Slide shows

Back in the old days of film, producing a high end slide show was not easy, we often ended up watching the slides from Uncle Howard's Trip to Cucamonga with Aunt Helene.  Half the slides were mispositioned, because Howard dropped the tray of slides out in the driveway, and now his commentary after 7 bottles of beer is closer to a slurred verbal diarrhea,  that goes on far too long, and  how did he manage to create 85,000,000 slides and cut off part of Aunt Helene in every shot.  I think only 4 or 5 are actually in focus. 

We can do a lot better digitally these days. software like Openshot can be used to create wonderful slide shows, you can give each slide a certain amount of time, say 10 seconds, then use a professional style fade or wipe to the next image, rather than a black out.  A fade is where one image gradually replaces another and a wipe is where one seems to roll over the other.  If using wipes, don't use too many different ones, or you can make your audience "sea sick".  You can use a simple microphone to add commentary over the slides, a good way to do this, is to watch the pictures a few times, and write some notes, as to when you want to speak, and what you want to say, then script the show, if using a microphone, you want it on a stand, about 30cm away from where you're sitting.  You can also add a music track, don't use songs from the radio or a CD, as it creates copyright issues, there are places to get music for this, Youtube has an audio library of songs you can use, the ideal is to load the commentary into software like Audacity, then mix the tracks, for example you can reduce the volume of your commentary when not speaking, to remove background noise, or have the music lower below your speaking, and then higher when you're not speaking.  If using several songs, your can "balance" the volume between tracks that were recorded at different levels.  Once the audio track is completed, you can add it to the video.  You can also add titles to your show. 

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Of course this does nothing for images that are out of focus or that have the subjects head off, but nothing will fix that, better then a good edit. I may do an example slide show, and add a link here later on, but for now we need to make due with just a photo.  If I do a show it will probably be posted on Youtube with a link added here in the comments.

This little guy resting on a not quite  open rose from 2008 will need to do.  I think it was a backyard shot, as we often have flowers in the back yard and they are typically easy to obtain. 




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I think that is all for this week,

W.