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Newspaper Woes Continue

Newspapers' economic situations have recently gone from bad to worse. November was the worst month yet for the New York Times with advertising revenue dropping 21 percent. A recent study conducted by the Research Center for the People and the Press, a branch of The Pew Charitable Trust, found more people are getting their news from Internet sources, than printed newspapers.

As a society, we're turning our attention away from print and to the Web. This will have profound impacts on professional photography, and more broadly, on our society.

In light of these changes, those who've always relied on print media to pay the bills should start now experimenting with multimedia.

This newsletter can be your guide.

2008 showed a dramatic increase in the number and sophistication of online photography presentations. As photographers gain a better understanding of how to conceptualize, shoot and deliver multimedia projects, this artistic growth will expand, causing us to rethink what it means to be a photographer.

To whet your appetite for 2009, here are a few examples of multimedia photography at its finest.

Poynter.org lists the best Multimedia projects you may have missed in 2008.

The Las Vegas Sun produced an outstanding multimedia presentation on the use of water in Las Vegas, compiling historical uses and current trends, highlighting the political and ecological issues Las Vegas will have to navigate to continue its rapid growth. 

Zach Wise, the photographer who shot For Want Of Water has an excellent article on his blog about the creation of the project.

(From MultimediaShooter.com)

Photographer Dai Sugano's: Left Behind takes us to India to look at those who have been left behind in India's rise into the global economy. 

(From Multimedia Shooter.com)

Sample Rate and Bit Rate (Audio)     

     As you begin working with audio, either for audio slideshows or with video, you'll need to become familiar with the Sample Rate and the Bit Rate. The Sample Rate is the number of digital samples taken of sound, typically measured in hertz (Hz). A higher sample rate yields cleaner audio, capturing the variances in loudness and tone of the original audio source. A lower sample rate often creates choppy, unnatural-sounding audio as the digital samples "miss" changes in the sound. 

Think of it this way. Let's say you wanted to plot the speed you're driving in your car by looking at your speedometer and recording your speed. If you do it once during your drive, you would have one sample. The likelihood that one sample accurately represents your driving habits is pretty low, so you take additional samples at regular intervals.   Infrequent samples could give you an average of how fast you're driving, but to really understand your driving patterns, you'd need a rapid sample rate to capture the nuances of your driving. With a high sample rate, you'll be able to see where you waited at a stoplight, how quickly you accelerated once the light turned green and even where you had to accelerate to get around the oblivious driver talking on his cell phone.     

By sampling the audio signal with higher frequency, you can better capture the natural contours of sound and get a more natural-sounding recording.

The standard for most commercial CD recordings is 44.100 kHz, though some uncompressed audio recorders capture at 48.000 kHz. This can cause compatibility problems with some applications like Audacity or Soundslides.

The Bit Rate, typically listed in kilobits/second (kbt/s) is the amount of data stored in one second of audio. Generally, your bit rate increases with your sample rate. As you take a greater number of samples per second, those samples take up more space. You can fudge this a bit by compressing the audio to decrease the bit rate while maintaining your current sample rate. This is similar to the JPEG compression used in compressing photos. When you save a JPEG file, you maintain the same number of pixels, but the file size decreases due to the compression.   

The higher the bit rate, the longer it will take for your listener, or viewer, to download your file online. To make audio more web-friendly, you will often need to decrease the sample rate and use a compressed audio format, like MP3, to store your audio.

Photoshop CS3 and CS4 have a wealth of video editing features. While you'll never replace Final Cut Pro with Photoshop, you can do some interesting things with video in Photoshop. In this tutorial, I'll help you create a Video Slideshow, which introduces you to several of the key video features in Photoshop.

To accompany the tutorial, I've created a custom Photoshop panel, with corresponding actions to walk you through the process, and automate steps along the way. You can find the Video Slideshow panel and Video Slideshow actions here. Install and configure the panel by watching this video. (Note: Configurator panels are only compatible with Photoshop CS4.)