values, the women say they turn to their faith in God and seek solace in each other’s company while away from home.

The narrow bridge connecting the middle to the upper island routinely floods in high tide, leaving the women trapped. Lower Hoopers Island, formerly Applegarth, became uninhabitable due to erosion, and a hurricane washed away the bridge in 1933.

Malagón vividly remembers the first time she saw the bay’s waters encroaching on the doorstep of the house in 2006. “When I looked outside, I was terrified,” she said. “We had never seen the tide rise that high. Now we see it as more normal.”

Flooding has become routine in recent years, threatening the daily lives and futures of locals and women alike.

The Chesapeake Bay has risen by about one foot during the past century, which is nearly double the global average. By 2050, sea levels are projected to rise by as much as two feet. Climate models predict that over half of Dorchester county, the third-largest county in Maryland by land area, could be underwater by the end of the century.

Vincent said she has an emergency management plan for a major flooding event during work hours, where she would evacuate her employees, but says there’s only so much she’s responsible for as an employer.

CDM argues there is a pressing need for climate adaptation measures from both governments and employers to safeguard seasonal workers’ wellbeing in the long run.

“With roads washing out, the communication lines go down – it just increases all these layers of vulnerability,” said Coburn.

“The truth is it’s very beautiful living here – except when the tide rises,” said the laborer who has worked on the island for 14 years. During a recent grocery trip to Walmart, 40 minutes away, she said her housemates were unable to return to the island because the bridge was closed due to flooding.

Language barriers can make it difficult for women to stay informed and they often rely on word of mouth from other workers about the bridge flooding.

With every passing season, the grueling nature of the job and looming precarity can take a toll emotionally and physically – some of the women question whether it’s worth coming back.

“As long as we’re here, we’re going to make the most of it,” said Clara Ramrez, a worker at GW Hall & Son, one of the crab processing plants on the island. (GW Hall & Son did not respond to requests for comment.)

Some owners share a common sentiment.

“We just do the best we can with what we’ve got, and ultimately, everybody’s goal is the same: to try and make a living,” said Vincent.

Back at the house, a group of women started to arrive for the new crab season that started on 1 April.

This year more visas have been made available , and Vincent scored 80 visas for her employees through the lottery system. Speaking via WhatsApp from Mexico in early April, Malagón said she was getting ready to make the trip to Maryland via bus. If all goes well, she and the other workers from Lindy’s will arrive by 15 April.

Newcomb, the former owner of Old Salty’s, said he won 23 employee visas this season, up from the roughly 18 or 20 he’s gotten in previous years.

AE Phillips & Son, another crab house on the island, was unable to obtain visas and will not be operating this season, a major setback for the company and its employees.

Malagón says she has put her faith in God for a bountiful season, with hopes of returning every year to have enough money to retire. Still, she worries for the future of the industry and the region itself.

“If God allows it, my goal is to work for 10 more years. But if there’s no crab, what will we do then?”

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What is the difference between a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse?

It almost time! Millions of Americans across the country Monday are preparing to witness the once-in-a-lifetime total solar eclipse as it passes over portions of Mexico, the United States and Canada.

It's a sight to behold and people have now long been eagerly awaiting what will be their only chance until 2044 to witness totality, whereby the moon will completely block the sun's disc, ushering in uncharacteristic darkness.

That being said, many are curious on what makes the solar eclipse special and how is it different from a lunar eclipse.

The total solar eclipse is today: Get the latest forecast and everything you need to know

What is an eclipse?

An eclipse occurs when any celestial object like a moon or a planet passes between two other bodies, obscuring the view of objects like the sun, according to NASA .

What is a solar eclipse?

A total solar eclipse occurs when the moon comes in between the Earth and the sun, blocking its light from reaching our planet, leading to a period of darkness lasting several minutes. The resulting "totality," whereby observers can see the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere, known as the corona, presents a spectacular sight for viewers and confuses animals – causing nocturnal creatures to stir and bird and insects to fall silent.

