Pictures that Talk: Bringing Images to Life with Sound
© Bob Sacha
In the media rich environment of the web, the simplest, quickest and one of the most powerful ways to make our stories more compelling and humanistic is to add audio. People now want stories to “sing and dance.” Sound brings pictures to life. Gathering ambient sounds and interviews of subjects is the perfect compliment to documentary storytelling and photographic essays. Great audio helps us paint even more vivid stories: the sound of someone’s voice in an emotional moment or even the sound of a lone train whistle in the desert adds depth to our projects. Plus sound has a multiplying effect: pictures and sound married artfully together are many times more powerful than images or sound alone.
In this workshop we’ll learn to start really listening. We’ll talk about what kind of photo stories work best with sound. We’ll start by listening to and watching lots of examples of successful stories that use great images and strong audio. We’ll look at audio equipment, recording techniques and editing and publishing programs. We’ll practice interviewing, recording ambient sounds and doing narration. We’ll talk about types of recorders and kinds of microphones and the best ones for different situations. We’ll discuss where to put our microphones to get the best sound. We’ll also discuss that eternal problem of when to make photos and when to record sounds.
We’ll put this all into practice by going out into the field on Saturday to capture a story by recording audio and making digital pictures, then in class we’ll edit these images and sounds together to create powerful multi-media stories. Finally, we’ll learn how to make flash based slide shows with audio for the web, and quickly and easily upload polished projects online.
Bob Sacha (www.bobsacha.com) is an award-winning photojournalist with 25 years of professional experience. He has produced photo essays, portraits and covers for National Geographic,Life,Timeand Fortune, among dozens of other nation-al and international publications. Versatile and always curious, he has explored subjects ranging from American presidents to China's environmental impact and Kolkata India tea stands to revolutions in mapping. He photographed the first all-digital around-the-world assignment for National Geographic, the January 2005 cover story "Caffeine." He has received many international awards, including the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography,Picture of the Year and NPPA awards.
Last year, Bob was the John H. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow at Ohio University, where he taught photography and studied new media and film. In December 2007, Bob joined the Emmy Award-winning multimedia production company MediaStorm.org as a multimedia producer. This year he leads a graduate seminar in documentary and photojournalism at New York’s International Center of Photography.His photographs have been widely exhibited and are held in several private collections both in Europe and the United States. Bob resides in New York City and has pitched headlong into multimedia, creating multimedia projects and digital video documentaries.
