The “12 Hours in Photos” series.

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:

1. I’m trying to improve my visual storytelling skills.
2. 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.
3. 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.