photography + sound + the web = new age photo-essay?

resist much,
obey little

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  Photo Essay: A collection of pictures on a single theme, arranged to convey a mood, deliver information, tell a story, in a way that one picture alone cannot. Selection and arrangement are all-important. A successful photo essay is always greater than the sum of its parts. It has a life of its own. It says more, has a greater impact than any single picture in it.

Great Photographic Essays from Life Commentary by Maitland Edey. Little, Brown and Company. 1978. Page 1.
  Photojournalism died with the weekly edition of Life magazine in 1972. Life will differ with me but when Life reprised itself as a monthly magazine photojournalism took second  position to advertising revenue. Take a look at any issue and observe how many ads they insert into a photo-essay. Most times there are more ads than photos. When was the last time you watched 60 Minutes on TV and saw commercials every two minutes during one of their stories? Never. When 60 Minutes started in 1968 Life was still a weekly and never put ads within a photo-easy and this was the model 60 Minutes used. 

The World Wide Web could just be the vehicle that brings photojournalism the respect it deserves. Now Photographers can create their own stories without editors or ad-men interfering with the story. 

The problem is how the present the story. I have never liked the concept of showing small images of the photos and have the visitor clicking on the small image to get to the lager photo and then back to the story. There needs to be a way to present the photo-essays like any story with a beginning, middle, and an end. 

I also would prefer to have more than one photo on the screen. With just one photo per page the story appears to be more of a slide show of what I did on my vacation. The solution is high resolution monitors. 1024x768 would be the minimum. We can't just round down to the lowest common dominator. High resolution and 16-bit color should be a minimum. 

Another advantage of the Web is sound. Now narration and other audio can be part of the story. RealNetwork's RealVideo is one way to integrate photos and audio. Take a look at the ballooning story below and then go to the Wired's Webmonkey story on how Realvideo is used and also examine the story that was put together using existing tools.

Now you can do the same thing with RealNetworks RealPublisher. With RealPublisher you will be able to put audio into your web pages. It will allow you to automatically move to pages through links imbedded into the streaming audio.

Soon after writing this piece I found Dirck Halstead's Web site, The Digital Journalist. I discovered I was on the same track as he was. Read his thoughts on this new photojournalism in The Platypus Papers. I now find myself, at 53, on the cutting edge of what is happening in journalism, especially photography, and I'm excited about the future. 
 
  Ballooning Around The World With RealVideo you can narrate your story while your pictures appear like a slide show.

Image Mapping in RealVideo Get a short introduction into using RealVideo with your photographs. Also take a look at the story put together by the author. The story shows the promise of photos and sound together on the Web.