The right pictures can help you tell health care stories

When I started working as a corporate communicator more than a dozen years ago, my manager talked with me my first week on the job about using photography to enhance a story—what works, what doesn't, how incongruity can create a curiosity that will draw a reader in, and more. It's information I use every day here at Ragan Communications as co-editor of Health Care Communication News.

She also handed me a big black binder, with the words "Photo Seminar" taped to its spine. That's the day Ragan Communications first touched my life. Within this nifty notebook was a collection of Ragan Report articles about what makes a good image—hints no photographer or editor should be without.

Last spring, when I left corporate America to begin my dream gig at Ragan, I took that binder from an upper bin in my cube and put it in the department library, passing all those morsels on to my fellow communicators.

I hope they appreciate them as much as I did, but I'm realistic. I know that people today are more likely to watch a video than to read a bunch of articles that could very well be older than they are. After all, Ragan Communications has been sharing stuff like this with communicators for more than 40 years.

I can't send that binder through cyberspace, but I can share this great video from our CEO, Mark Ragan.

Mark shares three types of images you should avoid and five hints for taking pictures that will draw your readers in.

Please, if you learn nothing else from watching it, try as hard as you can never to take another execution-at-dawn photo! Your readers will appreciate it—and so will those poor saps on the firing line.