Digital Images and Places.

If you are producing a multimedia kiosk in Flash, then you will need to assemble your photographic visual resources in:

• QuickTime movie format. Whether you take your movies as analogue or digital video, you will need to put them through a digital video editor and produce QuickTime, as this is the only movie format recognised by Flash.
• Jpeg or Gif still image format.

You will acquire your video using a standard VHS or 8mm video camera, a digital video camera, or a digital still camera with a movie clip mode. You will acquire your still images with a conventional camera and scanning (an expensive option), a digital still camera, or by still capture from a video camera.

Quite apart from these various technical options, you will need to consider the uses to which your visual resources will be put. Here are some points to bear in mind:

• Video is hungry on memory and computational resources. Don' t use it for the sake of it; only include video when the resulting motion is meaningful, and adds something to the presentation.
• Don't use video for slow pans around a place. This can be done much more efficiently using a still panorama moving behind a mask. Similar remarks apply to zooming in on detail - this can be done with an animated zoom or a pop-up.
• The latest generation of multi-megapixel still cameras are designed to produce high quality printed images; you don't usually need to use all of their resolution on the screen. It might be useful to take a small detail out of a 1600x1200 image; but you aren't going to use all of it without resizing.
• You can get quite reasonable results by using a video camera to give you still images - the lack of resolution is often not a problem.
• Interactive multimedia is a 'chamber' medium - it works best with small scales and intimate detail. Distant scenic views don't have the impact on the screen that they would have in a high quality print. When you collect visual materials be prepared for much of it to be taken up close - use a combination of distant and close shooting to give images you can montage together to give context and detail.
• Digital photography gives you more flexibility with low light and high contrast than old-style silver halide photography; you can use this to produce interesting twilight and artificial light images in urban settings.
• Its probably best to take still digital images on low compression and make any desired adjustments later (unless you only have a small amount of memory available) - you can easily compress an image in Flash before publication, but you can't get back what you threw away when the image was taken.

How you actually go about photographing your place is a 'technical' matter of a different sort, and depends upon the kind of visual record you are trying to build into your interactive kiosk. This is why you have to plan your shoot. If you want to produce a guide then you have to take clear shots of recognisable landmarks, if you want to produce an interactive tour then you have to take a sequence of shots that fit together into the path you want to take, etc. The main principle to observe is that you are trying to mould an impression of a place in the mind of the viewer, and you have to obtain the materials necessary to construct it.