I took advantage of the nice weather today to study for my French exam shoot some photos and collect some sound at the Wentworth Farm Conservation Area near my house in Amherst, Mass.
The result was the best panorama I’ve put together so far (click to enlarge) and a mediocre Soundslides project.
The panorama is a roughly-150-degree view of the pond near Wentworth Farm. In between shooting photos I grabbed a bunch of natural sound – nothing too interesting: footsteps on grass and mud, a plane overhead, the sound of rushing water – and compiled it into this slideshow.
I must say I don’t like the way Soundslides displays photo sequences taken on the burst setting as much as I have with similarslideshows I’ve made with iMovie, but for stories that really make use of captions and feature the standard three-minute, 18 frame formula, Soundslides is still far superior.
Since I took up photography a few weeks ago, I’ve been carrying my camera with me just about everywhere I go, fumbling with the manual settings and taking a lot of awful pictures. That’s how I learn best: by making mistakes. Lots of them.
So a few weeks ago, I had my camera during a snowstorm in my native New Jersey, a small party at my friend Doug’s house and the inevitable snow-shoveling session at my parents’ house the following morning. I thought I had taken enough photos to make a rough sketch of that 12 hour period, and put together this slideshow:
I call it the 12 Hours in Photos series, because it tries to tell a story over a particular period of time – roughly 12 hours – without any text or sound (Granted, these slideshows don’t really tell a story in the way a slideshow ought to, but they’re a good place to practice). I do this for three reasons:
I’m trying to improve my visual storytelling skills.
I really enjoy the burst setting that creates a stop motion effect, though I’m still not sure if it adds value to a photo slideshow or is just a novelty that makes me look like a 14 year old girl with an itchy shutter finger.
Uploading pictures to Facebook and tagging them is a timesuck and this is a way to satiate my friends’ requests to do so.
Now I’ve used a lot of different programs for slideshows, from Soundslides to Picasa – and my girlfriend, a documentary filmmaker who spends a lot of time showing me how to use my own equipment, swears by Final Cut Pro for slideshows. But I actually edited this one in iMovie v.8.0.05, which I’ve really grown to like since I upgraded to Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6.2) a few weeks ago.
For slideshows like this one, what’s the selling point? Editing to a beat.
I haven’t tried this feature out for a slideshow that has a natural sound bed; any of the slideshows I’ve produced for work have been done in Soundslides. But particularly for slideshows that use music (and we can get into a long, long ethical discussion about whether it’s appropriate to use music in multimedia journalism projects – the short answer being if you have to ask, you probably shouldn’t use it), the ability to tie a transition to a particular beat with a click of the “M” key is really useful.
You don’t even have to go in and hit it for each photo. I tend to start by setting all the photos to a generic, really short length – 1/10th of a second if the slideshow has a lot of burst sequences – and then adding emphasis by either holding an individual photo longer, say, a second or so. Then, if there’s a particular photo I want to transition at a certain time or a part of the song I want to sync it with, I start marking beats.
Now, both the above slideshow and the next iteration of the series were put together pretty quickly, and so the transitions aren’t perfect and could probably be made better. That said, if I spend too much time editing content from my personal life, I could end up an Internet celebrity, so I prefer to keep justifying my stop motion photo albums as experiments in new media, not labor intensive projects.
Here’s part II of the series. In this edition, Rosie gives me camera instruction and then we go exploring around Puffer’s Pond in Amherst/Pelham, Mass.
I stopped by the free H1N1 vaccination clinic held at the University of Massachusetts Campus Center today. I was just there to take a photo or two for The Collegian, but I ended up getting pretty interested in the event because of the turnout, and stuck around to talk with some of the people volunteering.
I’d been waffling over whether or not I’d get the vaccine, but I eventually decided I’d go for it. I’m not going to endorse it or anything, though. If you really want to know about it, get off the Internet and find a human doctor.
Anyway, this isn’t a story about the swine flu. It’s just a story about one clinic. As a disclaimer, I still don’t really know what I’m doing with a camera. Criticism is always welcome.
An update to an earlier post today, with something to show for my troubles.
I put together a photo slideshow with Picasa, Google’s nifty little photo software. It’s pretty user-friendly [albeit a little glitchy], and lets you export your slideshow as a .mov movie, which is preferable to the Soundslides method of conversion, which can take awhile.
Unfortunately, I left my sound files on my camera in Am’erst, so this slideshow is without sound for the time being, but I’ll throw some in later next week upon my return.