Partial eclipses, when some part of the sun remains visible, are the most common, making total eclipses a rare sight.

What is a lunar eclipse?

A total lunar eclipse occurs when the moon and the sun are on exact opposite sides of Earth. When this happens, Earth blocks the sunlight that normally reaches the moon. Instead of that sunlight hitting the moon’s surface, Earth's shadow falls on it.

Lunar eclipses are often also referred to the "blood moon" because when the Earth's shadow covers the moon, it often produces a red color. The coloration happens because a bit of reddish sunlight still reaches the moon's surface, even though it's in Earth's shadow.

Difference between lunar eclipse and solar eclipse

The major difference between the two eclipses is in the positioning of the sun, the moon and the Earth and the longevity of the phenomenon, according to NASA.

A lunar eclipse can last for a few hours, while a solar eclipse lasts only a few minutes. Solar eclipses also rarely occur, while lunar eclipses are comparatively more frequent. While at least two partial lunar eclipses happen every year, total lunar eclipses are still rare, says NASA.

Another major difference between the two is that for lunar eclipses, no special glasses or gizmos are needed to view the spectacle and one can directly stare at the moon. However, for solar eclipses, it is pertinent to wear proper viewing glasses and take the necessary safety precautions because the powerful rays of the sun can burn and damage your retinas.

Contributing: Eric Lagatta, Doyle Rice, USA TODAY

CNN, MSNBC Report Live as Man Sets Himself on Fire Outside of Trump Trial Courthouse: ‘An Unbelievably Disturbing Moment Here,’ Says CNN’s Laura Coates

By Jordan Moreau

Jordan Moreau

• CNN, MSNBC Report Live as Man Sets Himself on Fire Outside of Trump Trial Courthouse: ‘An Unbelievably Disturbing Moment Here,’ Says CNN’s Laura Coates 10 hours ago
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A man set himself on fire outside the courthouse where the jurors are being chosen for former president Donald Trump ‘s hush money criminal trial. CNN ‘s chief legal analyst Laura Coates and MSNBC national correspondent Yasmin Vossoughian both witnessed the self-immolation and spoke about the incident live on air.

Incredible moment from Laura Coates pic.twitter.com/zaeGe3sIwj — Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) April 19, 2024

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Both Coates and Vossoughian were reporting live on their respective networks about the Trump jury, with cameras catching the moment they saw the self-immolation and began to explain what was going on.

Coates at first thought the chaos appeared to be an active shooter, but she quickly corrected herself and reported the man setting himself on fire live. Cameras caught footage of the flames, then turned away to focus on Coates as she spoke.

“We have a man who has set fire to himself,” she said. “A man has emblazoned himself outside of the courthouse just now. Our cameras are turning right now. A man has now lit himself on fire outside of the courthouse in Manhattan while we are waiting for history to be made.”

A man appeared to have set himself on fire outside the Donald Trump trial in Manhattan as MSNBC was live on the air. Good lord. pic.twitter.com/tSoHGyLoqy — Charles Robinson (@CharlesRobinson) April 19, 2024

Eyewitnesses told outlets that Azzarello threw pamphlets into the air before setting himself on fire. There is not a clear reason why he set himself on fire, and reports indicated Azzarello was still alive but in “critical condition” while in the ambulance.

The 12 jurors and six alternates in Trump’s trial had been chosen, and the court was heading into a break when the man set himself on fire outside. Trump is accused of being part of a large scheme to bury negative press stories about him ahead of the 2016 election, including making hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal to cover up alleged affairs. He has denied these claims as he is gearing up for the 2024 presidential election.

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The Bigger Picture | UFC 300

After more than a dozen years covering this sport and having been in attendance for some truly memorable and historic moments during that time, it’s rare that I’m rendered speechless after an event, but that’s what happened on Saturday night.

