SnapperTalk

My first multimedia slideshow produced using Soundslides has just been published. It concerns the mini-industry of street repairmen who fix broken consumer goods in Egypt.

The slideshow of my photos can be seen by clicking on the picture above… and the written story by AP reporter Anna Johnson, who also read the voiceover, can be read here. Multimedia editing/production was done by me.

All works are © Copyright 2007, The Associated Press.

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Some technical details on the production for those interested in multimedia editing:

1. Photos - taken with a Canon EOS 1D MkII, saved in AdobeRGB colour space for print use, and separately in sRGB for the multimedia slideshow. I’ve found that sRGB displays much better online where the majority of people don’t use colour-managed web browsers (only Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox 3 betas do proper colour-management) and therefore most machines assume images are sRGB. See more discussion on this here, here and here.

2. Audio - the natural sound was captured using an Olympus dictaphone, the voiceover recorded direct to a laptop with a Sennheiser ME66 microphone. The audio was then edited using the free, open-source & cross platform Audacity. Four audio clips were used - the sound of the telephone ringing, background street noise, a call to prayer from a nearby mosque and the voiceover - all joined with a few fade-ins and fade-outs and then mixed down to a single MP3 track.

3. Putting it together - The telephone sequence at the beginning is a sequence of stills shot on the camera’s 8fps motordrive. Nineteen of these images were then used with each having 0.3 secs duration and a 0.1 sec crossfade transition inbetween to give the flickering effect. The rest of the images were mostly equally spaced, trying to fit the audio as well as possible.

A few lessons learned from this first project:

Good quality audio capture is key - having a decent selection of clean clips to work with is essential. Therefore the audio really needs to be seriously thought-out as you are doing the story and in parallel with the picture-taking. This isn’t always easy. The Olympus dictaphone even on “extra high quality” mode records using the CELP+ADPCM codec and whilst this may be fine for dictation, it just doesn’t cut it for real audio recording. I’d like to use a real field recorder such as one of these next time.

Once all the photos and audio have been selected, you need to plan how it is going to fit it together - which is harder than it sounds. Soundslides does a great job of enabling you to fit the pictures to the audio by changing the sequence order and duration. BUT… you had better be 100% satisfied with your audio track before doing this, because if you need to re-edit and re-import the audio then most likely all your photo sequence work will be lost and you’ll have to start again from scratch (unless the new audio has identical length to the old one).

Multimedia is a somewhat chicken-and-egg scenario where each medium is interdependent with others, but I think the best workflow would be to start with a reasonable idea of which pictures are going to be used and in which order. Then edit the audio (and record the voiceover if one is being used) to roughly match this. Finally, arrange the pictures to accurately fit the edited audio track.

The audio editing wasn’t quite so complex as I thought it would be, although this project required only some pretty simple editing. Learning the basic audio terminology is key to understanding what is going on but once you’ve done that and understand the basics, I found many of the principles were remarkably similar to those used in digital photography.

The first time to do something like this was a bit of a steep learning curve but I’m sure it will be a lot easier and quicker the next time around. I do believe the stills and audio combination is a powerful one and I’m looking forward to trying it again soon.

Any comments welcome…

Those of you using Soundslides for stills/audio slideshows will be interested in a new web-based utility developed to make it easier to publish your multimedia projects. Soundslides Embed Utility is a quick & easy webpage that generates all the code needed to embed your Soundslides project directly onto a website. You can try it out with the provided demonstration link to see the result. Very useful indeed.

With many photojournalists now using audio to complement their slideshows, the question arises of what’s the best way to capture that audio in the field?
A while back the answer would have been a small MiniDisc recorder, but technology has moved on and the most attractive option now seems to be one of the growing range of solid-state audio recorders. There’s a number of machines already on the market, ranging from glorified MP3 players with a record function, to top-end professional field recorders costing $1000s.
Of those available the main criterion in my mind for use by photojournalists is that it has to be small enough to carry easily with all one’s camera equipment. These are some of the better models:

Samson Zoom H4
Samson Zoom H2
M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96 and MicroTrack II (coming soon)
Edirol R-09
Edirol R-1 (discontinued)
Marantz PMD660 and PMD620 (coming soon)
Korg MR-1
Sony PCM-D1 and PCM-D50 (coming soon)
Nagra ARES-M and ARES-MII
HHB FlashMic
Maycom Handheld II, MP3 Recorder kit, N>Trans
Olympus DM-10

