Tonight I did a second school-related photo shoot since sending the completed yearbook to our publisher. I was so tired right after turning in the completed pages that I just feigned ignorance when someone would suggest I send out my photographers to cover some end-of-year event. So now I’m wondering what to do with the new photos (and the hundreds of photos that didn’t make it into the yearbook). As much as I would love to get the pictures to the widest possible audience in the easiest means possible, it would probably really hurt yearbook sales to just put ’em on the public school web site (and a real nightmare to get all the “model clearances”/parental permission forms needed for legal public display). Ack.
When I was at Twain Elementary School I tried using Kodak’s “Easy Share” web portal, but it was too complicated, and was shortly there after abandoned. It’s not about creating a web gallery, I’ve been doing that for years with Adobe Dreamweaver. It’s finding a way to balance access with ease of use. And quite frankly, I’m still dealing with an audience that doesn’t think something is real unless it bleeds ink. Damn. There may not be a real solution. At least if we were more of a “mac” school they could view my iPhoto library. I thought about burning CDs for interested teachers, but most of ’em probably wouldn’t know what to do with ’em. Hell, I have doubts whether most of ’em would know what to do it I made a slide show from the pix and burnt a DVD from it. This is not really a criticism as much as pointing the incredibly wide gap between what’s possible and what’s practical given my target audience’s wide range of technological challenges. Damn. JBB