Travel & Humanitarian Photos
All good stock photographers know that even the most dynamic, engaging and saleable images will sit on a virtual shelf gathering dust if the keywords and caption applied to them isn’t detailed and accurate. Indeed, more than that, captions must contain all of the relevant information that a potential buyer might require. Captions must be brief yet comprehensive, it’s a challenging aspect of the job but it must be right.
When captioning, you have to put yourself into the position of a buyer looking for that particular image and ask “What words would I use if I were searching for this specific image”. Specific location information must, of course, be included and it’s got to be accurate. Editors won’t thank you if they run a double-page spread of a picture of a beach in cuba and tell their readers that it shows a beach in Brazil, as happened to the UK’s premier Travel mag recently. Captions must include all relevant information but including too much detail can be as damaging as not including enough.
There’s certainly an art to it and a good vocabulary combined with a grasp of conceptual keywords is an essential quality for those wishing to bring their images to the attention of potential buyers. I wouldn’t say that it’s as important a skill to develop as the photography itself – I’d say that if you ever want to market your images successfully that it’s much more important than that.
Having spent some time and energy honing my captioning and keywording skills and having agonised at length about how to get exactly the right combination of words into the Metadata in my images it was with great delight that I read this morning’s post from the Photoshelter blog.
Poor old Martin Corben is an Argentinian photographer who has a captioning style all of his own. Check out the other examples of his unique approach but this one was my favourite, Martin’s suggested caption is below.
“This I shot during a weekend getaway with my good friend Luciano. A month after this his boyfriend saw the picture and sent me the stupidest e-mail ever.”