Deconstructing an audio slideshow

Our own Apex Cougars girl's soccer team won the state title recently, and the crack Cary News multimedia team (me...with [more than] a little help from my friends) was there to record it for posterity. [Click here to see the audio slideshow]

Sports editor Tim Candon and I decided that this was a perfect opportunity to make an audio slideshow that would generate some buzz on the Cary News website. (Actually, Tim thought it was a good idea. I just nodded and went back to the scramble on the comics page.) So, once that was decided, I had to come up with a game plan.

"A game plan?" I can hear your gasp of disbelief from here.

Yes, a game plan. It's an 80-minute game (high school rules), there are lots of players, coaches and parents, and I didn't want to find myself buried in pointless images or a mountain of meaningless sound clips when I got back to the office. So I started brainstorming exactly what I would need to make a comprehensive presentation.

(I hear the Rocky Mountain News takes six months, a staff of 12 and a golden-egg laying goose to put something like this together. [Not that I'm bitter. Or jealous. Heavens, no.] Me, I have...well, me, and a sports editor sent from heaven who's more than willing to dive in and help.)

I broke the problem into two areas: sound and images.

Sound would drive the slideshow, as it usually does for me. (Good, relevant audio is an absolute necessity for any multimedia production. People will forgive bad pictures, and jumpy video, but bad audio will send them clicking right off of the page.) Having covered more state championships than I like to think about, I knew that the PA announcer would give me the intro and explanatory clipss that I needed: "Welcome to the NCHSAA 4A state soccer finals, featuring the Apex Cougars and blah, blah, blah." I needed early sound of cheering fans. I needed to be in the team huddle before the start of the game. I would need the PA again for any Apex goals, and I would need the final score and announcement of Apex as the state champions. I'd like to have the ten-second countdown to end the game. I'd want crowd reaction from any Apex goals. I'd want team react as time expired. And I'd want post-game quotes from the MVP and seniors.

Images were easy to come up with. Fans. Team huddles. Sidelines. Game action. Goal reactions. More sidelines. More fans. Postgame reaction.

The only problem was that I had to do both, which meant I was (at least) two hands short.

Enter sports editor, stage left.

While I gathered most of the pregame audio, Tim took over the recorder for the pregame huddle, and stood guard on the sidelines for fan reaction and all of the other post-game necessities, freeing me up to shoot the pictures we would use in the paper, an online gallery and the slideshow itself.

Was it a perfect setup? No, and that's mostly my fault. I gave Tim the recorder tutorial as we were standing on the field. It honestly didn't occur to me to have him help me out until that very moment. (No, I'm not the brightest bulb.) He gathered a lot of repetitive stuff, and stuff that wasn't necessarily relevant to the slideshow, that took some extra time to edit through. And he was juggling a notebook and recorder during several of the postgame interviews, which was a challenge for him and made for some interesting extraneous sounds for me to edit around.

But by gosh and by golly, we DID IT. And we did it as a team.

It probably won't win any awards, but it tells the story, tells it creatively and well, and (judging by the feedback) the community likes it.

We helped ourselves out by shamelessly promoting the slideshow in print, and in several places on the website-but let's face it, what's the point of putting in that much effort if you're not going to give people every opportunity to find the darn thing?

What did I learn from this? As an avowed "lone wolf" who is very much used to doing this sort of thing on my own, it was a pleasant eye-opener to see how much more and how much better of a job I can do with help. And I learned that I might want to do the training a little bit earlier in the process. But mostly, I reinforced the idea that prior planning really does make a huge difference on the back end.

Could I have done it by myself? Yes...but it wouldn't have been as good, because I would have been forced to pick one or the other medium at any given moment, and I would have missed things.

So, what have we learned today?

• Plan ahead. Know what you need to have for both audio and images. (Especially key if you're working alone)

• Work tight. The less extra stuff you have to edit through, the faster you can get the finished product online. (Especially key if you're working on a "due 5 minutes ago" deadline)

• If you can spread the workload out, do it. But don't wait until the last minute to make that decision.

• In the long run, we do this for the community. Not for ourselves -- although that's certainly a part -- and not for our peers, FOR THE COMMUNITY. That's our job, in whatever medium we choose to work in. The final product may not be (and probably won't be) perfect, but as long as it tells the story, and tells it well and with respect, it will be more than good enough.

Keeping track at the track

There is so much action going on at a track meet it can be overwhelming.

I was fortunate to be offered the opportunity to shoot the NCAA Division II Outdoor Track and Field meet in Charlotte, N.C., by Jamie Schwaberow of NCAA Photos last weekend. It was bloody hot, and the work space was (to put it politely) a bit small for the job, but the volunteers, meet officials and athletes were top notch.

The problem with covering a track meet is two-fold.

One, there's so much going on at one time it wouldn't help if you were triplets. High jump, pole vault and discus are competing as the 100-meters hurdlers are screaming down the track. Everywhere you look, it's running, jumping and pictures galore--but where do you start? And what are you missing over THERE while you're over HERE?

Two, because of all the pandelerium, it's very tempting to wimp out and make the "easy" pictures so you can try to get to every event. Hurdles--snap! High jump--click! Discus--duck! (Only once, fortunately, and it wasn't really that close. But I don't turn my back on those folks, or the javelin throwers...for obvious reasons.)

A word of advice on taking the easy way out: DON'T.

Sounds pretty trite, doesn't it? But it can be done.

