This is just brilliant!

A few days ago Arkansas Morning News photographer Michael Zamora posted some photos from his coverage of the Miss University of Arkansas beauty pageant. Nice photos, I thought, two really good ones and two that were okay. Then today Michael put up his audio slideshow from the event and it's a stunning piece of work. The sample photos didn't do it justice.

Rather than having a commentary for the slideshow, Michael combined background sounds from the event with soundbites and quotes from those involved. There's nothing particularly wrong with commentaries on slideshows, it's just that in my opinion the work of a photo journalist is to tell a story by showing what you saw, so if you're going to include audio then logically it should be what you heard, not just an editorial piece that you read out. Does that make sense? Anyway Michael's idea works perfectly.

Click here to watch the slideshow 

The first audio slideshow I'm intending to do is a piece on fishing in our local community. (In case you don't know, I live in a small coastal village in the north-east of Scotland where many people used to earn a living through fishing, but not so much anymore.) It's still a few months away, when the fishing season starts up again, but I've already got a rough plan worked out and I'm really looking forward to doing it. Hopefully I'll have done a few more jobs for the BBC by then and I'll be able to do the audio slideshow for them, but I'm going to go ahead with it even if it just ends up here on my own site.