It’s a Girl Thing
As thrilling as the advent of Web-accessible, high-definition video may be, I guess I’m old fashioned. I still prefer the moment-captured, visceral impact of a good photograph. Better yet that the photograph is set on top of good audio, not only making the picture worth even more than a thousand words, but imbuing an I-was-there kind of feeling. I also think the still-audio combination engages the viewer’s imagination a lot more than the video version of talking pictures, which is too literal, in both production and consumption, for my taste.
The industry standard format of this sort of presentation is called Soundslides, a creation by Joe Weiss that is so pervasive, it is to audio slideshows what Xerox is to copying or Kleenex is to tissues.
Nikon D700, 200mm f2.0 lens, ISO 1250, 1/500th at f2.2.
Joe makes creating Soundslides much easier (in fact, Joe by his lonesome redefines the term “personal customer service), but that isn’t to say that creating a presentation is easy. On the contrary, I’ve heard plenty of newspaper photogs, for example, say they have to change their way of shooting. Accustomed to finding “the” moment, they now have to shoot even images to produce a usable set of a dozen, 20, sometimes many more, to tell a story. I’ve also heard many print shooters grumble that too many photographers throw a bunch of mediocre images together, thinking they have created a worthy presentation.
