Photojournalism Presentations – Slide-show Vs. Article Format

Online photojournalism and photo stories are increasingly replacing the traditional print publications like books, magazines and newspapers. There’s now basically two ways of presenting a photojournalism story online. You can do it the traditional way, using the article format which resembles a photo story in print, or you can make the presentation using a photo slide-show.

Both ways have their strong and weak points. So which one is best to use for photojournalism? Well, let me tell you right away. There’s no right or wrong answer. It depends! In fact, there’s nothing stopping you from using both at the same time, a slideshow embedded inside an article layout. It’s just that typically, photojournalism presentations tends to use just one or the other. So let’s have a quick look at the fundamental differences. Although I’m stating the obvious and typical here, I have the feeling that a lot of photojournalists haven’t really considered these differences and how they affect visual storytelling.

In a slide-show piece :

• All photos have the same size.
• All photos use the same format, horizontal.
• Photos are viewed sequentially, one by one.
• Only one photo can be viewed at any given time.
• Text is often limited to one or two sentence captions.
• Photos can be viewed large, perhaps in full-screen mode.

In an “article format” piece :

• Photos can have different sizes.
• Photos can have different formats, horizontal, vertical, panoramic, square...
• Each photo has a unique placement in the story.
• Several photos can be placed together so as to be viewed at the same time.
• Large pieces of text can be used together with photos.

I think the most interesting difference to keep in mind is this: The slide-show separates photos with time - The article layout separates photos with space.

So what does all this mean in practice?

Here’s one thing for starters. If the first photo in a slide show isn’t “a winner”, chances are the viewer never hits the ‘play’ button, since one photo is all he/she sees. The opener really has to ‘sell’ the whole piece when using a slide-show! In an article layout, the viewer typically skims a large part of the story quickly, looks at a couple of photos, reads the headlines, gets a sense of the structure and quality of the story etc. The various ‘page’ elements are separated by space, not time, so it’s possible for the viewer to form a quick impression of a larger part of the story, not just a single photo. His eyes can even wonder back and forth between a text paragraph, one photo, another photo, back to the text etc.

• One mitigating factor: Some photo slide-shows have little thumbnail images on the side, showing the next photos in the series. This can help to draw the viewer into the story if the opening photo didn’t do the job.

Another thing. If the subject matter is complex and the photos in themselves don’t tell the whole story, you probably want to have a good deal of text. Obviously the article format is better than the slide-show to present a comprehensive text piece.

• One mitigating factor: A photo slide-show lends itself very well to having narration and even ambient sound recordings added, making it a multimedia piece. But, it makes the piece a lot bigger and slower to download. And, good narration and ambient sound recordings requires both skill and extra equipment to capture.

And the last point of this account. Layout. A slide-show can’t really make use of a layout to creatively present the photojournalistic story. The storyline is completely sequential, like pearls on a string. One by one. This can be a strong point in some cases, especially when the photos in themselves tell the story. But with a layout you are able to emphasize one photo over the other, simply by making it larger or giving it a more prominent placement etc. You are able to put photos next to each other, thus creating a new perception by juxtaposition. And you can increase readability by good use of margins, white-space, paragraphs etc.

To sum it all up. Choose your presentation based on your story. Think about what you want to say and how you want to say it. It might help to think of a slideshow, especially a comprehensive multimedia one, more like a TV documentary than a traditional piece of print photojournalism.