At SportsShooter.com I found a very interesting section SportsShooter.com: Student Portfolio. This section is dedicated to a contenst of student portfolio, as you already may guessed. The most important part is though not the pictures, which are very interesting by itself. But the comments, which are posted by professional photojournalists and sport photographers. By reading those comments and evaluating the photographs you may learn a great deal. So, I would really recommend to take a look and add the link to your bookmarks.

Reading a magazine American Photo, I encountered an article about top 100 people, which influenced the photography world. Among those there was an agency of 9 photojournalists and a link to their website - VII Photo. Honestly speaking, I was very impressed by the quality and impact of their work. And right away my mind started noticing and analyzing their work. So here are a few things that I want to play with in my future:

• Placing the subject against a light or white background. It could be a pure silhouette or just normally exposed image, but it highlights the shape and form of the subject.
• Sometimes you can use a pole or some other line to split the image and add dramatizm.
• Keeping the frame alway in horizontal view adds the sense of photojournalism.
• Using darke out-of-focus shapes of people on the front plane as the frames to accentuate the subject on the second plane.
• Pointing the camera higher, so the people faces would be in the lower part of the frame, though the main point of the picture is the landscape or the environment.
• Focus on details - feet and the pavement, hands and things people hold in their hands. Sometimes it's just hands, the gestures.
• The contrast of many images is moderate, and whites aren't prominent, if exist at all.
• Fill empty space with extranous objects. It seems that in that aspect PJ is different from fine art. If fine art seems to tend to simplicity, PJ pushes the photographer use the space more aggresively and use every bit of it.
• Use people to complete the image, even it is about the scenery - mostly it is faces and full bodies. When people present in the scenery image, they are either small and used more like a detail, or they are big (just heads and shoulders) and could be out of focus to give some sense of presence, or they could big in focus to tell the story of the place related to people.
• It seems the lens, which are used, is in the wide to normal range. More like 35-50mm.
• Various objects are used on the front plane to fill the space, such as branches woth leaves, nets and other similar objects with holes, in which the subjects appear.
• It seems most of the exposures are done in such a way to preserve highlights and let the shadows drown in the darkness. Rarely there is overexposure used.
• Tilting of the camera used to add more diagonals to the picture, which adds dynamics and increases the impact.