Frans Lanting: LIFE

Here's a seamless, smooth and utterly professional multimedia production entitled LIFE: A Journey Through Time with the gorgeous photography of Frans Lanting.

Lanting is hailed as one of the great nature photographers of our time, and his photographs appear in books, magazines, and exhibitions around the world. He documented wildlife and nature from the Amazon to Antarctica.

This is museum-quality multimedia, with "new age" type of music by Philip Glass and you'll need time to savor its many ingredients. It's not travel nor editorial photography but I found it so well produced that I had to mention it here on TTP. I'm sure it'll be a favorite for years to come.

Rick Sammon & On-Location Portraits

Photograph © Rick Sammon-All Rights Reserved
Rick Sammon is a prolific travel photographer, author and instructor who has just written an interesting article in Layers magazine titled The Art of the On-Location Portraits.

This sentence caught my eye: "For me, the key to getting a good on-location portrait is to fall in love—photographically—with the subject. That’s exactly what I did when I saw this young woman. Out of the 50 or so people who lived in this particular village, she caught my eye immediately.

I couldn't agree more. The key to a good portrait (in fact, I'd argue it's the same whether on location or in a studio) is to establish a rapport with your subject. I've posted about this very thing in June last year in a post titled POV: Better Travel Photography . The foundation of successful environmental portraiture and ethnographic photography is the establishment of a relationship between the photographer and subjects....it's a no-brainer. When I lead my photo tours, I always sound like a broken record, and the mantra is "connect with your subject(s)...befriend them and start a conversation". Not only will the photographers make much better photographs, but they'll have background stories to go along with them. You'll be surprised at how long these memories stay with you.

So yes, absolutely...do what Rick Sammon says, fall in love photographically with your subject!!!

Via David duChemin's excellent Pixelated Image blog

IHT: The Virgins of Albania

© Johan Spanner for The New York Times-All Rights Reserved
Some two weeks ago on the pages of TTP, I was critical of a New York Times slideshow on the Virgins of Albania, and how I was disappointed that the 6 photographs photo essay -erroneously described as multimedia- had no audio, and could not do justice in telling the life stories of these interesting women.

So I was excited to find the International Herald Tribune's audio slideshow on the Albanian Virgins, and initially pleased that the gods had seemingly read my post. But no...they hadn't. The audio slideshow was almost as disappointing as the New York Times' silent photo essay, and such a classic example of how not to produce a multimedia slideshow, that I would use it in my classes of Multimedia Storytelling.

While adding narration to the slideshow was a step in the right direction, it didn't add sufficient depth/texture to the subject matter. The narration is by Dan Bilefsky, the writer of the original article, and he more or less reads it aloud. Yes, there are more photographs in the IHT production than in the NYT one...but the heavy-handed overuse of the Ken Burns effect is irritating and meaningless.

I don't mean to be disparaging to the producers, but a monotonous voice reading off a script, while the slideshow is punctuated by unwarranted Ken Burns effects, is not good multimedia. For one thing, the Ken Burns effect ought to be used sparingly, and used to bring the viewers' focus to something in particular...to emphasize a detail, for instance.

The second problem is also easy to fix: I can read the accompanying article which has the facts, so why have the writer narrate what he wrote? Why not have the Albanian Virgins speak instead, and have the writer translate what they said in a voice-over? At least there'd be some dynamism in the piece.

Ah, well...certainly a step in the right direction, but still a waste of a good idea. Third time lucky, NYT/IHT??