Tools for this profession demand actionfast. He or she must decide exactly which of these images will best explain all those other images, their cause and importance. A person daydreaming, or in the john, or just asleep at the switch when that best instant whizzes by, is out of luck. This is the primary difference between word people and picture people. There is a whole nuance of body language and facial expression.
Relative position can tell whole stories in the picture of several persons.
Sometimes a picture from the back, or simply a close-up of a man's hands, will tell more than words ever could. Writers and photographers use different inputs, of course, to arrive at the same point to tell or amplify the identical story or moment. As a result, and when one thinks of light as a language, our profession suffers from a terrible rate of visual illiteracy. We are assigning pictures that were out of date even when they were invented, at a time when television is making great visual inroads. Much is said these days about newspapers becoming daily magazines in order to compete better for the readers' attention and interest.