How? First off, tell yourself "I will miss pictures...and I won't cry."

Once that's out of the way, you can move on to planning. Get to the track early, before the competition starts. Scout the locations of the different events, and compare them to the handy schedule you should have close at hand. Is the long jump pit close to the high jump? Is the pole vault close to the 4x200 meter handoff zone? Remember that high jump, pole vault and most of the other field events have several flights (groups) that get at least 3 attempts before winnowing down to the eight- or nine-member championship flight. High jump and pole vault can go on (seemingly) forever, with the elite comeptitiors waiting until very late in the event to make their first jumps, so you have opportunities to float in ad out of these events between the running events.

A few key items to remember: background, angles, peak action and emotion. Pictures live and die on their backgrounds no matter what you're shooting. Track is an especially difficult sport in which to find clean backgrounds, but keep moving and looking until you find the best possible angle for every event. Climb up in the stands, lay down on the ground, switch up lenses and and shoot wide open, but work it until it's as good as it can get. And while clean is good, don't be afraid to make a background work for you. I saw the background of the picture at the top of this post while walking behind the javelin takeoff lane, and sat and worked it for almost 30 minutes until everything came together. I specifically framed the steeplechase photo below to include the scoreboard with "Johnson C. Smith."

Peak action is pretty self-explanatory.

Emotion is the lifeblood of sports photography. A pole vaulter clearing a bar is...well, not something I could ever do, but still, it could be happening anywhere, anytime. Give me a pole vaulter screaming on the way down after clearing 19 feet any day of the week. Or maybe two N.C. Central runners (at left) sharing a quiet moment before one of them absolutely dusts the field in the 400 meter.

Finally, don't be scared to take chances and give yourself extra opportunities to make a picture you couldn't make otherwise. I carried a 20D with a 20mm lens around as a remote body that I moved all over the track as I cycled between events. I put it under the netting for the discus (a place I would never be allowed to shoot), on the foul line for the javelin, in a turn for the distance races, and next to a hurdle, just to name a few spots. The shot at left was next to the water hazard of the 300 meter steeplechase, another spot I couldn't be. Of the 10 or 12 different locations, I made maybe 5 pictures--but they were 5 pictures that I wouldn't have made otherwise.

In closing, plan ahead, accept that you'll miss some frames, and...don't freak.

The June issue of Tar Heel Monthly magazine is here. Big ups to UNC pitcher and fifth-year senior Matt Danford for going with the flow and getting into the cover shoot. The young'uns on the staff gave him an "All-American Grandpa" shirt (a not-so-subtle dig at his "advanced" age), and we bribed convinced him it would be a great prop for the shoot.

I'm standing on a small ladder, and Danford is lit by a single Alien Bee monolight with a 10-degree grid. Shot in the infield grass to give a clean background. We tried about 20 frames of him tearing open his jersey to reveal the shirt underneath. Shot with a Canon 1DM2 and 17-40 lens.

I showed him the whole shoot on the back of the camera, and he seemed pleased, which is a good thing. As a general rule of thumb, never irritate a man who can throw things at you at 90+ miles per hour...

As mentioned in an earlier post, many thanks to Jeff Camarati for his assistance, the loan of his Alien Bee 1600 unit and his never-ending willingness to answer my stupid lighting questions.

Picture of the Day-Watching, Waiting

Some photographers don't enjoy shooting golf. I do, but I think the best pictures come from the quiet moments lurking just off of the putting green or tee box. Here, Green Hope high school golfer Kyle Sonnday waits for his turn to tee off on the third hole during a recent tournament.

Golf shooters live and die by the backgrounds in their images. Go check out Getty Images photographer Scott Halleran's work to see it done right. Here, I'm standing ankle deep in what I hoped wasn't poison ivy to clean up the mess of carts and houses behind Mr. Sonnday, and shooting backlit to even out the exposure. Shot with a Canon 1DM2 and a 300mm lens.

Pitcher Perfect

It's a bad pun. Get used to it.

Mix two high school softball pitchers, a coach who wasn't warned I was coming and a five-minute window, and what do you get?

If you're me, you plagarize a shoot from earlier in the week, and you down't feel bad at all when you do it.

Lighting guru and best bud Jeff Camarati (I'd link to him, but he's too lazy between web pages right at the moment) helped me set up the Matt Danford photo at UNC's Boshamer Stadium two days earlier, so I borrowed the technique of a single strobe, high off-camera to the left, at full power to knock down the background as much as I could. Of course, an Alien Bee 1600 punched out a lot more light than an SB-80, so the results aren't quite as striking, but that's life as a newspaper photographer.

Fortunately, freshman Darby Pearce (left) and junior Beth Ann Kleekamp were great sports who were easy to work with, willing to let me interrupt their pre-game preparations, and they didn't laugh when I laid down in the dirt to get just the right angle for the shot.

And I hope I had nothing to do with the fact they lost 3-2 in 12 innings...

Long time lurker, first time blogger

Matt Danford

UNC supersenior Matt Danford is the grandfather of the Tar Heel pitching staff.

Shot as part of a feature package for the June 2007 issue of Tar Heel Monthly magazine.

For those of you who care about this sort of thing, it was shot with a Canon EOS 1DM2 camera, 17-40 lens, and lit with an Alien Bee 1600 monolight at full power with a 10-degree grid. The photographer (that's me) was lying on the ground to make this particular frame.