My youngest brother is a senior in high school. The fact that the baby of the house will be leaving the nest soon has inspired my mother to thumb through the hundreds of pictures we have in our basement. Many are yellowed or stuck together, and almost all of the photos are out of order.
They all represent stories and memories -- just in slightly tattered and discombobulated way.
Since I bought my digital camera this summer, I have made it habit of immediately downloading my pictures and burning a back-up CD. Because of online photo galleries, I no longer have to worry about losing photos; I can easily email pictures to friends, or print photos out with as high of quality as I could get by developing them at Walgreens.
Creating online photo galleries this summer for GAME is what prompted me to make this move into online photo galleries.
These photo galleries also help me to tell stories about my personal adventures, and professionally in adding another dimension to my reporting.
In taking part in both a little shameless self-promotion, and self-analysis, I'm examining the photo galleries I have produced for the Lawrence-Journal World and Lawrence.com.
Both galleries have more of an ultra-local focus than many national publications do.
This summer we took pictures of the youth of Lawrence playing baseball and softball. Most of the emails we received from readers (second only to name corrections) was requests for the reprints of the photos taken of their kids.
For the past few weeks, I have been taking pictures for a new photo gallery that we are in the process of launching. It highlights the nightlife (sometimes debauchery) and fashions that can be found at Lawrence bars.
Now I could see why the GAME photo galleries were popular. However at first, I asked myself, how is Lawrence.com going to benefit from having this random gallery of pictures of drunk college students at bars? But very quickly I found the answer. People like to see themselves, their friends or people who do the same things they do. What results is a site that gets a lot of hits from the target audience.
These galleries follow a very simple template, and it satisfies the needs of the audience by providing more visual stimuli than newspapers don't have space to accomodate.
The captions appropriately identify the photos, and the viewer can easily pick and choose the photos they enlarge. This website also allows consumers to view the entire photo gallery in a slide show format, also with captions.
What I like about the Lawrence.com photo gallery is the fact that it is not just a photo gallery, but it also markets the other components Lawrence.com offers with a very visible right rail.
The photo gallery itself tells the stories that words can't. Which is more exciting? Seeing someone ride a mechanical bull or reading about it?
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