Second thoughts from the weekend

Since I was going to be at the weekend Relay for Life event any way, I volunteered to shoot something for the newspaper. After more than 30 years in newspaper photography, I can usually walk into most situations and see the feature photo even before raising a camera to my eye.

I stepped outside the tent where my wife and her sorority sisters were encamped at the edge of the stadium track, and there was my page-one image: the long shadows of late afternoon cast by relay participants walking around the track. It was that easy. Later that evening I gathered a few more images for a small, three-picture layout: someone kneeling in the dark along a row of luminaria, a closeup of one luminaria sack bearing the words “my brother” (the candle inside highlighting the Relay for Life logo), and a third image of someone standing before the word “HOPE” spelled out in luminaria sacks arranged in the grandstands.

For years I’ve been parlaying one-picture assignments into photo packages – one strong image to go on the front page with the story (if a reporter has also been assigned), and another three or four photos to run inside, either with the story jump or as a related photo layout with captions only. Why? The extra work makes my job at a twice-weekly newspaper more interesting. I’ve become almost as facile at crafting these little photo clusters as I have at spotting stand-alone images. The point is, my job has become quite breezy: Either shoot for one good image and gather enough information to write a decent caption, or look for a few more supporting images and gather a little more information to put together a small layout.

That was my whole newsprint paradigm before attending the multimedia seminar.

What struck me from the past weekend is just how much sheer work would be involved in producing a decent two- to three-minute slide show.

I’ve studied a few good slide show productions found on the Internet and learned that they average about 12 images per minute – one image every five seconds. For a two- to three-minute production, that means having to gather between two and three dozen decent images . . . in addition to gathering enough clean audio material for story construction.

And that only amounted to the time spent in the field. There would also be a considerable amount of editing time needed to build the audio story and then assemble and coordinate the accompanying images.

What was I getting myself into here?

In the headlong rush to jump on the multimedia bandwagon, I don’t think newspaper photographers have paused to consider what a huge investment this promised to be in time and effort compared to routine newspaper photography.