The Power of a Caption

Had attended a workshop on “Wildlife photography” few days back ( a wild interest i know.. but very challenging n very demanding too). The presenter was Mr. Kalyan Varma who is the winner of The Sanctuary “photographer of the year” award…
The photo attached above is the photo that won him this prestigious award…
It did catch my eye as soon as i entered the room but cudnt actually make out what exactly it was.
Later he explained it,with the caption… It said “The assassination”...
It is actually a fight going on between the two ants… but there is more to the story that just a fight…
Well, if you look carefully, there is a scar on the thorax region (middle body) of the ant on top which implies that it had wings at one point of time and has now fallen off, proving that it is the Queen Ant.
The other one is a labor ant. It so happened that the queen ant ventured into another Queen’s territory and the labor ant is fighting with it to save his territory.
If u look closely, the labor ant is trying to kill the queen using its sting.
After this fight, the queen ant was assassinated…
Hmm such a big story behind a snap rt?

Yup, its true that photographs are rarely self-sufficient. They need captions. A caption tells us something about the person or thing photographed, also something about the photographer…

U all must have sent your trip snaps or of any other occasion for that matter, giving it an interesting caption rt? It makes the photo more catchy n more fun to watch... isn’t it?

Even for an article, captions are as important as for a photograph.
At times, captions can force u to read the entire article. Well, no comments on the captions that some news channels use just to make their news sound more “masaaledaar”...

Well, shall tell an incident that made me realize the importance of a caption…

While going thru the newspaper one morning (hope my friend who made me start reading paper is reading this ;) ), one headline caught my eye.
It read “License to kill”. Well, it raised my curiosity. I started wondering if it was something about the “mercy killing” which ppl have been debating about but never reached at a conclusion whether to make it legal or not. (well, just for ur info, mercy killing is “the right of a terminally ill patient to die”.. Should dying patients have the right to order their doctors not to start or continue medical treatment? Should doctors be protected from prosecution if they shorten a patient's life expectancy with pain-killing drugs? N such stuff… )

Well, I decided to read the article. Guess wot I found in it???? It was actually about a new pesticide used to KILL PESTS…pesticide which gives u the license to kill ;)

The incident might sound funny but it actually made me realize “THE POWER OF A CAPTION “ … :)