If a picture paints a thousand words, how many does three?

The one off Frui workshop this month is all about the three picture story. This device was often used in newspapers reportage to assist with the storytelling. The general idea is to begin your story with a wide shot to set the scene followed by the main theme of your piece and ending with a bit of detail or colour. However sometimes it's not so structured and perhaps the pictures follow on from one another like a minimalist flip book or just complement one another in some aesthetically pleasing way.

Filski set us forth to practice our craft in a very crowded Borough Market. Being so fond of food photography I was very happy with macro/detail shot but some of the proceeding shots didn't please me as much. After photographing fishmongers filleting, butchers chopping, artisans slicing salami, cheesemongers proffering morsels of cheese and the green grocers weighing, selecting the plumpest and twisting brown paper bags bulging with their wares I settled on the very popular raclette stall.

The half moons of raclette cheese bubble beneath the grills and the servers having been shown the correct prepaid ticket scrape gooey rivulets of molten cheesiness onto a plate of potatoes and gherkins or just potatoes. A wooden fork, and a push through the crowds with your steamy bounty to find a place to perch and then cheesy heaven! Yes, surely a photographic story here.

To make it a little more challenging we were then tasked to create another trilogy but this time avoiding the obvious material of the food stalls.

I plumped for photographers as second to people joyously relishing food are the others photographing food and some eating and snapping. I had a couple of ideas in my mental storyboard. I wanted a shot over a photographer’s shoulder so I could see the obligatory review of the last image, or else live-view depending on the camera. Next one of those unique postures photographers tend to adopt and finally that special camera cradling you see especially with the big cameras as the fingers gently cup the lens. I couldn't do that maneuver until I'd attached my extension tube but I do now find myself mimicking this protective stance. Luckily there was plenty of material.

When we reconvened after completing our mission we uploaded our pair of threes on Filski’s laptop so we could share. It was interesting to see the different interpretation of especially the second challenge. There were buskers setting up, then playing and then the “money shot” of the tossed coins in the double bass case. There was a slice of café life, a red and smoking theme and finally some happy eaters.

This definitely seems to be an interesting device to adopt for the holiday snaps. I noticed how many times in Iceland I went for the wide landscape followed by the macro detail shot. I wanted to record those unique vistas, the tranquility and majesty but I was also attracted to the tiny icicles on the grass, the patterns made in the iced puddles and the melting ice cutting through the dense, black ash. Next time, I'm going to aim for the three picture story rather than the two.