The American Frank

by Frank A Hilario

Look who just invented a new genre of media! With a flash of insight, I came up with the idea; with another flash, I came up with the name. It’s a short, short story told ideally in a set of 3 photographs, like the one you see here, as the little story is told in parts, one shot at a time. It is, I might say, the short story reborn.

Here is my little story behind The Shot Story:

When I first saw Flickr weeks or months ago, I was astounded at how well the photographs looked: They all looked good! I thought of Webshots, the one who started all these community photo sharing, or made it a worldwide phenomenon in any case, and I was quite impressed with one and not the other. I felt sorry that I didn’t have any photographs I could share with the world. And I didn’t have a digital camera. My Siemens A65 had a camera, but you wouldn’t want to look at the shots, not that the owner is a bad photographer.

On Sunday, 25 June 2006, Manila time, I suddenly realized that yes, I do have shots I took myself, with somebody’s camera (my daughter’s), and that was during the Pre-Valentine Reynoso Family Reunion last year at Villa Leyte Resort in the City of Calamba in Laguna. (I’m plugging it because it’s a nice place if you can get it.) I had a CD-full of shots, and I knew some of the shots were good, if I say so myself. And they were all stored in the Hilarios’ double hard disk, waiting to be shown to the world.

So I decided to finally upload to Flickr the photos I shot that I suddenly realized I had all along. Once a photographer, sometimes a photographer. Open Microsoft Picture Maker. Very good. Open Google Picasa. That’s better! Now, I saw that I did have plenty of photographs, but most of them were not world-class quality. I decided to upload them all anyway, slowly, a few shots at a time. It’s not a limitation of hardware – we have a 17-inch color monitor, a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM and a video card with its own 128 MB RAM, 200 GB total hard disk, and I can (and I do) maximize the virtual memory to 4056 MB. It’s the photographs that’s the problem, or it’s me: they’re telling me so many stories I don’t know where to begin. Now, what to do so that I would myself enjoy doing what I would be doing and the viewers be pleased?

I looked at the shots one by one, and one by one, and again one by one, trying to think of something. I wasn’t thinking of inventing anything, just thinking. Thinking blank is what I was doing, letting all kinds of thoughts enter the mind, not filtering, not saying No, not saying Yes – until something hit me.

The idea of a short, short photo story. I came up with a way to tell a short story with just 2 photos shown side-by-side.

The next day, I came up with more photo stories, all with 3 photos shown side-by-side: the 3rd photo had either the clincher or the punchline. Today, 28 June, after uploading 3 more shots, I had a flash of inspiration: Why not call them shot stories? As it turns out, it’s a pun on and short for short stories. So, you see, I invented The Shot Story just about an hour ago (maybe at 1030 hours) as I write this. And so, to memorialize it a bit, I decided to register my own flickr address like so: http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_shot_story/

That’s for my photos. If you want to go straight to my profile, if you’re curious enough, click on this one: http://www.flickr.com/people/the_shot_story/.

So, I’d like you to enjoy reading on my photos like I enjoyed writing them on them.