Photojournalism

Many amateurs have the technical skills and the imagination of professionals, and certainly all the equipment they need. But they don't take as good pictures. This stems largely from a difference in attitude. The professional must sell his pictures. Therefore he constantly thinks about them. If he is a photojournalist he develops the ability to regard them not so much as individual pictures but as parts of larger subjects, and he is always considering how and where they may be published.

It is this difference in attitude that ultimately distinguishes the professional. It forces him to stand outside himself, to think like an editor, to ask himself if what he has framed in his viewfinder is really as "useful" picture, if it helps tell a story, establish a mood, catch the high point of an event. In short the effort to think like a professional teaches him how to squeeze the maximum out of what is going on around him. That is what photojournalism is -- making photographic stories out of events and their impact on people.