…the Caption –
is not a Press Release!!!
No no no no no, and NO. Did I mention “No”?
It may vary with small-circulation publications, where one man, a small dog and a packet of fruit pastilles are putting the whole publication together, but any publication which is large enough to have a picture editor do not want to see “PR speak” in an image caption.
Any of the following, which may have been included in the press release, do not need to be detailed in a caption:
“Exciting”, “Wonderful”, “Fantastic”, “Not to be missed”, “Sensational”, “Brilliant”.
A journalist or sub-editor can take the facts from a breathlessly-excited press release and translate them into copy that fits with the publication’s style, but the image editors don’t want to read through the BS.
To quote from Sgt Joe Friday in the classic old American TV series Dragnet: “All we want are the facts ma’am”.
That can be summed up as Who What When Where and Why.
Before I go through those, just a brief rewind to explain exactly what a caption is, because not everyone knows. I’ll try not to get too “techie” here, but the basics need to be understood.
Prior to the invention of digital cameras, photographers used to shoot film (imagine that!). The process of getting an image onto the page of a publication included making a print, which was used to make up the page of said publication. The caption (or detail) regarding the content of the image, was literally written out onto a label, and stuck to the back of the image. That way, anyone who came across the print could just flip it over and read whatever the image was about.
Then technology moved on and via a very unwieldy and painful process (before the interwebthingy and broadband) images started to be transmitted via telephone lines for faster delivery to publications (newspapers being the prime example of the need-for-speed). Trouble was, you couldn’t transmit a label through a phone line, so having the information regarding the content of the image somehow had to be transmitted along with the digital version.
Along came a bunch of brainy people including newspapers, agencies and software gurus, and created the IPTC. While that sounds like the abbreviation for a Trade Union, in fact it stands for International Press Telecommunications Council. This led to the standard method of including a caption, EMBEDDED INTO a digital image, known as the IPTC or Metadata information. With the appropriate software, anyone could now read the information relating to an image, including photographer details, copyright, and the “facts ma’am”, as detailed above.
This leads to an important point regarding PR images. In larger publications a press release and an image may go in different directions but will need to be tied back together at some time, so need to refer to each other. More on that in pt06 – The Distribution.
So what does the IPTC information look like? I’m glad you asked, because I’m going to show you. It depends on the software you are using to view, but basically all the information will be available, just in different formats.
The version I’ll show you is from the software I use to sort, select and caption my images – Photo Mechanic by Camera Bits. For me, and many pro’s worldwide, this is the bees-knees of photo software for fast editing. There are of course other types of editing software, and I’ve used quite a few, but for me Photo Mechanic is the daddy of them all.
This is a view of the application open on my desktop computer:

If we zoom in a little and highlight one image we are going to look at:

We can then click on an icon to see the IPTC info. This is the lower half that contains nothing of interest at the moment:

and this is the top half that contains the caption:

So back to the point of Who What Where When & Why. If we zoom in further to just the Caption field…
The “Who”:

The “What”:

The “When”:

The “Where”:

The “Why”:

On occasion, where an image might not be accompanied by a press release it is acceptable to include further information than the basics. Personally I add this after the main caption and my own details, and clearly label it as “EXTENDED CAPTION:”.
Remember that at the end of the day, the caption is the information that should be displayed underneath or at the side of an image in a publication. A novel is not necessary. In most publications there is generally only sufficient room for a couple of sentences – at most.
Previously: PR Photography 101 pt 04 The Shoot
Next up: PR Photography 101 pt 06 The Distribution
TTFN