Photographs: Then and Now
Three Networks before Social Networking
There was a time not too many decades ago when news and media input came from two main sources: the daily newspaper and one of three network television stations. One could throw in an occasional magazine as an additional resource, but it was mainly network television and the local paper. This was the same era when David Gates, singer of the classic group “Bread” sang “If a picture paints a thousand words…” With the advent and boom of the Internet and social media, the number of potential media input sources has grown exponentially. From a few to literally thousands of possible messages to absorb or reject daily! Today, we have access to online news – either via website or phone app, 24-hour news coverage, social media apps, digital billboards that change messages every few seconds, and product placement branding in TV shows. That helps explain the media input “quantity” increase that is continually happening.
One-Day Photo Finishing: So Speedy!
Then, there’s the “visual” aspect. With the progression of digital photography, anyone can take a good photo. Or if it’s not the best photo, edit it into presentable shape. No longer are people taking rolls of film to the one-day drive-up photo booth in the grocery store parking lot hoping that the pictures turned out OK. Shown on on the right, I still have a legendary family photo of the Welcome to Louisiana sign and half of me in the frame. (Mom was known for that.) But we didn’t know that I was cut off, of course, until we got home and had the photos developed.
Digital Dinosaurs in Specs and Size
I remember purchasing my first digital camera in 1996. (This was also my very first online purchase – dial-up modem style!) I purchased a Sony Mavica FD-91 from someplace out of New York City. I truly felt like I had just made a $1,000 contribution to a scamster until it actually showed up at my door.
Early digital cameras were beasts.
These cameras were huge compared to the slim, compact modern models. This thing was basically a 6”x5”x4” box that recorded photos on 3.5” floppy discs. The number of photos one got per disc depended on the amount of digital information (so, how colorful). In the largest resolution it took (1024×768 – which is tiny by today’s standard, if you’re not a techie), I typically got nine to eleven photos per disc. Pictures of flowers and bright things? Maybe six to eight.
Pockets Full of Floppy Discs
Imagine being on vacation and carrying a stack of floppy discs in your pocket. Yep, that’s what early digital photographers had to do. And by the way, the camera weighed a full pound. It was truly a photographic brick.
Cameras built into “Phones”?
Let’s fast forward to present day where cell phones that weigh mere ounces technically have three, four, or even five different cameras to get the best angles and zooms, both day and night. Digital photography is a huge part of the daily input we get in terms of both words and images.
Now that images are so easy to obtain and incorporate, long-winded wordy paragraphs resembling ants marching are a thing of the past. Appropriately breaking up text with relevant images can help keep a reader’s attention and help keep them focused on absorbing your message!
Using Visual Media the Right Way
Put those elements of messages available everywhere and the ease of image placement and you’ve got a great combination to easily create attractive, attention-keeping documents and articles. But it’s not that simple. Image placement needs to be relevant and visually-appealing. Though a great puppy picture or a cute duck is – well — cute, it needs to be message-relevant in order to keep the reader’s brain engaged. It also needs to be uncluttered.
The Music is Not In The Notes
There needs to be adequate whitespace to keep everything from not running together. Images and words crammed together can quickly turn a reader off and immediately lose attention. To put it into a musical analogy, French composer Claude Debussy is credited with saying, “Music is the silence between the notes. The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.”
Whitespace is the silence between the words and images that helps keep content visually organized for the reader. Properly done, it adds context and depth to the message while preventing the ants marching analogy of just trying to trudge through words, words, words.
Let’s look back at this article and analyze why it is laid out the way it is. The paragraph about my first digital camera? Hopefully, it is well-written with some imaginative language, but the added touch of seeing what I’m describing hopefully helped pull you through. The images have some space around them so as not to run up against text. And also a little extra space between paragraphs helps with the ability to focus from one point (paragraph) to the next.
You see a couple examples of good whitespace use from live Shout It Out Design client pages. Click on either of the images to the right to see a larger version. For this example, the wording isn’t important. Notice how the wording and the images are broken apart to allow the eye to move from one element to another without the clutter and congestion of visual rush-hour traffic.
So fear neither the images nor the whitespace! It takes some practice, patience, and tweaking to get the right balance. But once you master the skill and perfect the content-image balance, you’ve got a winning combination for a great reading (and great looking!) way to present a topic and keep readers engaged.