One of the newest on the market is the Samsung Zoom H2 which seems a very attractive machine for those of us who need to do audio occasionally but cannot afford to be carrying something large. It’s packed with features including 4 separate internal microphones able to record in surround sound. I doubt this would be particularly useful for slideshows as most users don’t have more than stereo capability on their machines, but for me the main attraction is the small size, use of AA batteries, and pretty low price compared to others. It’s now shipping and the reviews are starting to come in:

Samson Zoom H2 review - also here and here

For more on field recording hardware, this blog is quite good. Finally, don’t forget a good microphone as it’s no use having a high-end recorder with a bad-quality mic - you’ll just end up with quality at the level of the weakest link in the chain…

If anyone has used any of these, I’d be interested to know your impressions…

Bjarke Myrthu, the executive editor of Magnum In Motion, has posted the first portion of a multi-part article series about the work of Magnum’s multimedia department… This article deals with the philosophy and reasoning behind multimedia storytelling, and is well worth a read.

Magnum In Motion: The philosophy behind the story

Posts have been a bit thin here recently as I’ve been busy with work. So this is just a short one to point out a nice bit of multimedia storytelling by my friend Michael Kamber of the New York Times, travelling with the 10th Mountain Division, reporting on the search for missing U.S. soldiers south of Baghdad. It’s a six-minute audio slideshow with commentary by the photographer.

“The Reach of War: A deadly search for missing soldiers“

The US-based National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) has published an online collection of articles written by photojournalists reflecting on their coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre and its aftermath.
Articles are by Todd Maisel of the New York Daily News, Rick Wilking of Reuters, Matt Gentry and Alan Kim of The Roanoke Times, and freelancer Casey Templeton. Also included is a pretty nice 360-degree VR image/audio of a post-massacre ceremony by Alan Kim that’s quite effectively done.

Photojournalists reflect on Virginia Tech massacre (NPPA)

Or not… if you work for the Dallas Morning News where 11 out of 24 of their staff photographers now shoot their assignments entirely in video.

This month’s edition of The Digital Journalist edited by Dirck Halstead - a long-time proponent of photographers shooting video - features a trio of articles about the new trend: An editorial by Halstead expressing the belief that changes in technology in the next 10 years will force a seismic change in how “photographers” operate - on a level much greater than the shift from film to digital; and articles about the attitude and ways of working at the Dallas Morning News by its Director of Photography Leslie White and by Halstead himself, plus an image gallery (although I’m not clear if the gallery is all from video, or not)
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Guardian photographer Dan Chung and reporter Angelique Chrisafis have created a duo of well-produced multimedia pieces in the run-up to the French presidential elections. After the Riots focuses on life for residents in France’s run-down housing estates, whilst opposite viewpoints are presented in Le Pen’s Heartland.
Produced with the ubiquitous SoundSlides, the slideshows have a different feel to most due to their often fastpaced transitions that give a somewhat cinematic style. A nice use of the multimedia format that’s well worth watching.

The march of multimedia into the field of stills photography continues ever-onwards…

Sion Touhig has two interesting articles about the use of High-Definition video cameras by stills photographers entitled 30 FPS Motordrive and The Decisive Moment, R.I.P? The first article is based on this informative piece on the Photo District News site, carrying interviews with some U.S. staff newspaper photographers who are already shooting this way such as David Leeson from the Dallas Morning News, who seems to be a bit of a pioneer in this field.

If you want to see the sort of gear he’s talking about, take a look at these reviews of the high-end Sony HVR-Z1, mid-range HVR-A1 or lower-end Sony HDR-HC3 camcorders. All are capable of shooting 1080i - that’s 1920 x 1080 pixels at 30 frames-per-second - and the latter can shoot stills at 2304 x 1728 pixels (4MP).

I don’t think the equipment is quite there yet to be able to replace stills cameras for the majority of photojournalistic work, but as the megapixel race continues at incredible speed, it can be only a matter of time. If anyone out there knows of some links to sample images from these cameras - both frame-grabs and stills, I’d be interested to see.

This thread in the SportsShooter forums has a long user discussion about the use of multimedia slideshow application Soundslides, including many examples of recent work.

With so many photographer’s websites being created in Flash, it is worth noting that Adobe have released version 9 of the Flash Player, which is supposedly significantly faster than previous versions, amongst other improvements.