UFC 300 was even more spectacular than anyone could have imagined, with tremendous championship performances, a moment for the ages courtesy of Max Holloway, and so much to unpack that it took me most of Sunday to process my thoughts and figure out just what to discuss here because the options were so vast.

This was a magical night that served as yet another reminder of why I love this sport and its athletes so much.

Now let’s get into it.

Unprecedented Pereira

What Alex Pereira is doing is, frankly, preposterous, and the fact that he’s now starting to add style points and a little personality to things makes it even more incredible.

“Poatan” didn’t just successfully defend the light heavyweight title against Jamahal Hill in Saturday night’s main event, he made another emphatic statement about the danger he presents to anyone that steps into the Octagon with him. The fact that the finishing sequence began with the champion waving off referee Herb Dean as he tried to pause the fight following a low blow is incredible, and Pereira gesturing at Hill as he lay on the canvas once the bout was halted served as a perfect bookend.

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The champion is now 7-1 in the UFC, having won gold in two divisions and each of his last five wins coming against individuals that held championship gold at one point or another, and he’s done it all in less than three years. Everyone can be beaten and we’ve already seen Pereira stopped inside the Octagon, but he looks like an even more domineering force now that he’s competing in the 205-pound weight class and he has a real opportunity to lord over this division long term, if he so chooses.

RELATED: Alex Pereira Post-Fight Interview | Octagon Interview

But he could also venture up to heavyweight and seek to become the first person to win UFC gold in three weight classes. He has the size and frame for it — he’s an inch shorter in both height and reach than interim champ Tom Aspinall — and there is no reason to believe his thunderous power won’t translate up a division.

Whether he embarks on a quest to defend his title or chases after another one, what Pereira has done to this point in his UFC career is unprecedented and seeing how the next chapter unfolds is going to be thrilling to watch.

A Fight in Four Parts

The strawweight title clash between Zhang Weili and Yan Xiaonan felt like a four-part miniseries playing out inside the Octagon on Saturday night.

In Part I, Yan started well, flashing her speed and showing Zhang she was going to be in tough before the champion took the fight to the canvas and dominated, seemingly earning the finish with the challenger on the brink of unconsciousness at the close of the opening round.

RELATED:  Zhang Weili Post-Fight Press Conference

In Part II, Zhang asserted her dominance, dragging Yan back to the canvas and punishing her, staying one step ahead at all times while chasing submissions and piling up meaningful offensive output. Once more, it seemed like the challenger was primed to be dispatched, but again, Yan endured.

In Part III, the challenger rallied, taking advantage of Zhang’s fatigue to snatch all the momentum and work her way back into the fight. The sharp, precise hands she flashed in the early moments of the contest returned and stung the champion, leaving many to wonder if a changing of the guard was in the offing.

In Part IV, Zhang showed her championship pedigree and big fight experience, recognizing her advantage on the canvas and selling out to get the fight there in each of the final two rounds to salt away a unanimous decision win.

For a fight that ended with lopsided 49-45 scores, this was a captivating battle between two outstanding talents, and a fitting entry into the UFC history books.

What to Say About Max Holloway?

There was no reason for Holloway to beckon Justin Gaethje to the center of the Octagon for a 10-second punch-up to close out their BMF title fight in the middle of the UFC 300 pay-per-view main card — he was up on the scorecards and seconds away from an outstanding win, but sitting on a lead has never been in Holloway’s character.

MORE MAX: Post-Fight Interview | Post-Fight Press Conference

So just as he did with Ricardo Lamas 101 numbered events early, “Blessed” called Gaethje forward, his foe obliged, and they started swinging, with the Hawaiian finding Gaethje’s chin and instantly finishing him.

People are rightfully going to talk about the finish and the “call to battle” from Holloway, but this whole performance was masterful. Not only did the former featherweight kingpin look better suited to his second appearance in the lightweight division during his UFC tenure, but he showed the kind of technical brilliance and mastery that made him such a dominant force during his march to the top of the 145-pound weight class and extended reign as its ruler.

