Shooting an audio slideshow

The days of shooting a news story in a single picture are coming to an end, at least for those of us whose primary output is the web.

For the last seven years or so I have been shooting stories for this website and these often take the form of static picture galleries, one image presented after another to be clicked through by the reader. It's a satisfying format and one that allows the photographer a fair amount of freedom.

A number of years ago the audio slideshow began to appear on both our site and others, the New York Times with its large contingent of photographers being a good exponent of the art. To some extent these are cut down versions of good old fashioned audio visual shows with multiple projectors, one of the most well known and best being The Ballard of Sexual Dependency by the wonderful Nan Goldin.

Our own slideshows have developed little since the early days. They are now slightly larger but we still need to add features and indeed expand to the full width of the site, but here I want to talk a little about the making of a slideshow, not the output.

Last week I took a call from the Clare who works on the Business section of the site asking me to re-visit the City of London for Taking the pulse day (15 July), whereby they reflect the views of people around the country on the recession.

The reason I say return, is that last October I shot and produced a slideshow from the Square Mile in a new way, or at least it was new to us, using just wild track (that is ambient audio), and music overlaid on traditional black and white street photography.

There seemed little point in doing exactly the same again as it doesn't really have anywhere to go journalistically. It was wonderful to shoot (all on a compact camera as it happens) but this time I thought I'd add in a few vox-pops, voices of those I met on the street, as this would match the other content being produced from around the country in video, text and audio form.

I certainly didn't want to create a lot of taking heads, oh so dull and probably best done in video form anyway, so chose to use the voices as a backing track.

Kit wise it's pretty simple: A decent digital audio recorder with a separate microphone (essential) and headphones (again essential so you can actually hear what you record) and of course a camera, this time an SLR with a few lenses.

All this kit makes me fairly easy to spot as I wrestle with the cables that inevitably tie themselves in a knot with my camera strap.

When setting out to produce a series of pictures it's a good idea to layout your story before you start, at least the type of images you are after and what sounds or words you feel can accompany them. These plans will usually fall away as you start to gather the material, but without it the whole process can be a little daunting.

There is of course a balance to be struck between shooting strong pictures and recording the audio. Personally I think you need to concentrate on one or the other at any one time, but this is still very much a work in progress for me, lots to learn, and plenty of room to improve. But that's exciting.

Anyway, spreading my net slightly wider this time I headed to a brokerage in Canary Wharf and then to the financial district in the centre of London, shooting stills and recording ambient sounds and a few voices along the way. A few hours later I returned to the office to download it all and check I had enough material.

I usually check the images with a rough glance and then work on the audio as that can dictate the length of the slideshow. You tend to need a picture every six to eight seconds, so that's a good figure to keep in mind when gathering the material as a 15 second interview will need at least three relevant pictures to cover it. You also need to work to the photos, as any TV journalist will tell you, write to the pictures.

You often find that you can't use all your best pictures though, certainly you need to include as many as you can, but there are moments where you just have to illustrate the audio, and that is fine, just so long as that doesn't happen too often within the production.

Anyway, You can see the final slideshow I produced here.

Working for a broadcaster often means answering the question why don't you shoot it in video? Well I'd guess most of you reading this are at least interested in the still image and quite possibly keen photographers so maybe you get it already.

The still image is just that, still. It's not the real world but a flat representation and as such can open up a new world that allows us to study a split second in a way that the moving world, or image, doesn't. In an earlier post I wrote about the truth of a photograph and one of my readers DanSF4fun commented that a "map is not the territory" just as a picture is not the thing pictured.

There are of course ways to merge video and stills, long the domain of the documentary film maker, and a number of websites and photographers are doing this, creating much longer presentations.

My mind is not yet made up on this, maybe I have a short attention span, but throwing in video for me doesn't always work that well, it needs to be for a reason, not just to show talking heads, conversely stills should not be used just to mask cuts in the video.

It can work though, just look at photographers such as Sean Smith or John D McHugh's work for the Guardian from Iraq and Afghanistan, or the work of Reuters photographers looking back at five years in Iraq. These both deal with hard news stories where the visuals are strong, if you have the will to get close enough. But if you are looking for innovative use of stills and video on a wide range of issues then try Mediastorm.

Ultimately it's content that counts, no amount of gimmickry will save a poor story.

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