I have come to enjoy Soundslides as a form of journalism, but I have an admission: I had, to this point, though of them primarily as a form to be used by a print publication to take advantage of photojournalists at a news scene. I was surprised to find a very nice soundslide package on a barrista competition

at CNN.com. It’s a great package, but as I look at it I keep wondering how they got the images — are these stills from a video shoot, or does CNN have still photographers on staff? If they’re stills from a video, why did they choose this form?

You know, I may just have to make time for a couple of calls to Atlanta…

The assignment was fairly simple: find two videos at any one of several newspaper web sites, then compare and comment upon them. I looked at some of our options, but was impressed by the very rich (and easy to find) options at The Toronto Star.

The first video I chose at covered the opening of a snowboarding venue in downtown Toronto.

Urban Rail Park

You expect plenty of action in a video about snowboarding, and there is a lot here, with different angles and points of view. The snowboarding action is interspersed with interviews of snowboarders, and the very static setting of the interviews plays nicely against the movement of the snowboarders.

Does Urban Rail Park tell a story? I’m not sure it does, in the classically-constructed sense. It does, however, report nicely on a new venue in the city.

The next video I chose covers the process by which an animated character was created.

How Laurie Maher became MMe. Tutli-Putli

This is a very deliberate video that does tell a story of an actresses process for creating a character — from emotion to eyes to costume. The music behind much of the video increased the deliberate mood of the piece, and enhanced the connection between the video and the film. This is a much slower-moving video visually, concentrating on two characters, those of the actress and her animated creation. It was interesting to see a recurring artifact in the video screen behind the actresses head during some of the interviews: it’s almost impossible to synch the video refresh rate of a video camera and a monitor, and the moving shadow we see is the result. It doesn’t distract greatly, though, and the video we see with the actress is worth the bother.

Now, the very first thing I looked at on the Star site didn’t really qualify for this assignment, but it was very powerful, nonetheless.

Airsick: An Industrial Devolution

Airsick is the work of Lucas Oleniuk, a Toronto Star photographer who, we’re told, took 20,000 images in a span of 20 days. The images were used to make a stop-action video. The music behind the images and narration through titles give the video a Koyaanisqatsi feeling that’s very powerful. It is astounding to see what can be accomplished with a camera, a computer, and the commitment to a vision. It’s not like either of the other two video presentations, and doesn’t tell a well-formed story, but the overall effect is quite powerful and completely unambiguous.

What happens when the last practitioner of a traditional craft dies or retires? We think of the loss in cultural or aesthetic terms, but with craft as the foundation for much of our technology, future innovations may be lost or delayed, as well.

The International Kumihimo Conference provided an opportunity to see the point where traditional crafts and modern technology meet. The value of the craft — and the potential magnitude of the loss — were clearly demonstrated by the participants from both sides.

I tell the story of preserving handcrafts through a lens of kumihimo braiding. It is, I think, a modern story told through a very old language. Click on the hands of the braider to get the whole story.

In the U.S., we tend not to lack for things. We’ve become quite adept at creating the machinery to make things in bast quantities. In many cases, the rise of an industrial process has meant the end of traditional hand-craft methods of making things. I went to Kyoto two weeks ago to accompany a participant in the first International Kumihimo Conference, which was sponsored by and held at the Kyoto Institute of Technology. Kumihimo is the traditional Japanese craft of braiding, a craft that had significant uses in many aspects of life in Japan before the industrial age. At KIT, they study traditional kumihimo as an end unto itself, and as a source of inspiration for structures and designs used in making products from a variety of materials, including the latest carbon-fiber threads.

I spoke with a number of conference attendees in an attempt to answer the basic question, “Why”. When every participant acknowledged that machines could produce many useful braids, why did they consider it important to preserve the craft and improve their own skills. Some of the answers they gave are in my soundslide presentation on Preserving Handcrafts.

I’m looking forward to completing the full project, and to seeing your comments on the soundslide.

I like urban parks. Central Park in New York City, Forest Park in St. Louis, and Kapiolani Park in Honolulu are three example of great urban spaces where people go to enjoy friends, family, activities, and just a little bit of being outside. Gainesville doesn’t have an urban park like the three I mentioned, but it does have some nice small parks. Northside Park, near the intersection of NW 34th Street and Highway 441, is one of Gainesville’s city parks. Northside is notable for a couple of things: it’s the site of the city’s only disc golf course, and it is apparently the ideal place to put a large retail center.

I decided to make my second soundslide project about Northside Park, with a particular emphasis on the disc golf course. The project was interesting to put together. I focused on the disc golf for two reasons — it’s a large part of what makes the park unique, and I wanted to try to get some “action” shots in. I ended up getting a few pretty good action shots, almost all of which were left out of the final project. I’ll post a few of them here over the next couple of weeks.

The sound, especially the natural sound on tape, was an adventure in itself. There’s a blog post coming on that, too, in the very near future. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy Northside Park in Gainesville, Florida.

You can’t be on the University of Florida campus very long without noticing the number of students riding bicycles. Some ride out of environmental principles, some out of convenience, and some because they’re too cheap to pay for gas and parking. When I thought about bicycles and their riders as the subject of my first soundslide project, I began looking for a way to focus the subject, both topically and geographically. I had noticed the free bicycle repair offered by the Student Government Association, and decided to focus on the activities and people at the bike clinic. I spent several afternoons taking photos and talking with the mechanics, though the final interview heard in the project took place over the telephone — I was in the Javits Center in New York and Ian Knabe, the interview subject, was back in Gainesville.

The soundslide on UF Bicycles and Repair is my first. I’m pleased, though, that I’ll be using the technique again in the near future: the assignment I was on in New York has expanded to include multiples soundslides.