He used his length and varied his targets. His footwork was sharp, he was defensively responsible and showed good durability, and mixed in weapons we hadn’t seen him use too often in recent fights, like the spinning back kick that found Gaethje’s nose and left it shattered at the end of the first round.

Holloway stayed tight, stayed within himself at all times, chipping away, chipping away, chipping away until the opportunity presented itself for him to land something bigger, and then he did. It was that way throughout the fight.

Touch-touch-touch-POP! Touch-touch-POP! Touch-POP! POP!

This was the best Holloway has looked in quite some time, and that’s saying something because he once embarked on a 13-fight winning streak that included winning and successfully defending the featherweight title, and then styled on Calvin Katter in the first main event of 2021 on Fight Island.

On Saturday night, “Blessed” was indeed the best.

Quick Hitters

Arman Tsarukyan is going to be UFC lightweight champion at some point; it’s just unclear when he’s going to get the opportunity to fight for gold. The 27-year-old extended his winning streak to four with a gritty win over Charles Oliveira on the main card, and has consistently shown all the attributes and qualities you look for in a future champion.

Bo Nickal is an outstanding prospect, but people need to remember that he’s just six fights into his professional MMA career and give him time to progress. The former Hodge Trophy winner asked for that grace following his win over Cody Brundage on Saturday, and should be given it because given his skill set and clear talent, the unbeaten 28-year-old could develop into a legitimate middleweight contender with time.

The way that Jiri Prochazka fights is akin to the way I used to play fighting games at the arcade or on different gaming systems — he marches forward at all times, eschewing defense almost entirely in order to attack, confident he’ll do more damage when he lands. It worked against Aleksandar Rakic over the weekend, further adding to the former champion’s reputation as a beloved all-action fighter and must-see attraction.

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Kayla Harrison looked outstanding. We throw around terms like “elite” and “world-class” too casually in this sport at times, but the bantamweight newcomer is both of those things, and it showed in her defeat of Holly Holm. A championship fight before the end of the year feels undeniable at this point.

It’s time to find out if Diego Lopes is ready to be a title contender in the 145-pound weight class. The Brazilian blazed through Sodiq Yusuff, registering his third straight stoppage win in roughly 90 seconds and should land opposite a Top 10 opponent next time out. Could I interest you in a main event clash with fellow UFC 300 winner Aljamain Sterling , who looked good in his featherweight debut win over Calvin Kattar?

Renato Moicano and Bobby Green are everything you could want from veteran fighters still trying to push forward and deliver entertaining fights every time out. At some point, they have to share the Octagon together.

Dana White Announces McGregor-Chandler, Makhachev-Poirier

Jessica Andrade remains a Top 5 talent wherever she competes, and became the female fighter with the most wins in UFC history by defeating Marina Rodriguez on Saturday.

Deiveson Figueiredo continued to look sharp in his new surroundings, submitting former bantamweight champ Cody Garbrandt in the opener. It’s time to pair him off with a Top 5 talent and figure out if he’s primed to contend in the 135-pound ranks.

One Last Thing

A round of applause is in order for the entire production and broadcast teams because UFC 300 had that “massive event” feel from the outset, in large part because both of those units conveyed the magnitude and historic nature of the show the whole way through.

MORE 300:  Renato Moicano Octagon Interview |  Dana White Post-Fight Press Conference  |  Diego Lopes Post-Fight Interview | Mark Coleman Backstage Interview

From the various throwback graphics and tremendous video packages to an excellent night on comms from Jon Anik, Joe Rogan, Daniel Cormier, and Megan Olivi, Saturday night was an absolute home run performance from those on the mic and behind the scenes, and I want to make sure to give them their flowers.

And with that, I’m out.

See you again after UFC 301 .

