the big picture

Much like my friend Robert I have been amazed by the Martian Skies entry in The Big Picture. (Robert also has an appropriate quote in his blog which is worth reading.)

The guy behind it is Alan Taylor. There’s a good interview with him in which he explains some of the thinking behind it:

…my parents used to always have Life and National Geographic magazines around the house, I fell in love with the visual storytelling way back then. When I was getting my feet wet in the online journalism world as a developer at msnbc.com, I had the good fortune of working alongside Brian Storm and a few others in MSNBC’s photo department, who were just phenomenal as far as selection, editing and presentation.

I wondered why other sites didn’t reach that level. Many have by now, but I was still frustrated by the presentation — either far too small, or trapped in click-after-click interfaces that were in Flash or just acted as ad farms.

I’m a very visual person and photography is my favorite form of art by far. I love this particular storytelling style. It’s different than most styles of telling stories because it relies somewhat on chance and the eye of the photographer to catch a moment in time that illustrates the underlying story. You can’t tell people about what you saw – you can only show them. I love that.

Also, there’s a good quote about the workflow that he uses to find photos:

I use Firefox to browse the wire on an internal site, wired up with Greasemonkey scripts to give me decent-sized thumbs, extract caption and photo ID from the IMG tags. When I find an image I like, I save it to a local folder until I get about 25 or so good ones to choose from. Then I open all 25 in Photoshop, arrange the windows in a horizontal tile and drag them around to get a rough ordering that makes sense. Then I start to edit out images that don’t make the cut, run a couple of recorded Photoshop Actions to size the images, and do some hand-cropping if necessary.

Yay for tools to customize your browsing experience!