Ask a Photo Editor (or Three): What Do You Want from Photographers?
By: Stacy J. Platt
Tags: Interview, Professional Development, Education, Instagram, Photography

Dustin Drankoski (Mashable): The ones most difficult for us to look at are the ones that are too personal. The photographer has gone so far in, but the viewer has gotten lost. Be careful about editing. Be careful to make sure that you’re actually telling a story.

Sarah Leen (National Geographic): There’s got to be a certain level of wonderfulness. I want to be throbbing for it — I want to be at that pitch. If it’s not that, it’s like, “Who cares?” How do you make me care? The reader care? I call it “yumminess.” How do you get that in there? Be in a community of photographers that push you to reach that level of successful yumminess. Personal projects that are too personal are like “this big,” (makes a tiny gesture) and they need to magnify.

Question #4: What happens when a photographer comes back to you and the story just isn’t there — what do you do?

Sarah Leen (National Geographic): It depends. If it’s a long term story and we catch it early, I’ll assign the story to another photographer. I have to think about the end game: this story is showing up in the magazine, and I don’t have a photographer for it.

It’s really important to nurture the next generation of photographers, so we use them in the Traveler section, with Proofs, or with Dispatches, or on our digital stories. There are a lot of different entry points for a photographer before we will assign them stories.

Genevieve Fussell (New Yorker): Generally we assign work to someone you know will deliver. But I’m also big on giving new people a shot — Max Pinkers’ story on North Korea was his first story with us. We try new people out in the front of book pieces that is at the very beginning of the magazine. If we kill work we might go to our illustration team. There are really good photographers and then there are also really good photographers that are just not good on assignment.

Question #5: In the process of putting together stories and teams, you’re thinking all the while about channels, too. Do you feel optimistic about the power of the still image, with all of this other stuff running in the background?

Dustin Drankoski (Mashable): We do everything, and we find success with still images the most. There’s something ephemeral about a photo that video can’t touch. Still photographs won’t have any less power moving forward.

Sarah Leen (National Geographic): More and more people are taking photographs and publishing them online. There’s this huge love of the photographic still image. It’s not going away; it’s just being used in different ways. The photo book market, for example, is just awesome. It’s so awesome that I’m going to go broke! I don’t feel like the still image goes away; it just changes its place.

Question #6: How imperative is it to curate your Instagram feed? Is it a sin if my nephew’s birthday party is in the mix?

Sarah Leen (National Geographic): I have hired photographers directly because of their Instagram feed. I had been following this one photographer, Brian Finke, because he only had photographs of meat on his feed; endless images of meat. And one day I was doing a story on meat, and I thought: I wonder if that guy on Instagram could be the photographer for this?