Slide-shows / A body of Work

This post is not about how to create a slide-show but why it's worthwhile to create a slide-show. As they say, once you know why you can always figure out the how.

A while ago I was speaking to a friend who owned a DSLR. This person is much newer to the field of photography than me and I asked him if he had made any interesting photos of late. After some hestitation he admitted he doesn't take many shots at all. Pressed further, it seemed the reason for this lack of output was the pressure he put on himself to create a shot with a big "Wow" factor.

I mentally compared this to my simple approach: if I see something that catches my eye (or my mind's eye) then I take a shot with my handy point-and-shooter. From a particular outing (rarely for the purpose of just taking photographs) I might have one good photograph or five. Sometimes ten. If I have less than 5 photographs I'll email them to the other attendees / participants. If I have 5 or more photographs then I'll consider creating a simple slide-show then email the slide-show.

The idea behind the slide-show is to create a [small] body of work that is good enough to show somebody else. Not to impress them but to express my view on the event / activity we recently participated in. This approach also takes the pressure off from trying to create one stupendous image to a more manageable task of creating a few good images.

Many years ago I read a book on playing tennis by Ivan Lendl. At the time, Lendl had one of the fastest serves in the game. He wrote that the "secret" to serving the ball fast was to train himself to serve the ball slow, then medium pace and then reasonably fast pace. Once he consistently could serve at a reasonably fast pace then a few serves would creep up into the "fast" pace. And so on. You cannot simply serve slow balls all day then expect to suddenly put in a blinder.

The analogy to photography is this: don't try to create a one-off "Wow" image. Strive to create a body of work and in doing so you will naturally improve. Well, that's my game plan anyway!

Layout & Technical Notes

1. I use OpenOffice Impress as my slide-show editor. It's free to download and use, is very capable and reliable and can also output Microsoft compatible slide-shows (.ppt).

2. I've settled on a simple and (IMO) elegant layout style for every slide in a slide-show: light grey background, black 18pt Arial text, white next/previous page arrows and photos surrounded by a white border 0.2cm thick.

3. The first slide contains a title, date and my name (to claim authorship) along with a representative photo on the right-hand side of the slide.

4. Photos are re-sized to 800 x 600 pixels. This works well if I want to fill a slide with a single photo.

5. The best photos in the collection occupy an entire slide, good photos are two a page. Average photos are arranged in a collage style.