Saturday, October 17, 2009

Documentary Photography

Documentary photographs tell stories with images. The main difference between photojournalism and documentary photography is that documentary photography is meant to serve as a historical document of a political or social era while photojournalism documents a particular scene or instance.
A documentary photographer may shoot a series of images of the inner city homeless or chronicle the events of international combat. Any topic may be the subject of documentary photography. As with photojournalism, documentary photography seeks to show the truth without manipulating the image.

Friday, October 2, 2009

Landscape photography

A landscape is a section or portion of scenery as seen from a single viewpoint. Scenery is the subject of a landscape image. Typically, people and animals are not shown in a landscape, unless they are relatively small in the image and have been included in the composition to show scale. Some photographers argue that the sea coast, the city and man-made structures in general should not be included in a landscape, and images that do contain them are more accurately called seascapes or cityscapes. From a purist perspective, they are probably correct, since a landscape is a picture of the land and its aggregate natural features. However, if natural scenery dominates an image, it can probably be accurately termed a landscape, even though there may be a farmhouse in the distance, a city skyline on the horizon or a road or path in the foreground.