Putting it together, frame by frame

This is why I love the internet. Photojournalist Mike De Sisti with the Appleton Post Crescent found an innovative way to answer the question “how many photos do you take?”

Typically news photographers shoot dozens or hundreds of photos for every shot that winds up in the newspaper. Perhaps a few of them will make it into an online slideshow. But De Sisti took every single shot from a recent softball tournament and turned them into two short movies.

Considering these images were captured using a still camera, you’d expect a jarring series of still shots. But the truth is many of the shots are taken in such quick succession that they tell a story almost as clearly as a video camera. And perhaps my eyes aren’t as sharp as they used to be, but you get a clear illusion of movement watching many scenes in the movie.

There’s nothing wrong with most of the shots photographers take. Editors don’t pick the only good photograph to put in the morning paper. They pick the image that they think works best. But there are hundreds of other photos that can be just as evocative in their own right. It’s great to see a photographer find a new way to display those images. Most viewers would be overwhelmed (and quickly bored) looking at 742 individual frames. But by putting the images together as short videos, you can quickly get a glimpse of what De Sisti saw that day.

[via Andy Dickinson]