Jour1111 Lecture 5- Monday 20th August

After having a recorded lecture last week (due to the Ekka break), it was lovely to be back in the Physiology Lecture Theatres, physically interacting and listening once again to the wise words of Dr Bruce Redman. This week’s lecture was about Pictures Stories, or telling stories with vision, and Dr Redman opened with this saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words” which when you break it down is so unbelievably true. There can be so much to a single image, so many ways of interpretation; so many individual stories can be captured by a single snapshot. In the right context, images can narrate entire era, or event, whether it is a historical photograph, or a comic’s depiction of a powerful leader, pictures hold an unbelievable amount of voice power. Picture stories are everywhere announced Dr Redman, as he projected a family portrait throughout the lecture hall.  

In the portraits instance, even without an accompany of text, viewers can still tell so much about the photo, when it was taken (note bad mullets), the individuals relationships with one another (family style portrait), and perhaps even where they were from.

There are an abundance of Picture Stories we are subject to everyday, these include:

·         Television

·         Newspaper Images

·         Advertising (Billboards, Buss tops)

·         YouTube

·         Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram

·         Personal Signs, (lost and found, wanted, etc)

·         Paintings

·         Photographs

·         Money Graffitti

·         Movies

Picture stories date back century’s, with some of the earliest images recorded in the time of the Mayans. Closer to home we can find our own historical picture stories in the great caves of Australia, thanks to the work of our countries Aboriginal Ancestors. Over time there has been no shortage of picture stories, as we also acknowledge heavily illustrated Bibles, Holy book, Glass pain windows, woodcarvings and the list inevitably goes on and on and on.

In the context of Journalism the first illustrated Newspaper was recorded in 1860, shortly after that the first photograph to ever be published in a Newspaper occurred in 1879.

All of these images remained in Black and White until 1936, when Scottish paper, The Daily Record, marked a turning point in the era of pictures, publishing the very first colour image. Moving forward 56 years, we saw the internet take it’s very first visual step in 1992, publishing the very first image online.

Since the uploading or publishing of the very first image on the internet (which was only 20 years ago!), it is obvious society has come a very long way in using this media form, with up to 60 photo’s being uploaded to Instragram per second and an estimated 100billion+ photos currently on Facebook. (THAT’S A LOT OF SELFIES!)

The very first video uploaded onto YouTube was on the 23^rd of April 2005, which isn’t that long ago…. And now only 7 years later there are over 72hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute! This data really puts into perspective just how fast technology has evolved and personally made me empathise with our older generations who so quickly went from having next to no form of technology, to every facet of their lives jumping on the fast tracked cyber connection and having to learn all these new methods of social communication from scratch, how daunting it must feel to have most of your own common social connections, e.g. Telegraph, Switch Board operating (for phones) writing, half if not completely voided.

Today we are subject to the grand world of “capture and upload” which means in seconds of capturing an image it is uploaded and out there for the whole world to see, there is no time to cover up and edit reality and in many cases you are always being watched! (Don’t think that time you walked out of the toilet with loo paper on your foot didn’t go unnoticed and isn’t being laughed at by 100’s of people on someone’s Facebook page….) In many ways this is rather scary as we are losing the element of intimacy and privacy we were once entitled to, because everyone is a personal paparazzi, and walk around with camera phones in their back pockets.

Other developments in Photo Journalism include Photoshop which in this day and age is completely clouded in controversy, editing human images to an unachievable extreme and changing the perceptions of beauty 10 fold.

Now that Picture stories hold such high regard in our day to day lives, getting a good image is imperative. What makes a great photo?

• ·         Framing
• ·         Emotion
• ·         Focal point
• ·         Angel
• ·         Exposure/ Light
• ·         Timing
• ·         Capturing the moment

Evolving on simple pictures, we move on to moving images, and films which is a combination of multiple shots to make a story come to life. Flickr and is a leading server in this domain, allowing average people to upload a few simple snapshots and connect them together to create and fast slideshow/ short film. From this we have YouTube the home of the short films and then we have full length films or movies we enjoy today.

Remember: picture has no power or meaning if it can’t tell a story and an image is worth a thousand words!

Image Origin : University Of Queensland Jour1111 Lecture PowerPoint 2012