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What (Not?) To Do: Captioning Edition
We gently and calmly tell our photographers time and again how to correctly keyword and caption their photos, but some bravely persevere and ignore...
We gently and calmly tell our photographers time and again how to correctly keyword and caption their photos, but some bravely persevere and ignore each and every piece of sound advice. Never has this been done to more hilarious effect than by Argentinian photographer Martin Korben; I feel like he has a much better chance of writing a bestselling graphic novel than selling loads of stock.
And that is a compliment! Take a look– I dare you not to become engrossed.
month after this his boyfriend saw the picture and sent me the
stupidest e-mail ever.
The boy’s called German and up till the last minute we all thought he
was gay. And the girl’s name is Caro, she won the Elite Model Look
contest here in Argentina.
off her clothes for my personal portfolio. I love her because whenever
she calls me on my mobile phone the first thing she says is: “Hola Gay.”
meeting her I realized she starred on a kid’s soap I used to watch.
She’s VERY easy going and fun.
most popular beach to Buenos Aires. My friend Agustina lives there and
she owns a collection of these so I just borrowed them and spent a
whole morning playing with them. And yes, people did stare.
Her name is Azul, spanish for the color “blue.” She asked me to take
her portrait once and this turned out to be my favorite. She was very
nice and collaborative.
Our in-house linguist and captioning guru Kate Thomas weighs in here about captioning (she’s not-so-secretly amused by Martin, though):
“Personal moments can make for fantastic, genuine stock imagery with a
broad appeal. Even so, a great stock photo /caption/ should be
informative, brief, and professional– not personalized.
News captions are written
to provide contextual information that’s essential for understanding
the larger importance of an image.
In general, captions for creative images don’t need to provide a lot of
background info. They need to specify and explain only what you can
actually see in the image. It’s not helpful to a buyer to know that the
woman in the picture is your mother, or that she’s wearing her favorite
hat that you bought for her last year on vacation. The lives and
opinions of photographers and their subjects are simply not relevant
for creative captions.
BUT- it must be said- some people’s lives are just more entertaining than others.”