The six tips below are about learning to ask the right question before you raise your phone. Not a technical question. A human one.

Photograph around the moment, not just at it.
The ceremony, the party, the graduation—everyone in the room is photographing the moment itself, and they should. But the images nobody takes are the ones before and after, and those are almost always the ones that tell the truest story. The quiet conversation in the parking lot before everyone goes inside. The look between two people during the toast that lasts half a second and says everything. The exhausted, relieved, completely unguarded faces on the way home when nobody is performing for anyone anymore. The big moment is the headline. Everything around it is the story. Next time you're at an occasion worth photographing, stay a little longer than feels necessary. The images you're looking for usually happen at the edges.

Write the caption before you forget what you knew.
A photograph captures what something looked like. A caption captures what it meant, and those are not the same thing at all. When you take an image that feels true, write something down while you still remember what you knew in that moment: why this mattered, what was happening just outside the frame, the thing you were thinking when you pressed the shutter. One sentence is enough. Not what happened. What it felt like to be there. The image will show the moment to whoever finds it someday. The caption will tell them what you knew about it that they couldn't possibly see just from looking.

Find one thing to photograph over and over again.
Time is the ingredient that turns a photograph into a story, and a series of images taken in the same place or of the same subject across months and years becomes something no single image could ever be on its own. The same front door every first day of school. The garden from first planting to last harvest. The holiday decorations going up and coming down, year after year, with slightly different people arranging them every time. A single image tells you what something looked like once. A series tells you how it changed, and change, honestly, is the most interesting story there is.

Choose which images to keep as carefully as you choose which ones to take.
Most people spend all their attention on the taking and almost none on the choosing, and the choosing matters just as much. An image that documents something happened is a record. An image that makes you feel something is a story. When you sit down to review a week of photos, ask yourself one question about each one: does this make me feel something, or does it just show something? The ones that make you feel something are the ones worth keeping. The rest can go. A smaller, more intentional collection of images will always mean more than a camera roll with ten thousand photos in it and no way to find the ones that matter.

Look for the image that has all three things.
A photograph becomes a story when it has a subject, a feeling, and a context—all three, in the same frame. The subject is who or what. The feeling is why it matters. The context is where and when, the details that root this moment in a specific time that will never come back. Most images have a subject. Fewer have a feeling. Almost none have all three. But when you find one that does—when you look at an image and all three things are present at once—you'll know it immediately. It's the one you can't stop looking at. It's the one you show to other people. It's the one that does the thing a story is supposed to do, which is make someone who wasn't there feel like they almost were.

Ask a better question before you raise your phone.
This is the one that changes everything, and it costs nothing and requires no equipment at all. Before you take a photo, ask yourself one question—not "will this be a good shot?" but "what is true about this moment that I don't want to forget?" That shift in question produces a shift in what you see. You stop looking for the obvious image and start looking for the true one. You stop waiting for everyone to look at the camera and start watching for the moment when they forget it's there. You stop documenting the surface of things and start looking for what's underneath. The question you bring to the camera changes everything you come home with. It always has. It always will.

This is, honestly, the thing I believe most deeply about photography—and about stories in general.

The tools don't make the story. The intention does.

Whether I'm helping a family preserve who their child is right now, or helping a founder find the words for what their business actually does and why it matters, the work is the same at its core: find the truth of something and figure out how to show it to the people who need to see it. Photography and brand story work aren't as different as they look from the outside. They're both just ways of answering the same question: what is true here, and how do we make sure it doesn't get lost?

Story photographs are the answer to that question in visual form.

And if you want a system that asks you that question every single week—a weekly reminder that shows up in your calendar already written, already waiting, for 52 weeks in a row—that's exactly what Story Year was built for.

The weekly habit that preserves your family's story -- delivered right to your calendar, no new apps required.

[Learn more about Story Year →]