Change of Pace

I needed to briefly review another photographer’s website for a class assignment, so I looked at St. Louis photographer (and fellow Mizzou alum) Sarah Conard’s professional site. She uses a simple, clean flash interface to introduce her site with a looping 5-picture slideshow featuring images that represent her work in sports, music, food, news and feature photography.The user can easily exit this short presentation at any time by clicking a simple list of links to the left of the page. These links lead to galleries and slideshows for those same categories, combining news and feature in to one genre called “Life” and adding options to also peruse portraits, audio slideshows and recent work. Visitors can also see biographical and resume information for Conard and may link to a separate PhotoShelter site to purchase and license images. The images selected for display here are strong and do a good job of showcasing the versatility of this photographer.

The site appears to use a CSS/Flash template stored on a server named lightgalleries.net , but there isn’t a publically accessible website with that name, so I couldn’t get much more information than that. It’s very user friendly and simple to navigate, but it doesn’t seem to leave any room to showcase the photographer’s image or personality. Or if it does, this particular photographer has not chose to do so. In addition to rendering her someone anonymous, the limited about of text within the site may also hurt Conard's searchability. Including a link to an integrated blog on that left side might help her include more searchable information in a way that doesn't interfere with the clean, efficient look of the site.

Since this brave new world of photojournalism requires us to not only have the ability to produce beautiful, storytelling images, we tireless grad students are also devoting our days and nights to also becoming evocative writers, crack audio technicians, skilled videographers and finally, computer programming whizzes as well. Today's entry for the cause of a class is about the merits and shortcomings of a multimedia piece produced on the St Petersburg Times' website marking the 50th Anniversary of the Barbie doll.It's not exactly hard news, but it's an interesting example of how to tell a simple story using photographs, textual information, reader feedback and Flash animation.

There's not a ton of information included in this project, but it does feel like a playful use of the tools available and after all, it is a news piece about a toy, so that is as it should be. It's colorful (PINK!) and fun and suits the subject matter perfectly. The interactive bits seem to work smoothly and the navigation is intuitive, though again, the actual facts that were presented felt a bit sparse.
The three major features include:

• An interactive screen showing an array of dolls from the past that the viewer can click on to find out more about the cultural influence that determined the look of that doll and its clothing style.
• A somewhat superfluous feature that allows you to find out what human celebrities are also turning 50 this year -- this screen also provides some clickable links to find out what Barbie might do to age a little more gracefully.
• An audio slideshow from a Barbie fashion show at this year's New York fashion week. The audio is simply a repetitive track of techno music.

The project looks like it was fun to make and it really does suit the subject matter well. I guess it sort of functions as brain candy more than it does news in this case, but I do think it's a good example of simple, well-planned interactive design.

I'm finally getting to the point where I have some rough drafts of work on my project about the growing numbers of girls who are learning to shoot. I see it as a way of looking at the next emerging generation of women and the confidence with which they carry themselves as well as a way of examining modern relationships between fathers and daughters. There are still quite a few images I'd like to replace in the slideshow, but that is going to be dependent upon getting clear weather and the ongoing patience of my subjects.I've also been haunting the 4-H shooting competitions around these parts and have met a ton of charming and talented female shooters there as well. This is my first attempt at an NPR-style radio story and it's entirely too long, but this is the result of chatting up the ladies at the state shooting contest. There's another shotgun match this coming Sunday, so my camera, recorder and I will be out there again trying to figure out what my story is.