Between my full-time job, raising my daughter, my photography business and grad school, I realized that I still had way too much free time on my hands.  So I decided to occupy myself with yet another project. 

As a photographer I have often struggled to find a good way to present my images as a story in a meaningful fashion.  It seems like today slideshows are a way to go, but the problem with a slideshow is that it’s too linear and offers limited interactivity.  In 2007, Jonathan Harris did a great job on his experiment with storytelling with a photo essay on Inupiat Eskimos’ whale hunting.  However, while Jonathan’s storytelling UI is great, I still found it a bit limited when it comes to telling stories that branch out, or stories that run in parallel to each other.

For the past few months, I’ve been going through the photographs I took for my Chernobyl documentary - a few of them can be seen on my photography website or on Flickr - and I realized that I really had three stories going at the same time.  Unfortunately, all of my attempts at designing a good and intuitive UI have fallen short of a good storytelling experience.  

That is why I would like to turn to you guys – if you went to a news website and wanted to look through a long photo essay that told multiple intertwined stories, how would you like to see it?  What type of navigation would you find intuitive to use?  What features would you like to see?  Do you have examples of websites that provide at least some of good storytelling functionality?

I would really appreciate if you could email feedback and you suggestions to dbabichenko@gmail.com