Yearbook Photos: Creative Tips

The school year is well underway, events are happening and hopefully your staff is out taking lots (and lots!) of yearbook photos. We thought we’d give you a few pointers to pass along that may help your students capture their subjects.

Keep it simple

Ask yourself: What is my subject? Then move around and shoot, looking to eliminate distracting background and surrounding elements. Think about framing, center of interest and angles. Yearbook photos should be about the people, so focus on the faces whenever possible.

Move in and focus in on the element that is the most important or most interesting, then capture some of the surroundings or other details.

Capture emotion and personality

Look for the reaction to the action, the response to events that capture emotion. Don’t be afraid to photograph both the agony and the joy, for instance, during that big ballgame. You want to capture the moments in their entirety and edit later. Look for the story within the story–other details that supplement the main action. Look for things other attendees of the event or game may have missed. Include as many different people in your story telling as possible.

Look at different photo styles

Photography today is much different than it was 10 years ago. Today, many of us have smart phones capable of taking some pretty amazing, and candid, shots. Not only that, the technology behind phone apps like Instagram offer filters and styles that have become popular among students.

How can you incorporate interesting filters or other manipulations to your images in order to make them extraordinary? It’s worth examining. Discuss these new technologies with your team. It might make sense to incorporate some of these emerging technologies and their resulting imagery in your yearbook. It would work to give your yearbook a contemporary feel.

Now get shutter-happy!