Searching for the meaning in the image can mean making an ethical choice as well. Take a critical look and use your intuition.” What’s gained by moving on that image? There are times it makes a difference to moving your story along. If it’s a powerful image, I wouldn’t mess around with it. “The charm and beauty of a frozen image is that it doesn’t take off on you. He agrees that there are no hard and fast rules, and says that movement needs to improve the story itself. Jim Douglas is an award-winning photographer and editor at KARE-TV in Minneapolis who loves the power of the still photograph. And I not only looked at the photograph, I listened to it - all in the service of meaning, what it is I’m trying to communicate, what I’m trying to do … What we seek is meaning, and any movement, however dazzling or frenetic, if it doesn’t have meaning, it doesn’t have a place.” And so I treated it in much the same way that a filmmaker would a long shot, therefore having the possibilities of a medium, a close, a pan, a tilt, a reveal, all the devices of cinematography within the seemingly static still image. As I became a filmmaker, I trusted that still photograph to be a representation of a moment that was once very much alive. I’ve been guided for more than 30 years by a sense of the primacy of the individual image to convey complex information. He says there are no hard and fast rules: “All there is is what works that is to say, what ultimately has meaning. The Ken Burns Effect demonstrated on an image of Ken Burns.īurns believes the photograph is still the core of visual storytelling, that “the still image is still the essential building block, the DNA, at least photographically speaking, of visual creation.” From that foundation emerge three concepts to consider when working with movement and photography.įor Burns, any motion on an image comes in pursuit of meaning. I recently put that question to some expert editors - including Ken Burns himself. This raises a critical question about using pans, zooms and tilts with still photos: As multimedia reporting grows in influence and impact, more journalists than ever need to understand such techniques, which are common in video and documentary work, but new to photography.

The recent release of Soundslides Plus puts this tool in many more hands. Few of us will ever develop a technique distinctive enough to have it named after us, but most people serious about visual storytelling know what the Ken Burns Effect is: the intentional use of movement on still photographic images.

Soundslides plus to youtube