Christoph Bangert has an article in the June edition of The Digital Journalist describing his recent experiences working as a photographer in Baghdad, Iraq. See also his multimedia presentation on Iraq last year for the New York Times.

The world of multimedia-speak is chock full of buzzwords, often leaving the reader with little idea of what is being talked about. But once you sweep away the jargon there is actually some really interesting potential for new ways of transmitting reportage. I wrote previously about the Magnum photo-agency’s excellent “Magnum in Motion” series of stills-and-audio slideshows. Now they have announced (see press release) the first in a series of podcasts. The debut is a slideshow entitled “Satellites” by 28-year-old photographer Jonas Bendiksen, described as “a surreal journey through the scattered enclaves and isolated communities in the southern borderlands of the former USSR”.

What this actually means to the viewer is that users of iTunes, and other such software, can “bookmark” the Magnum podcast link and have each new multimedia slideshow automatically delivered to their computer as soon as it is posted. The slideshow (with or without audio) can then be played directly in iTunes, or owners of video-capable ipods and other such decices can view them on the ipod itself. The best aspect of podcasting - versus showing content on the web normally - is the convenience afforded by having content delivered automatically rather than the viewer having to seek it out each time. It should be noted that despite the origins of the name, podcasting is not restricted to any single operating system or type of device, and is essentially an open standard.

I view the potential for this as huge… Podcasting has already taken off in a big way in the world of audio e.g. for home-made radio shows, or for music blogs such as the african music blog Benn Loxo du Taccu run by my friend Matt Yanchyshyn.

But until now I hadn’t really considered the potential for photographers. Imagine yourself as a viewer, able to subscribe (freely or paid) to daily photo & audio slideshows from your favourite photographers. Or agencies and newspapers providing customised podcast feeds for those with an interest in e.g. the latest events in Palestine. The viewer wakes up, plugs their iPod into their computer, and on the way to work watches a selection of images, audio, and/or video of the latest world events that he or she is interested in.

Another possible use could be as an efficient method for freelance photographers to get their images seen by newspapers. Imagine a newspaper able to view the “photo feeds” of a hundred different freelance photographers, all delivered automatically to the editor’s desktop for viewing.

Either way this technology creates many new methods for what essentially is the age-old purpose of photojournalism - enabling readers to see the world through the eyes of photographers.

As noted in Harts Big Picture, my good friend and colleague Michael Kamber has a nice multimedia piece on the New York Times website about the refugee situation in Chad caused by the Darfur conflict in Sudan. The NYT uses some extremely nice flash work to present their multimedia galleries, but those looking to create a similar (albeit not quite so sophisticated) effect might want to try the SoundSlides software I wrote about previously.

If you liked the sound-and-still-images presentations on the Magnum in Motion website, you might be interested in Soundslides - an impressive application for Mac OSX that enables users to easily create this type of multimedia presentation. Combining your still images with an audio track, titling and automatic caption info extraction, it exports it all as a Macromedia Flash piece ready for upload to any webserver. There are some sample slideshows to look at on their FAQ page

The software is created by Joe Weiss - interactive producer at The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina - and there is a short review of Soundslides here. Joe also keeps track of some of some the best multimedia work that’s being produced on the net in his blog

Multimedia production studio MediaStorm yesterday unveiled its online publication. The site which is sponsored by washingtonpost.com features projects combining still imagery with audio by journalists, filmmakers and artists including Martin Schoeller, Ray Farkas, Douglas Menuez, Andrew Lichtenstein, Zac Barr, Tim Klimowicz, Julie Winokur and Ed Kashi.

Those who are interested in combining audio with stills imagery may also find interesting the site’s excellent “Guide to Gathering Audio” specifically for photographers looking to gather audio to run alongside stills in a multimedia piece.

The president of MediaStorm, Brian… err… Storm, also had an article in the June 2005 issue of Digital Journalist with an article entitled “Why Photojournalists Should Gather Audio“.

Magnum has a really nice online exhibition of work that shows just how multimedia should be done. Entitled “Magnum in Motion” it blends great images with audio commentary, text and graphics using some very impressive Flash work. I came across the site after a photographer friend Jason Bye pointed me to the “Bitter Fruit” piece by Paul Fusco - a powerful essay documenting the funerals of US soldiers killed in Iraq which is definitely worth watching the whole of. The commentaries from the photographers are particularly interesting.