I nteresting is how the difference of inches, sometimes the width of a body, or less, radically changes the composition of the compared photos. Above is a simple photo of a butterfly landing on flowers with a raging forest fire spewing smoke as a backdrop. Jae C. Hong’s photo, the one on the right, places the flower and butterfly against the more open sky and the horizon line at the bottom. The result, to draw your eye to the butterfly, is more effective than Djansezian’s photo where the same flower and insect are lost against the darker background. Time Magazine notes in a year-end piece about photojournalists often travel together covering the same events because of convenience and safety. Sometimes that doesn’t end well as we learned this year with the deaths of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros during an attack in Libya. An earlier marker was the deaths of Larry Burrows along with Henri Huet, Kent Potter, and Keisaburo Shimamoto, when their helicopter was shot down while covering the Vietnam War.
