In the next segment of our trek across America, we explored two of the most prominent communities one thinks about when they think “USA”; New York and Washington D.C.

D.C. leads the nation in new cases of HIV/AIDS, and New York leads with the highest abortion rate. So the question we asked was: how do the religious communities in these places respond to these statistics?

So far, our reporting for the Data Road Trip has mostly consisted of short video productions, but this time around a photojournalist - myself - tagged along. My former experience as a photographer has mostly been shooting photographs for newspapers; looking for that one key shot, then back to the newsroom for the A1 deadline. This time, I was shooting for video; a new experience in the age of digital/web/multimedia journalism.

The first challenged I faced was how to illustrate statistics with pictures, and then make them compatible with video. I shot as a photojournalist, but learned that capturing images that are figurative no longer applies. TV is very literal, and it’s the combination of sound, motion and graphics that give the viewer a complete sense of what the story is about. Is this the death of the documentary photograph?

See where this post was made on Google Maps

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 12th, 2007 at 11:56 am and is filed under Data Road Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.