National Stories Gone Local, With a Back Beat

The hardest thing to learn in photojournalism is where to point the camera and when to push the button. The rest, well … it’s just mechanics, really. Maybe in between is composition, but a great moment (when to push the button) from a great story (where to point the camera) trumps composition. Usually.

So when I talk with my students about finding stories, one of the suggestions is to take a national story and make it a local story. We do this all the time in newsrooms, they can, too. But they’re young and, well, not that interested in the sub-prime mortgage issues. They do like music, so why not try to take a national story and make it local?

Virginia-based photojournalist Jared Soares has done an interesting take on this, photographing the local hip hop music scene near where he lives. No reason you have to go to the big city for a story like this – there’s probably a smaller, more intimate version of it in your area.

(Thanks to Alison Zavos of Feature Shoot for the lead.)