So when the Russian Guy living in Australia travelled to Barcelona in order to go to Rome, he met The Finnish Girl that actually knew The Italian Bloke, whom she met in Denmark while studying photography in Aarhus. And so it goes…

Sometimes I surprise myself. And often I’m surprised by the resilience of my audience. I tend to be nerdy and especially when it comes to arguing the importance of great audio when in a classroom full of mid-career photojournalists. For instance during the current — very international — workshop at Francesco Zizola’s place in The Eternal City.

It’s surely outside most photjournalists’ normal comfort zone, yet quietly they sat while I played old radio clips from the 20's and 30's, listening with patience to clips from the hey day of audio. I was trying to make a point. About the images (good) audio creates on your internal screen. About how you sometimes show and how you sometimes tell when you’re producing a web documentary. And quietly they sat. Listening. Seeing. Watching their personal interpretation of the sounds, they heard in the movie theater of their brains.

And it always makes me wonder if I took it too far. But then again: Bad audio kills great photography and I’m here to ensure that my students will get their images seen as far and wide as possible. And nobody will watch your story if it sounds terrible. Simple as that.

So the surprise ends there with the confident knowledge that I’d rather have them listen to one piece of great audio too much than having their future audience run screaming for the nearest exit because the quality of the audio of their recent web documentary was appalling.