When I first heard about captioning, the first thing that came to mind was that it’s a thing that should be standard practice in schools. But when I thought about it long and hard, I realized that captioning is not just an educational exercise. It’s also a way to tell the story of a photograph.
So I talked to a few photo editors and found out they think captioning is pretty cool. In fact, some of them talk about it as a way to make pictures more memorable. But a caption can only really be used when the photo itself says something. A caption can only really describe the object of the picture. So if you want to make a picture more memorable, you want to make it more memorable for the reason that the picture says it should be.
By accident. We get it, people.
That’s fine, but how? Some people think using a caption can be super helpful in describing what something is. Others think using a caption makes the picture less memorable because it doesn’t describe what the object is. However, there is a common problem with both of these ideas: They are fundamentally wrong.
There are a lot of reasons why a picture could be more memorable than it is if you dont’ want to describe what it is. For example, picture of a cat is more memorable than a picture of a dog. However, a picture of a cat can be very different from a picture of a dog because cats are generally very active, so a picture of a cat is much more expressive.
There is a point to this, but there are a lot of ways a picture can be more memorable than a description. For example, a picture of a mountain is much more memorable than a picture of a sand dune. The reason this works is because there is usually a reason why the two objects are similar. However, a picture of a mountain is much more expressive than a picture of a dune. This is because the scale and the contrast in a picture makes more of an impression.
That’s exactly right. Take a picture of a cat and describe it in three words. That’s how you make pictures memorable. But how do you describe a picture of a mountain? That’s right, a picture of a mountain is much more memorable if you just say it is a mountain.
So, you can add a caption to a picture. But you have to remember not to use the word “mountain”. Thats because that would imply that a picture is a mountain with a mountain in it. If it was “a” mountain, then it would be a mountain. But a picture of a mountain doesn’t have a mountain in it. Thats why you have to say “mountain”.
One of the best ways to make pictures memorable is to add a little bit of meaning to them. And by the same token, you have to remember to not use the word mountain because it implies that there is a mountain in the picture. You can’t just say that the picture is a mountain. Thats because it could easily be a picture of a mountain and a mountain could be a picture of a mountain.
This is true for pictures as well. As much as we love to put words, pictures, and objects in our heads, we know that we can never really know what the person meant. So we try to make our pictures memorable by adding in a little bit of meaning.
