How to come up with the worst image captions and titles?
As you may have noticed, it is not uncommon to see a photo (especially online or on social media) that has been entitled or captioned with the equipment or settings that was used making it. Even though a common practice, it is one of the most unimaginitive and amateurish solutions out there and you can do so much better than that.
The style and quality of presenting your work can affect a lot on how it is perceived by the audience. That includes how you are able to talk about it, including how the work is being entitled and captioned. Gear has very little to do in the equation and not being able to tell nothing more than the camera that you’re using, gives an amateurish impression.
For example, let’s imagine a portrait of a person and underneath it, there is a short piece of text known as the image caption. Caption, more often than not, describes the image somehow. Ideally it should reflect the content of the image and maybe credit it’s creators, such as the photographer and models. Or at least that is what you’d imagine being described, but in the world of amateur photography, what you tend to find instead, is a mention of the camera model or the lens and quite possibly even a documentation of the shutter speed, aperture and ISO… as if anyone would really care or it would be relevant in any significant way.
There are countless of photography groups on different platforms (Facebook, Flickr etc.) that have it in their community rules, that when posting, the camera and settings must be mentioned. If you encounter such group, run and don’t look back.
90% of photography related YouTube videos revolve around gear and I’m not even talking about gear reviews. Just how many times have you seen a video entitled something along the lines of: “Shooting Leica M6 in New York”, “Shooting Portra 400 in Japan”, ”Pushing HP5 to 1600” or something similar? I have a bit of a beef with this kind of format. I don’t see a real reason to wrap the content around the medium, gear or settings when there is an actual topic (the trip to New York and/or Japan) right in front of you, that should, at least in my mind, be the primary focus of the content. But for whatever reason it seems more important to make a big deal of hyping the equipment.
See what I mean?
Also, YouTube algorithm, please, if you are reading this, don’t suggest any more videos about award winning cinematic short films shot with Sony cameras.
If there’s a camera model mentioned in the video title, it is pretty much guaranteed that there’s going to be very little real substance. It is going to be a montage of some footage of someone filming themselves in their apartment.
Why are photographers so obsessed with the technical stuff?
I’m not on social media anymore, but I can still remember quite well thousands of examples of posts being captioned only with the camera that was used during the shoot.
One photographer was conducting a long term portrait project, that was actually quite good. There was a clear concept behind the work. It involved nudes posed in a clever way, blending them into the landscape setting, without an unnecessary exploitation of the nudity. Somewhat tasteful take even. The images came together so nicely, that it would have made sense to actually say something about them, but no, there was none of that. There was no credit given to the models either. There was, time and time again, from one post to another, just a mention that the image was shot on Hasselblad. Hooray, how relevant. I could perhaps see that being thrown in there as a hashtag, but to highlight only that information as the image caption is beyond my understanding. I mean, the photographer clearly had something good going on there, but just how the intellectual capabilities weren’t able to allow him to go beyond the gear talk?
Or let me ask you this; when you read a photographer’s bio on social media, how often it is basically just a list of their cameras? If the person happens to own a Leica, it is practically impossible for them not to mention it. I mean it, they cannot help it. They might even profile themselves as Leica photographers, rendering them beyond any help.
Imagine if musicians would name their songs after their guitars or painters mainly rambling about their brushes. I know many musicians are total gear heads and painters will go bananas over over new brushes, but when you pick up a record or open Spotify, you will find very few songs named after a guitar amp. When you go to a gallery, there will be absolutely no paintings named after the type of brush that was used to create it.
I seriously doubt that there has ever been a photo exhibition that the photographer (photographer as in artist, not as in content creator or influencer) decided to call Pushing Kodak Tri-X to 3200.
When you open up a photo book… well, you can probably guess that the naming convention differs quite significantly from an Instagram post.
A book of W Eugene Smith’s works by Phaidon books. The photograph is entitled Stranger in town. The caption, or rather the left hand side paragraph, describes the background and the essence of the work and as you’d guess, there’s absolutely no mention of the equipment or whether the film was pushed or not.
Bill Brandt’s book on his nude portraits, simply called: Nudes 1945—1980, not: Shooting portraits with Hasselblad 500C. Absolutely no one in the publishing company, not to mention the photographer himself, or anyone else with a right mind, never entertained the idea of including the camera model in the book title. Such a thing never even occured to their minds.
The book Kertész on Kertész displays sophisticated and conventional photo book captioning, providing only relevant information with a suitable tone voice.
Portraits on Kertész on Kertész with an additional paragraph giving some insights into the backgrounds of the image.
