Applying “The Five Ws and How” to Photography

Who, what, where, when, why, and how: they’re the classic set of questions asked by journalists, researchers, and anyone else who is investigating something. Those questions also apply to photography.

Maybe it should have been obvious to me all along, but this is something that truly dawned on me just a few days ago. Over recent weeks, as I’ve posed about here and here, I’ve been working on a long-term project involving enhancing the metadata that accompanies my catalog of photographs.

In an effort to identify a wide range of things related to an image—a feeling that a photography might stoke, a technique that I used to make an image, a thing, a compositional element, and so forth—I first turned to adding keywords to my more recent images. At the very least, this exercise has brought into high relief the extent to which I’ve lately fallen into a compositional rut. It’s also helped me to identify images that I like looking at, and it’s driven home ways that I can make better images in the future.

And just last night, I more or less wrapped up work on adding location metadata to my photographs. With the proper settings turned on, many smartphones will record latitude-longitude coordinates with an image. This past summer, I tried out and quite liked the way that Canon’s Camera Connect app communicates my location to my Canon EOS M50 upon making an exposure. I got into the habit of keeping that practice going.

But when that location metadata is not there, it’s not there. Deciding that it was worth plugging in manually, I actually went back into my catalog of images—all of them—and identified at least the city in which I took the picture.

To manage all this, I made changes to my custom photography database application, which has been somewhat of a work in progress. It’s also become a key part of my photographic practice.

For me, a core reason why I have always done photography is to document life. But like many others, I have been a little lazy over the years about recording various details when my camera doesn’t do so for me. This has been especially problematic with my film photos from my earliest days as a photographer in the 1990s.

As I mentioned above, I eventually realized that at the heart of all this metadata work I’ve been doing in recent weeks is a set of core questions: who, what, where, when, why, and how—the “Five Ws and How.” Especially in retrospect, some are harder to answer than others.

Let’s take them in ascending order of ease and complexity:

Who took the photograph? This is probably the easiest question to answer since 99% of the time it was me. When it wasn’t, I can often (but not always) recall who was holding my camera when an image was taken.

What is depicted in the photograph? This question basically involves an image’s subject: people whose names I may or may not remember, an event or experience, a scene, and so forth.

When was the photograph taken? With digital photography, this is easily known... as long as I was diligent with keeping my camera’s onboard clock accurately set. Although I haven’t always remembered to do this when I traveled to other time zones—this is especially annoying when I have traveled across the International Date Line—I have usually been in the habit of rechecking the accuracy of the camera’s clock and adjusting it as needed especially when switching from Daylight Savings to Standard Time and back. With older film images, however, things get a bit more problematic. What I’ve done is take moments that I distinctly remember dates and use them as milestones. The best I can do with photos between such milestones is to say, “I took such and such a picture between X and Y date.”

How was the photograph taken? For my film photography, having the negative helps a great deal with knowing what film stock I used. In my particular case, I only ever owned one film camera in my youth, an Olympus Stylus Zoom, so knowing what camera took an early film image is straightforward. After I transitioned to digital photography, I benefited from the camera model being recorded as part of the image metadata. Other data points that the camera recorded include lens focal length, focal ratio, exposure time, and sensitivity (a.k.a., ISO). In my current film photography, however, I have to write down these settings. I’ve actually been quite good about doing so since I took up film photography again a few years ago. All this information makes its way into my photography database.

Where was the photograph taken? This is usually obvious when I took a picture in a familiar place: at home, in a city that I lived in, etc. But when I was traveling and didn’t bother to take notes, knowledge of the location where I took a photograph has often faded from my memory. Before I undertook a systematic project of location identification, it had already become somewhat of a parlor game for me to use Google Street View as a tool for identifying the specific location of some photographs I had taken decades ago. I took that kind of detective work and applied it to other images whose location I had forgotten. If anything, it was actually a lot of fun for me to scrutinize those images closely. In the process, memories about taking them came rushing back.

For instance, consider these two images:

I took the one on the left when I was in Sydney in the late 1990s and the one on the right almost 14 years later. When I took the latter, I had well and truly forgotten that, years earlier, I had already captured a nearly identical version of this composition looking down Market Street at Sussex Street while standing at the end of a pedestrian bridge just east of Darling Harbor. There was just something about this scene that caught my eye both times. But through scrutinizing my catalog of images, it was only much later that I actually made the connection. The coincidence made me smile.

Why did I take the photograph? Sometimes this is a relatively straightforward thing to consider: as I mentioned above, documenting events and experiences in life is a core part of my photography. But mere documentation often results in a mediocre image. Articulating why a stand-out photograph has true stopping power involves a great deal of critical thinking. Why is one photograph more powerful than others? Is it the lighting, the serendipitous timing, or some other element that makes an image special? This is where the art of photography comes into play. Consequently, this is also the hardest thing to nail upon making an exposure, and it’s the hardest thing to express upon looking at the resulting image.

Who, what, where, when, why, and how: my resolution for the new year is to take the same kind of work I’ve done to answer these questions about my past photography and apply it to my photographic practice moving forward.