Creating your own assignment

[Ishmael.]

Imagine you are a 24-year-old "serious amateur" who has spent the last two years traveling, working, and (most of all) photographing  through Australia and Asia (7 countries to be exact).  In two weeks you are leaving on a one-month trip to some of the most remote and untouristed parts of China. A small media distribution and production company has noticed your work and said that if you give them a coherent "peice," both photos and writing, they will help you produce and market it....i.e. make some money from it, and more importantly, step a bit closer to professionalism.

but they have left you with no guidance, only this vague offer.....now you have 4 weeks in China to string something together. I'm posting here because I want to hear from professionals and serious freelancers who may have had similiar circumstances: how do you generate a coherant topic and series of photos and writing from scratch?  I guess what I'm asking about is the "workflow" that preceeds the work itself.

And as far as reserch goes, I've done  bit....but these places I'm going are so remote there's not much detailed informtion or anacdotal accounts available.

Thanks in advance for any advice you offer up

Ish

[Ken Bennett]

Ish,

You have discovered one of the most difficult sides of being a photographer -- being able to find and tell a coherent story. It's not as easy as it looks in magazines. I can't tell you which stories you should tell in your China trip (there are, after all, more than a billion stories there), but I can try to offer some techniques.

1. Talk to people. Put down the cameras and just work on meeting people in their own environment. Ask them to show you the most important or noteworthy thing(s) in their lives, or in their town. Once you know someone, you'll meet others, and just keep talking (and photographing.) The most important characteristic of a photojournalist is a relentless curiosity about other people's lives. The second-most important characteristic is a complete shamelessness in sticking your nose into those lives. Nicely, of course.

2. Take copious notes. I like to record audio, either directly from my subjects, or just my own audio notes. (Not for broadcast -- though if you get decent audio it can really help when putting together a multimedia piece.) Bring a stack of reporter's notebooks and write down notes about everything you shoot. This will be crucial when trying to reconstruct the story later.

3. Photos. You don't provide a link to your work, so I'm not sure where you are photographically. You might want to invest in a basic photojournalism text (perhaps http://tinyurl.com/mp2wd9 or http://tinyurl.com/nsb9fh), and I would strongly suggest that you spend time looking at great photojournalism and storytelling. I like the work at these links, but of course this is not an exhaustive list by any means:

http://nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/...lion/index.html
http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx...id=2K7O3R1VX08V
http://www.viiphoto.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/multimedia/index.html

Gotta run and shoot volunteers building a house for the 4th day in a row. Try to find something new....

Good luck. Shoot a LOT of photos. Take a LOT of notes. Talk to a LOT of people. Open your eyes and SEE.

--Ken