So I went to the bike repair station this afternoon, because I really wanted to re-record my interview. Guess who wasn’t there? At all? That’s right, the repair crew decided to take the afternoon off. I moped around for a few minutes and finally decided to take some photos while I was there. Maybe it was the rain, maybe I was just feeling a bit funky, (and maybe it’s because there weren’t really any people to take pictures of) but my shots today turned out to be rather more “art-y” than journalistic.

One of the things I did was to change the ISO setting on the camera from my usual 400 to ISO 200. At 200, it seems to emulate some of the good Kodak chrome (slide) films a bit more. It’s tough to tell in these small versions, but the resolution on larger shots is really amazing.

First, I saw a piece of broken chain lying on the ground.

Shot taken with Nikon D80 at 1/125 sec., f/5.6, ISO 200.

I enjoyed the way the light played off the edges of the links, and the holes in the links gave some nice dark areas to contrast against the reflections.

Next. I’d been looking at a stack of tires and wheel the guys keep under the workbench.

Shot taken with Nikon D80 at 1/80 sec., f/4.2, ISO 200.

This just seemed a very dynamic image of some very static pieces of metal and rubber. There were interesting things on top of the bench, too, especially when I climbed up into a chair to get a good angle on some stray parts.

Shot taken with Nikon D80 at 1/80 sec., f/4.2, ISO 200.

Once again, the lights and darks in the box of hardware was really nice. I thought about framing the shot to be solely within the box, but I sort of like the stray GoJo cups of parts off to the side.

Finally, I did find some people to put into a shot. The two students in this picture just seemed visually “right” on a Fall afternoon that had turned sunny.

Shot taken with Nikon D80 at 1/250 sec., f/5.6, ISO 400.

This image is cropped down from a shot that included many more trees and much more hedge. At full size, I like all the “stuff” around the two individuals, but as I brought the size of the image down I found that the people were getting lost, so I had to really focus on them to keep the shot interesting.

So that’s the day. Life handed me lemons, so I tried to make…well, you know. Now, I just have to figure out how to get that make-up interview before next Thursday…

Over at the PhotoJournalism blog, Mark Hancock interviewed Ken Burns during a recent lecture stop. The first video on the page covers his ideas about photography. I think Burns’ thoughts on the power of still photography are fascinating given both his work in film and his heavy use of still photographs in those films. It’s obvious that Burns has given this a great deal of thought, and his thoughts — especially on the importance of "trust" in photography — make a great deal of sense to me.

The second video covers his latest film, and there are some interesting thoughts there, too. Burns has been such an incredibly influential film-maker that it’s fascinating to listen to the way he thinks about the subjects and his work.

I’m always looking for tips on how to take better photos, and found a good list of possibilities here at DigitalPhoto. They have quick points on everything from light to perspective, and the tips don’t require that you have a particular kind of camera.

Thanks to the always-helpful LifeHacker for the pointer.

Ethics and mechanics. These two critical aspects of telling a story in any medium play an especially large role in photo stories. As I worked through the most recent readings for class, each side of this equation came into focus a bit more clearly, and I was reminded of a lesson taught by my college choir director. The late Hugh Thomas said that any musician needed to be able to split their awareness between the performer — totally in the performance, fully committed to the music — and the critic, coolly observing the performance and drawing the performer back from self-indulgence or emotion that overwhelms the necessary musicianship. In many ways, a successful photojournalist has to call on those same two parts of their professional person to create a compelling story while staying clear of polemic or ethical difficulty.

It’s obvious that a photojournalist has to be committed to a story before they can commit the time and energy necessary to take the shots required to gather the necessary images. In a story like AIDS Orphan Vickie’s Story, the hours that Joe Amon spent with the subject, getting to know the story and taking photos over a period of months, are evident in the images of Vickie and her family. It seems highly unlikely that he would have spent the time with a desperately ill young woman and her family if he didn’t see a powerful story to be told. At the same time, Amon edited the final sequence of photos into a story, rather than a simple collection of images. This editing (which may start with the decision not to take a potentially powerful shot that might exploit or be demeaning to the subject) is difficult when it requires leaving an emotionally-gripping photo out of the final story.

I was more impressed with Amon’s work than with many of the other winners I saw, because there was a clear narrative in the collection of photos presented. I must be honest, here, and admit to a couple of biases: first, if something is presented as a story, I want it to tell a story. I’ll give you a bit more on my ideas of a story in a moment, but I think that the total package presented should have a coherent narrative that moves the viewer/reader from one point to another in their understanding of what is happening in the life or lives of the subject. Next, I don’t know that every story has to have the same components, but if a component exists it should work to tell the story. I found the captions for many of the photo stories distracted me from the story being told or, at the very least, didn’t help tell the story. An example is the story that was awarded first prize in enterprise picture story (large market). The captions describe each image, but I found the repetition distracting, and neither the images nor the captions presented a clear narrative. Please don’t misunderstand: these are powerful and important images, but that doesn’t mean they’re a story. Frankly, comparing the captions of the two pieces I’ve mentioned has reinforced the importance of captions in the soundslide story I’ll turn in.

Speaking of stories, much of my understanding of the mechanics of a narrative story comes from reading Robert McKee’s Story.If you’ve seen the movie Adaptationyou might remember the screenwriting seminar the lead character attends. The seminar was based on McKee’s seminars, which formed the basis for the book. I know it sounds odd for a journalist to list a book on screenwriting as a significant influence, but I’ve found what he says about the structure of stories to be useful as I build narratives. The Poynter Institute has presented a number of free on-line classes on narrative journalism, and I’ve taken several, but McKee’s ideas have been quite helpful.