With watercolour, you can't cover up the marks. There's the story of the construction of the picture, and then the picture might tell another story as well.
There's something special about working with picture and adding music to picture that really takes you to a whole new level. It's always the director's picture first, and I'm there to help tell the story.
My dad used to open up photo albums and stuff and you'd have to tell a story about the picture but you couldn't tell the truth so you had to make up a story about whatever you were looking at. He really taught us how to lie.
It is a great honor for me to be compared to Henri Cartier-BressonBut I believe there is a very big difference in the way we put ourselves inside the stories we photograph. He always strove for the decisive moment as being the most important. I always work for a group of pictures, to tell a story. If you ask which picture in a story I like most, it is impossible for me to tell you this. I don't work for an individual picture. If I must select one individual picture for a client, it is very difficult for me.
The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.
If you want me to explain the picture, if you put it in reality, then the mystery goes away. The situation just catches you and you think it is absurd or mysterious and you just take the picture. You dont want to see the bare reality of what happened. I took the picture as the picture, not as the realistic story of what happened.
Too many times nowadays the picture is expected to tell the whole story, when in truth there's only one picture in a hundred thousand that can stand alone as a piece of communication.
I tend to gravitate toward reporters who cover all aspects of the story: from personal aspects to the big picture that answer the 'so what' of a story.
It is, because you've got a nice picture, you want to put it up, and then you're like, 'Do I want this to go out in the press? Do I want them to run it and make a story surrounding that picture?' That's what I have to think of all the time.
I love picture books - with picture books, you can use words and pictures as a double act, even tell two different versions of a story at the same time.
You have to do three things really well to make a successful film. You have to tell a compelling story that has a story that is unpredictable, that keeps people on the edge of their seat where they can't wait to see what happens next. You then populate that story with really memorable and appealing characters. And then, you put that story and those characters in a believable world, not realistic but believable for the story that you're telling.
What excites me about picture books is the gap between pictures and words. Sometimes the pictures can tell a slightly different story or tell more about the story, about how someone is thinking or feeling.
People have asked me a lot, 'What comes first? The pictures or the story? The story or the picture?' It's hard to describe because often they seem to come at the same time. I'm seeing images while I'm thinking of the story.
With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow.
It takes two guys to tell a story, paint a picture, so our audience can be entertained and brought into the match. You need to suck people in emotionally to a match, and it takes both parties to paint that picture.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In the nonprofit world, the right picture is worth tens of thousands of dollars. I use PhotoPad to sync our Samasource Flickr account to my iPad and slip it out of my purse at cocktail parties to tell our story.
Must you know that yours will be the “better” picture before you pick up the brush and paint? Can it not simply be another picture? Another expression of beauty? Must a rose be “better” than an iris in order to justify it’s existence? I tell you this: you are all flowers in the Garden of the Gods.