Shooting with your heart

As news people, we are all invariably tied to the bottomline. Nevermind if you're a writer, editor, multimedia producer or photographer. The crux of how successful your career will turn out is linked to how your publisher runs the business. It will not matter how good you are at your job. In the end, the nuts and bolts of it will be whether the business model is profit - sustainable.

(read: i got laid off and I need a job)

But lets just put aside all that for a second, put away the business aspect of publishing a newspaper, put away the issues of revenue and overheads and 30% profit margins just for a moment. And lets talk about your craft and how that defines you as a person.

The Digital Journalist has always been a fantastic resource for forward thinking news people. They talk about putting feelings and emotions back into a business that has most recently, become nothing short of bleak. 

(caution) This a photographic-centric post.

" Empathy is our ability to understand the emotions that others feel in response to circumstances and situations. The capacity to empathize allows the photojournalist to grasp the meaning that the story has for the story's key players, for the viewers and for the members of the larger society.

The photojournalist must try to recognize and understand a subject's emotion or lack of it. Emotional cues are often quite subtle.

The photojournalist must be able to capture those emotional cues. Technical expertise, including the knowledge of lighting, framing and shutter speed, enables the photojournalist to capture "the moment," but without the ability to recognize the cues, there will be no perceptible "moment" for the photographer." And without the ability to read, to understand and to capture emotion, a photojournalist might create pictures that are technically good. But the visual communication will never rise to the level of excellence.

To accomplish that, the aspiring photojournalist must "Shoot with your heart."

Read > Photojournalist: know thyself