Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Wilson
Hate to burst anyone's bubble, but the majority of the general public can only last through about three sentences of that before it becomes way overly wordy. While information is always helpful, as a photography website, the picture should speak more than the caption.
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I don't know how I missed this discussion, since I am probably one of the worst offenders, when it comes to lengthy captions. At least I TRY to use paragraphs!
A few thoughts on this.....
I tend to lean toward Doug's approach with regard to viewer reaction. It is better to have a story there for folks who are inclined to read them. Folks who just like to look at the pretty pictures are welcome to ignore the text.
I also tend to picture myself as a photojournalist vs. an artistic photographer. I am an engineer by training, and I don't have much artistic talent. I think that anyone can learn basic composition and the angles that people like with practice, but to regularly generate stuff that the artsy crowd fawns over probably requires a talent that people were born with. I enjoy watching folks like that do their thing. As a friend of mine once said, watching a real artist at work is like having someone give you the answers to the SATs.....you know the answers, but you still don't understand the questions.
Lastly, there is nothing that frustrates me more than looking at an old railroad photo, and not knowing a thing about what I am looking at. No date, no location, no locomotive number, no context. Some day, when I fly west (that's pilot jargon for DIE), someone will probably pitch all of my stuff into a dumpster. But if by some miracle that doesn't happen, I want my stuff to have some context, so the guy or gal who looks at it 100 years from now isn't as clueless and frustrated as I am, when I look at an old black and white print with no documentation at all.