UFC 300: Pereira vs Hill  took place live from T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada on April 13, 2024. See the final Prelim and Main Card Results, Official Scorecards and Who Won Bonuses - and relive the action on UFC Fight Pass ! 

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Mark Coleman Backstage Interview | UFC 300

UFC Hall of Famer Mark Coleman Talks To UFC.com Backstage At UFC 300: Pereira vs Hill On April 13, 2024 

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Watch: Salman Rushdie on the moment he was attacked on stage, and why he felt lonely

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Tsering Bista

Annabel Edwards

Mito Habe-Evans

Credit: NPR

Salman Rushdie is a writer. A storyteller.

So when you ask him to tell the story of the day, in 2022, when he was attacked and nearly killed by a young man with a knife, Rushdie paints a vivid picture.

He describes lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood, overwhelmed with a singular emotion. It wasn't fear, it wasn't pain. It was extreme loneliness.

"I thought, here I am in the middle of upstate New York, almost in Canada, very far from everyone I love. You know, dying, as I thought. I thought I was dying. Dying in the company of strangers. And that felt ... worse than the dying," he said.

Rushdie writes about the attack in his memoir, Knife . He sat down with All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly in NPR's New York bureau recently to talk about what happened that day, his reflections on the fatwa calling for his death decades ago, and finding great love later in life.

Listen to the interview with Rushdie on All Things Considered . Part 1 is airing on Wednesday, April 17 and part 2 airs on Thursday, April 18.

Watch a 30-minute cut of this interview on YouTube here .

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Taylor Swift’s ‘Poets’ Arrives With a Promotional Blitz (and a Second LP)

The pop superstar’s latest album was preceded by a satellite radio channel, a word game, a return to TikTok and an actual library. For her fans, more is always welcome.

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By Ben Sisario

Taylor Swift was already the most ubiquitous pop star in the galaxy, her presence dominating the music charts, the concert calendar, the Super Bowl, the Grammys.

Then it came time for her to promote a new album.

In the days leading up to the release of “The Tortured Poets Department” on Friday, Swift became all but inescapable, online and seemingly everywhere else. Her lyrics were the basis for an Apple Music word game . A Spotify-sponsored, Swift-branded “ library installation ,” in muted pink and gray, popped up in a shopping complex in Los Angeles. In Chicago, a QR code painted on a brick wall directed fans to another Easter egg on YouTube. Videos on Swift’s social media accounts, showing antique typewriters and globes with pins, were dissected for clues about her music. SiriusXM added a Swift radio station; of course it’s called Channel 13 (Taylor’s Version).

About the only thing Swift didn’t do was an interview with a journalist.

At this stage in Swift’s career, an album release is more than just a moment to sell music; it’s all but a given that “The Tortured Poets Department” will open with gigantic sales numbers, many of them for “ghost white,” “phantom clear” and other collector-ready vinyl variants . More than that, the album’s arrival is a test of the celebrity-industrial complex overall, with tech platforms and media outlets racing to capture whatever piece of the fan frenzy they can get.

Threads, the newish social media platform from Meta, primed Swifties for their idol’s arrival there, and offered fans who shared Swift’s first Threads post a custom badge. Swift stunned the music industry last week by breaking ranks with her record label, Universal, and returning her music to TikTok, which Universal and other industry groups have said pays far too little in royalties. Overnight, TikTok unveiled “The Ultimate Taylor Swift In-App Experience,” offering fans digital goodies like a “Tortured Poets-inspired animation” on their feed.

Before the album’s release on Friday, Swift revealed that a music video — for “Fortnight,” the first single, featuring Post Malone — would arrive on Friday at 8 p.m. Eastern time. At 2 a.m., she had another surprise: 15 more songs. “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you,” she wrote in a social media post , bringing “The Anthology” edition of the album to 31 tracks.

