Wednesday, February 5, 2025

GETTING TO THE HEART OF YOUR PHOTOS

by Patricia Newman

Photographs are a huge part of my middle-grade nonfiction STEM books for children. My books feature environmental science in the field, and I’ve been lucky enough to have a ready source of images from scientists excellent at documenting their work. Usually, my challenge is one of quantity! With that in mind and considering that other blogs in the NF Fest catalog focus on permissions and working with photographers, I’d like to address how I choose the best photos from the hundreds available to me.

For any nonfiction book, images must add clarity to the text just as the illustrations in picture books do. Photos are great for a step-by-step approach, to give readers a sense of place, and to drop them into the adventure. But if you’re only using your photos for clarity, you’re missing out on a fabulous opportunity to add heart to your project.

The right photographs can elicit emotions and ratchet up suspense. In each of my environmental books, my goal is to help readers understand that we are not separate from nature. We have a role to play. By establishing connections to nature, I can help readers care enough to act. And photos help me do that.

After collecting the photos, I create a digital folder for each chapter in my book project. These folders are ultimately shared with the editorial and design teams. I add images that best match the events and details described in each chapter. Then, I drop in images that make me react in physical ways. I’m lucky enough to have a design team at Millbrook Press who allow me to have input on the images we use. Often, we swap out photos during the design process. Here are a few examples of what we came up with:

On the last pages of Plastic, Ahoy!, I quote Miriam Goldstein the lead scientist on one of the first expeditions to study plastic in the North Pacific. She says, “People want to know that there are wildernesses out there somewhere. If even the open sea is no longer a wilderness, what is?”  This thought-provoking statement paired with Annie Crawley’s photo of a single water bottle floating in the vast sea still takes my breath away.


Giant Rays of Hope: Protecting Manta Rays to Safeguard the Sea focuses on an amazing conservation project in Peru that uses giant manta rays as a flagship species to inspire the community to protect the ocean. In a dramatic twist, the largest manta ray anyone had ever seen was inadvertently caught in a fisher’s net. The media called the manta a “monster” and vilified the fisher who brought it ashore. The suspended manta gives readers an idea of the size of these creatures, and its sad end shocks us into paying attention and urges us to find out more.


Planet Ocean: Why We All Need a Healthy Ocean is a book about our connection to the sea. Throughout, Annie Crawley and I use text, photos, and video QR codes to share the beauty of our ocean, but also to explain and explore the devastating effects climate change has on the sea. One of our favorite spreads includes two photos (see below, right side). In the first, two children play on a trash-strewn beach. It dawns on us that the kids probably have never seen a pristine beach. The second photo shows a submerged baby doll that Annie calls the “creepy baby” photo. The doll’s incongruous cheerful expression is at odds with her new underwater home eliciting conflicting emotions in the reader, too.

In my books about animals, photos illustrate a variety of cool behaviors to engage and surprise readers and (I admit) appeal to their sense of awww. In Zoo Scientists to the Rescue, Annie Crawley and I included a photo of an orangutan inspecting a piece of fruit. His human-like dexterity, his curiosity, and his sense of awareness draw us in.

In Eavesdropping on Elephants: How Listening Helps Conservation, the photo of two bulls fighting gets readers’ hearts pumping from the power and fierceness with which male elephants protect their territory.


And in Sea Otter Heroes: The Predators That Saved an Ecosystem who can resist a raft of fuzzy-faced otters posing for the camera?



 

Reading photos is a learned skill that our young audience must practice, but perhaps it would benefit nonfiction authors to learn to get to the heart of their photos, too! Check out this LitLinks lesson that provides a framework for describing, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating photos.

I wish you much success in choosing the perfect photos to add heart to your project.

 

Patricia Newman

Sibert Honor author Patricia Newman uses social and environmental injustice to empower readers to seek connections to the real world and act on behalf of their communities. Patricia's nonfiction titles have received multiple starred reviews, ALA Notable Awards, two Orbis Pictus Awards (NCTE), two Green Earth Book Awards, and several Eureka! Awards (CRA). All her nonfiction titles are Junior Library Guild Selections, and most appear on the Bank Street College's Best Books of the Year lists. To learn more, visit her website at patriciamnewman.com or connect with her on BlueSky (@patricianewman.bsky.social), X (@PatriciaNewman), Instagram (@patricianewmanbooks), and Pinterest (@newmanbooks).

10 comments:

  1. Great thoughts on adding heart through photos! Thanks for sharing your thoughts and process!

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  2. Thank you! I have a historic proposal out on submission with just a few editors, but you've helped me rethink some of my photo planning! It may be different than your STEM books, but I think I can use photos very similarly.

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  3. Fascinating! Thank you for sharing your expertise.

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  4. Thank you so much for this helpful information! Your work sounds so wonderful and important and I'm following you on IG now!

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  5. What fantastic photos. You certainly have shown us how to get to the heart of the image in order to reach the heart of the readers. Thank you.

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  6. PATRICIA: THANK YOU for INSPIRING us with SUCH BEAUTIFUL examples of how photos can add HEART to our stories. I LOVE the idea of using photos to ". . . drop [readers] into the adventure" going on in our books. But I ESPECIALLY LOVE how you pair this with using pictures to ENCOURAGE readers to act and bring about change: "We have a role to play. By establishing connections to nature, I can help readers care enough to act. And photos help me do that." BEAUTIFUL! THANK YOU!!!

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  7. Thanks for a great post! I also research photos to support the text for my leveled readers in the educational market. I agree that the right photo adds heart in addition to the text to elicit an emotional response from the reader, such as delight, awe, empathy, or humor.

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  8. Patricia, I appreciate this dive into photos and how they can bring heart to nonfiction. Lesson learned!

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  9. Thank you, Patricia, for sharing helpful tips.

    The photos in your books are beautiful and support the text.

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  10. Great post, Patricia! And what a great idea to link to the litlink photo exercise - that will really help me next time I'm thinking about which photos to include.

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