Photographer Melissa Lyttle explores interesting lives and tells Floridians' untold stories with black and white photography. View multimedia presentations of audio slideshows in the ongoing photojournalism column. Send Melissa your story ideas for the series. ... Read more

Los Angeles Times staff photographer Liz O. Baylen recently completed this project for the Mountain Workshops, an annual documentary workshop in Kentucky. The workshops are put on by Western Kentucky University and include components for photography, picture editing, and now multimedia. Participants are sent out to document a new town each year. St. Petersburg Times staff photographer Kathleen Flynn and multimedia producer Carrie Pratt are on the workshop's staff, volunteering their time for the past several years. Liz spoke with us recently about her experience shooting her story: The Insights of Angels.

First, tell me about yourself and your professional background.

I started out as a magazine journalism major in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. But early on, during a stint as a reporter for the school paper, I quickly realized it was difficult to cover the ground I wanted to in writing alone. I’ve always been drawn to good stories but found that photography was the only sure-fire way I could avoid the “telephone journalism” I abhorred. As a photographer, I didn’t have to fight editors for face time with subjects; it was a given that it was necessary.

So I switched into OU’s School of Visual Communications and completed internships at the Toledo Blade and The Washington Times. In 2001, I graduated early to take a staff position at The Washington Times where I continued my education surrounded by excellent photographers and editors. After five years there and some great experience, I quit to move to New York and try my hand at freelancing. After two years of freelancing primarily for The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, I was offered a staff position at the Los Angeles Times. I have been in LA for two years now. [Click "see more photos" below to continue reading.] ... Read more

 "You can think of a glacier as a bank account, a water bank account that has been built up for over thousand's of years. ??And in the beginning of the 21st century we are taking more out of that bank account than is being put in.?? And we know long term, with any bank account, if you do that, pretty soon it's gone." 

    -Lonnie Thompson Ph.D., Professor, The Ohio State University

Bob Sacha, a multimedia producer for MediaStorm, recently finished On Thinner Ice, Melting Glaciers on the Roof of the World. The entire multimedia piece can be found on the website for the Asia Society.

About the piece, in Bob's words:

"The glaciers of the Himalaya are melting.  Global climate change has dramatically reduced the huge ice fields of the Tibetan Plateau, where Asia's major river systems begin.  On Thinner Ice, an Asia Society multimedia project, helps explain this critical issue. 

The goal of the piece is to present this overwhelming evidence of climate change. We wanted to let people see for themselves the amount of ice that has been lost. We did this by showing two sets of photos taken from exactly the same location: the first set in the 1920's and the second set taken by the mountaineer and explorer David Breashears in the last few years as part of his Glacier Research Imaging Project (GRIP) project.

All of the content came from the Asia Society, David Breashears and the PBS show Frontline. My job was to pick the strongest parts and craft them into a short introduction. I had more than 1.5 tB of data, which is thousands of pictures and hours and hours of High Definition video. My job is to try to look at everything and try to have it organized so it's interesting, logical and holds an audiences interest. 

I edit by the "wow" method, which means I go through everything and mark the stills or video clips that make me say "wow." In this case it was the photographic comparisons of the glaciers that mountaineer David Breashers is working on as part of his GRIP project. The second "wow" was an interview that David Breashers and Michale Zhao of the Asia Society conducted with Lonnie Thompson, who studies glaciers at the Ohio University. Because Thompson has been studying ice cores, which is the history of the glaciers written in the ice, he's incredibly knowledgeable about glaciers in general, why they matter to us and why we should care.

We had 4 weeks to pull everything together, which is not very much time when you're dealing with all of that material. But it's always great to work with a intelligent client like Michael Zhao and Orville Schell of the Asia Society's Center on US-China relations..

The is project was a collaboration between MediaStorm where I work and The Asia Society Center on US-China Relations. I was the producer and editor of the introduction.  MediaStorm's Jacky Mynt developed the site, wrote the code and designed everything.Brian Storm and Orville Schell (the director of the Asia Society's Center on US-China relations were the executive producer. Micahel Zhou was the associate producer and provided much of the material.

This piece was released in conjunction with a full page ad in the NY TImes. The idea was to publicize this information before the United Nations Climate Change Conference on December 7-18 in Copenhagen.  Our hope is that people like President Obama and the Chinese Premiere and others will see this and realize that we're in big trouble with the melting of the glaciers.  It's still not too late to change."

As Lonnie Thompson says:

"You can take it to US Senate. No one yet has come up with a political agenda the glacier might have to be behaving like it is except the climate of the planet is changing."