Jet Skis vs Bikes

The Photostory, a quick guide describing the best way to format and design a photostory, outlines a few key points to keep in mind when editing your photostory:

1.     Choose five to six photos — you do not want too many photos.

2.     You need one large, dominant lead photo — this photo is supposed to grab the reader’s attention and visually “summarize” or “introduce” the topic.

3.     Remove obvious clichés — you’re supposed to be telling a story that most people haven’t heard or at least not in the way you’re presenting it.

4.     Pictures in completely chronological order may not be the best — you might consider laying out your photos by theme or idea instead.

5.     Keep white spaces on the outside of the layout and smaller spaces between photos are consistently the same size.

To better illustrate these key points, let’s examine the best case that follows the key points contrasted with the worst case.

BEST		WORST
	versus

Immediately we already see a problem when comparing the two. There are too many photos used in Blood, Sweat and Gears. The overabundance of photos weakens the power of photography as it just becomes a messy collage. There isn’t a main photo to illustrate the central theme or draw the reader in. In Chairman of the Board, there are only three photos used and I immediately can tell what this story is about — I am immediately drawn in.

However, I personally didn’t see any clear clichés as there wasn’t a theme that was strongly predictable or overdone.

There was a clear issue with layouts and story structure. Blood, Sweat and Gears, seemed to be all over the place. Once again, there was no lead photo and no clear path to follow. I wasn’t sure where to look or even exactly what it’s specifically about. My eyes essentially darted from one picture to another, searching for some sort of pattern or meaning. Sure, the topic was interesting to look at, but I needed to do a lot of work to figure out if reading why it interesting was worth my time. Chairman of the Board doesn’t barrage you with photos. The photos that are used are clear and follow an order. It also helps that there are some minor captions on a couple where there is just large block describing all of them in the other.

Lastly, there didn’t seem to be any major issues with spacing from what I could see. The vertical spacing of Blood, Sweat and Gears looked like it may have some inconsistencies on the bottom two photos but nothing obvious. Of course, Chairman of the Board didn’t have any other spacing issues either.

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All in all, it is definitely much easier to point out the mistakes in someone else’s work than to actually do something yourself. With that in mind, I appreciate the work put into either photostory as I know it is not an easy task. I look forward to creating my own photostory so I can further appreciate how much work and time goes into finalizing a photostory, good or bad, and attempt to avoid the common pitfalls that I pointed out.