“The Tortured Poets Department,” which Swift, 34, announced in a Grammy acceptance speech in February — she had the Instagram post ready to go — lands as Swift’s profile continues to rise to ever-higher levels of cultural saturation.

Her Eras Tour , begun last year, has been a global phenomenon, crashing Ticketmaster and lifting local economies ; by some estimates, it might bring in as much as $2 billion in ticket sales — by far a new record — before it ends later this year. Swift’s romance with the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce has been breathlessly tracked from its first flirtations last summer to their smooch on the Super Bowl field in February. The mere thought that Swift might endorse a presidential candidate this year sent conspiracy-minded politicos reeling .

“The Tortured Poets Department” — don’t even ask about the missing apostrophe — arrived accompanied by a poem written by Stevie Nicks that begins, “He was in love with her/Or at least she thought so.” That establishes what many fans correctly anticipated as the album’s theme of heartbreak and relationship rot, Swift’s signature topic. “I love you/It’s ruining my life,” she sings on “Fortnight.”

Fans were especially primed for the fifth track, “So Long, London,” given that (1) Swift has said she often sequences her most vulnerable and emotionally intense songs fifth on an LP, and (2) the title suggested it may be about Joe Alwyn, the English actor who was Swift’s boyfriend for about six years, reportedly until early 2023 . Indeed, “So Long” is an epic breakup tune, with lines like “You left me at the house by the heath” and “I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.” Tracks from the album leaked on Wednesday, and fans have also interpreted some songs as being about Matty Healy , the frontman of the band the 1975, whom Swift was briefly linked to last year.

The album’s title song starts with a classic Swift detail of a memento from a lost love: “You left your typewriter at my apartment/Straight from the tortured poets department.” It also name-drops Dylan Thomas, Patti Smith and, somewhat surprisingly given that company, Charlie Puth, the singer-songwriter who crooned the hook on Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again,” a No. 1 hit in 2015. (Swift has praised Wiz Khalifa and that song in the past.)

Other big moments include “Florida!!!,” featuring Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine, in which Swift declares — after seven big percussive bangs — that the state “is one hell of a drug.” Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, the producers and songwriters who have been Swift’s primary collaborators in recent years, both worked on “Tortured Poets,” bringing their signature mix of moody, pulsating electronic tracks and delicate acoustic moments, like a bare piano on “Loml” (as in “love of my life”).

As the ninth LP Swift has released in five years, “Tortured Poets” is the latest entry in a remarkable creative streak. That includes five new studio albums and four rerecordings of her old music — each of which sailed to No. 1. When Swift played SoFi Stadium near Los Angeles in August, she spoke from the stage about her recording spurt, saying that the forced break from touring during the Covid-19 pandemic had spurred her to connect with fans by releasing more music.

“And so I decided, in order to keep that connection going,” she said , “if I couldn’t play live shows with you, I was going to make and release as many albums as humanly possible.”

That was two albums ago.

Ben Sisario covers the music industry. He has been writing for The Times since 1998. More about Ben Sisario

Inside the World of Taylor Swift

A Triumph at the Grammys: Taylor Swift made history  by winning her fourth album of the year at the 2024 edition of the awards, an event that saw women take many of the top awards .

‘The T ortured Poets Department’: Poets reacted to Swift’s new album name , weighing in on the pertinent question: What do the tortured poets think ?  

In the Public Eye: The budding romance between Swift and the football player Travis Kelce created a monocultural vortex that reached its apex  at the Super Bowl in Las Vegas. Ahead of kickoff, we revisited some key moments in their relationship .

Politics (Taylor’s Version): After months of anticipation, Swift made her first foray into the 2024 election for Super Tuesday with a bipartisan message on Instagram . The singer, who some believe has enough influence  to affect the result of the election , has yet to endorse a presidential candidate.

Conspiracy Theories: In recent months, conspiracy theories about Swift and her relationship with Kelce have proliferated , largely driven by supporters of former President Donald Trump . The pop star's fans are shaking them off .