EXPOSURE – Add stories to your images

You know, for the last 2-3 years, since I have started using a camera in proper way, I always had this problem with posting my work here and there. There are basically around 1000 services offering pretty much the same thing – display a photo, or more, to people in general, and hope your “story” makes sense. You cannot really create solid stories using these services. You can do it on your own website, if you have proper blogging skills, or if you are a lucky magazine contributor, then you can publish your work. So, in all honesty, the only reason I have profiles everywhere is to be easy to find. Until now, it was not very useful in any way for me.

Even if I combine pleasure with work, meaning that I try to sustain my passion by doing paid work, what I really want to do is to create stories. That means to remove a person’s attention from the actual photos and concentrate it on the actual narrative part. Stories give meaning to our lives and the necessity of sharing them is beyond questioning. Sharing a photo to prove a technical skill or to exploit our fussy understanding of photography as an art, is definitely questionable from a moral perspective.

Laura is a very talented writer who unfortunately is suffering of the typical artist low self-esteem. She can write amazing stories about real or imagined experiences, in languages that are not her own mother tongue, and that is one crazy talent. I have always imaged that we are a good combination of skills for creating some really awesome photo-narratives and we have talked a lot about this idea. But we couldn’t find a way to focus, for some reason. Apparently the reason was that we lacked the time to do it, since we don’t really have much of that available…

The push came this weekend when I have discovered EXPOSURE. This is a simple service that gives you the possibility of creating solid stories, really fast. Of course, the main focus of the service seems to be to give photographers a way to create visual stories, but we discovered that it can work in many different ways. That means also giving the writers a way to visualize their story or give a team the possibility of creating a piece of solid photo-narrative, where images and text end up contributing the same, completing each other to create a solid body of work. So, we took advantage of it and we created our first “test” story, about The Magical Forest of Tiveden, which we have hiked a week ago.

Really, it was a great experience working together like this and this may sound like advertisement, but really – Thank you Exposure for offering us this push onto expressing ourselves!