Exercise 15: Practise writing captions

First, do some research.  Look at some publication that are reliably professional with their picture captioning, such as The Washington Pose, New York Times, Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine.

In the light of your research choose about six of your own photographs and write a caption for each.  In Photoshop, make a copy of each photograph, extend the canvas below the image by an appropriate amount (colour white) and place the caption underneath, neatly formatted.

Ask someone who hasn't seen these particular photographs before to look at them and give their opinion on the quantity and quality of caption information that you've provided.

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Any captions I write should follow the list of five 'W's below as a good starting point:

Guide to Caption Writing

Explain what needs explaining; think about what you can see in the images from the point of view of someone else.  What should they know about it that they can’t already see?  The journalistic five Ws are a good starting point.

Who

If there is a person and he or she is prominent

What

Usually the alternative to who, but also can be what the person is doing - a simple, accurate description

Where

What’s the location and what details about the location are important for the viewer to know?

When

Is time important for the image?  The actual date? Season?  It may not be, but if it’s part of the story, write it in.

Why

Is there a reason behind the event unfolding or the subject being there?  This W is the one that is usually least obvious from just looking at the image.

Keep the sentence tight

Be succinct.  Avoid unnecessary words.  Captions are meant to be short.

Don’t overload with detail

There’s a finite limit to what most viewers want to absorb about an image.  It is a photograph first and foremost, and doesn’t need to be over-burdened with words.

I've put together the cations for the following pictures and feel that they follow the guide lines above but will seek another opinion later.

 

The Collector

Using the five 'W's listed above, this picture uses:

Who/what, why, when.

Early Dusk

This caption covers the following:

What, where, when

Winter Storms

This caption covers the following:

Who/what, where, when, why

Summer Solstice Singer

Covered caption points are:

Who/what, where, when, why

Self Drive Boats

Quilter's Hands

This caption covers  - what, where, why.

Once I had completed all the captions to the above pictures, I needed to get a second opinion as to whether they did fulfill the criteria.  I asked a friend who has works on the local paper and  has extensive knowledge of writing newspaper captions.  In her opinion five of the six captions fulfilled the 5 Ws criteria but picture number 5 - that of the small boats in the harbour - needed to be rewritten as it was constructed in poor English.

Whilst the original caption contained all the necessary information it was badly written.

Now, it is in colloquial English and is easier to understand.  Please excuse the black tick marks which were on the front and came through the paper.

Suggested revised caption reads:

I have found this a stimulating exercise in that it made me think twice about what I was writing.  Words usually come easily to me but having to cover the five 'W's in as short a sentence as possible makes it all the more challenging.