Global Ekklesia Seminar: Using techniques, persuasive photographs to push the Gospel
By Our Staff Writer
A pictorial from our Digital Photo Lab Seminar Photographs by Ruth Gbolumah Gaye
How can I tell a story through photography?” This was the question on the lips of every participant at the start of a one-day Digital Photography Seminar hosted here in Paynesville, Liberia, by U.S. based Christian news magazine, the Global Ekklesia.
And by the time the Digital Photo Lab training ended, the above question, plus many more, had been answered to the delight of Christian media workers, most of whom are youths, filming and running social media platforms for their own churches in Liberia.
“Excellent!” “Fantastic!” These were among words used by some attendees to describe how they felt about Tuesday’s Digital Photojournalism Seminar, the 1st of Global Ekklesia’s inter-community-knowledge-exchanging event. Participants had been given sticker notes to give feedback on the seminar.
“All thanks to Global Ekklesia for organizing this conference. It’s impressive,” wrote one participant.
“The workshop is rewarding and I suggest that the Global Ekklesia will cover churches that [are] represented here,” said another.
Some praised Ekklesia’s endeavor as being “impactful” and an “eye-opening” experience into the World of Digital Photography.
While praising the Christian news magazine for doing a fine job, Joyce, probably the youngest among the participants, observed Ekklesia wasn’t “time conscious.”
“I felt amazed after the presenter presented,” she maintained. However, “My observation on today’s summit was, we weren’t time conscious,” young Joyce, from Excellence Ministry International, Duazon, Margibi, pointed out.
Twenty people including a national broadcast journalist from ELBC, plus three bishops from Kakata and Careysburg respectively, took part in the one-day seminar. Ekklesia had sent out ten invitations to ten local churches requesting each to send in two representatives for the event and all showed up.
Ekklesia’s Publisher James Kokulo Fasuekoi, having felt the need to stage a Digital Photo Lab training for aspiring young church media workers, spoke to his own boss, Mr. Jackson K. George Jr. in August about hosting it and he agreed. Mr. George heads the JNB Foundation, President Boakai’s charity in Paynesville.
During Tuesday’s training, Fasuekoi emphasized that while it is important for church news reporters and photographers, including motion, to learn to write persuasive stories, they also need to know how to shoot “persuasive photographs” that beg viewers’ attention, using smartphones and digital cameras.
Journalist Fasuekoi used a couple of Global Ekklesia’s current and past stories and pictures as an example. He showed a colored photograph he captured of U.S. Evangelist Rev. Bryan Bassett, a few years ago when he helped raise funds for a small Filipino congregation to purchase a keyboard musical instrument.
To capture a spectacular picture to match his story, Fasuekoi said, he had to devise a way to do a photo that not only tell a story but draw both readers and givers’ attention to the overseas congregation’s plights. “There’s a way to shoot such a picture,” he said as he pointed to the T.V. monitor.
Fasuekoi is a former AP Journalist who was stationed in Liberia throughout its 1st civil war from where he covered political upheavals and wars in neighboring Sierra Leone, Guinea, and the Ivory Coast. He’s an award-winning journalist and holds an AA in Biblical Theology. He was a two-time Bush Foundation Scholar in 2017.
He lectured on various classes of photography-they included: nature, wildlife, landscaping and environmental photography. ‘With just your smartphone, you can change the world by waging a public campaign, using digital photography to protect our environment and animals threatened by human encroachment.’