Photo Story

Here is my photo story which gives a glimpse into the life at our apartment.  For those who can't tell, all my roommates are in a combined diet and exercise routine and I wanted to capture a bit of that to share with everyone. I took a variety of shots and tried to mix up the angles, lighting conditions and subjects to keep everything interesting.  I picked my favorite 7 photographs out of about 60 pictures and arranged them in an order that felt natural to me.

I talked with my girlfriend and after discussing things, we made some interesting contrasts between video and photo shooting assignments.  The biggest difference for me is in the workflow of how you should produce a photo story over a video piece, which is opposite.  In a video piece, a good video producer will take time to plan out their shots, imagine what things will look like, work with subjects to get it to look a particular way, organize how they want the order to be and imagine voice overs for B-roll.  For a photo story piece like this, she said to forget all the planning and just work with what I had and improvise, don't worry about the story arc or how things should develop.  I originally was thinking the only way I could tell a story through these pictures in any sort of arc was to start with a typical day, from beginning to end.  What I ended up doing, which I like better, is pick my favorite (or the image which sets the tone for the story) to be the first and group the rest of the pictures in groups.  This worked out very well.

In the process of picking what pictures to use I had to pick between an action (motion blur) or emotional type of expression in the push up picture.  I wanted the motion blur to give some life to the image, but I also wanted to see the emotion of the subject (me) in order to have the audience empathize and connect to the picture.  I also had an interesting time with the alarm clock shot in terms of the lighting.  I wanted to get a night shot so after messing with filters and trying to dim lights (and place paper faux-diffusers on them), I decided it wasn't good enough.  I then turned off all the lights and took out my roommates red LED headband which illuminated the scene barely and in red, but gave me an excellent night feel.  In editing, I decided the red color made things look too military and turned it into a B/W photograph.

I used my cell phone camera for these shots (Sprint HTC Evo 4G - 8MP Camera) and compiled the video photo story in Windows Photo Story 3, which is free for Windows XP and up users.  It took care of all the cropping, ordering, color correction, effects, transitions, music, captions, voice overs, and animations for me.  I decided that adding music/voice/silly transitions would take away from my product's intended effect, so I left it pretty simple and plain.

The tool is getting to be about 8 years old, which is interesting how it can still be pretty unsurpassed in its functionality still, but there were a few lacking areas.  The most important of which were for the captions, which didn't have an option to darken the background, so I had to choose the best contrasting color for the caption.