Glenn Russell is a five-year photojournalist for vtdigger.org with over 30 years of experience working for the Burlington Free Press. Russell takes photos to go along with articles someone else wrote. Russell visited with journalism students over Google Meets recently.

“I have to know as much about the story as a journalist… we work collaboratively to tell the story,” He says when talking about how he completes his assignments. On top of taking the photos for articles, he also writes all his photo captions.

Russell has to tell a story through his photos. “You’re always trying to find the moment that encapsulates the experience that you had,” he explains. Using different photography techniques, Russell can convey different emotions and help readers understand the story behind the article. One of the techniques is filling all of the space in the photo to attract the reader's attention. “Tight makes right,” is the saying used in photography, Russell says.

For some stories, there aren’t always candid pictures Russell can take. For these pictures, Russell may need to work with a person to take a photo of them. “There’s a photograph that you take and a photograph that you make,” Russell says. One of the most common techniques Russell uses is putting his subject near a window to take advantage of the natural light. 

After Russell has taken all his photos, he then has to edit them. Russell uses Adobe Photoshop; a professional software tool used for digital photo editing. Many people associate Photoshop with editing photos to be “fake”, but in reality, Russell uses it for color correction, cropping, noise reduction, and more. 

In a photo Russell took during an anti-mask protest, he captured a school bus driving past the gathering of people. In half of the photo, a person is holding up a sign that says “The mask is not the cure.” In the other half of the photo, you can see a girl on the school bus giving the finger to the protesters while wearing a mask. This is a perfect example of being in the right place at the right time to capture a photo.

Russell says “Photography is a language,” and he demonstrates a mastery of his craft.