“Here is your Aunt Totsy in front of the Taj Mahal… and here is Totsy in front of—I can’t remember what, this one came out so dark! And now, here’s another one of the same place. Darn! I just can’t make out what it is…and…”
So went the slide shows of my dear departed, widely traveled Uncle Dick and I guess it was thanks to him that even as a teen-ager I started working on how to make not only a better slide show, but one so engaging that even my grandpa would stay awake through the whole thing, and believe me, that was a real challenge.
Uncle Dick’s slide shows came back to haunt me a few days ago while sitting down at a meeting with people from all walks of life interested in a common theme. There were four Powerpoint presentations that morning, two of which were well done and kept people’s interest. The other two followed a formula which I call “My Latest Paper in 5,000 Words or More.” In this type of presentation, a favorite of many academics, the speaker reads a prepared text as fast as humanly possible, using terminology which only another expert in the field could possibly understand, while slides filled with bulleted lists flash by on the screen.
This approach to making a presentation is replete with academic expository techniques my Uncle Dick would never have thought of—thank God.
If you would like to turn your audience on instead of off, here are a few simple techniques that may help.
1. Take more shots. Now that we are well immersed in the age of digital photography, 100 pictures cost no more than ten, so take far more than you used to. Many otherwise good photos have to be discarded because the expression on someone’s face looks awful and many outdoor scenes are ruined because something or somebody moved in or out of the frame. Take plenty of shots and your chances of getting a “winner” will improve dramatically. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the great photos on world-hiker Cam Honan’s page (www.thehikinglife.com) Note that Honan carries a simple point-n-shoot camera. His technique: “I take lots of pictures.”
2. Select the best; throw away the rest. If you are going to show photos, go through them with a critical eye. A good technique for this, if you are viewing them on a computer, is to make a new folder called “Best.” Now look through your pictures for those which have so much visual impact that they grab your eye, even as tiny thumbnails. Haul all those attractive shots into your Best folder. Forget about pictures which are practically duplicates of one another, as well as those which simply didn’t turn out (no matter how much it will hurt). If only 20 percent of your shots end up in your show, that may not be a bad thing and your audience will surely thank you for it.
3. Edit your pictures the easy way. Professional photographers can make ho-hum pictures look 100% better by tweaking them in PhotoShop. You, too, can tweak your photos by using a free photo editor that Windows has already installed in your computer. Whenever you try to look at a photo in a PC, Windows Live Photo Gallery will probably open up automatically. Up at the top left corner of the screen you’ll see the words “Edit, Organize or Share.” Click on this and—lo and behold—all the pictures in that folder will suddenly appear in Photo Gallery’s editing window. Next, double-click on any picture you see and you are now ready for tweaking.
First, you can crop the picture to focus on what is most interesting. Click on “Crop” at the top of the screen and a rectangle will appear. You can “pull” on its corners to change its shape (a pair of tiny arrows will appear when you’ve hit the right spot for pulling). Once it’s the size you want, you can move it around by placing the cursor in the center (the cursor will now look like a cross). Just hold down the left mouse button as you move the rectangle to the best location. The last step is to click on a small arrow underneath the word “Crop” and then click on “Apply Crop.”
Now give the program a chance to try improving the overall look of your picture. Double-click on “Auto-Adjust” at the top of the screen. Hopefully, the picture will look somewhat better. If it doesn’t, click on “Fine-Tune” and you’ll see “Adjust Exposure” on the right side of the screen. Click on this and here you’ll find several interesting tools you can play with. Don’t worry, you won’t damage the picture! Pull the controls for Brightness, Contrast, Shadows and Highlights left and right to see what happens. Believe it or not, probably the most useful tool of all is the Histogram. If you see a lot of black at the left or right extremes of the histogram, gently pull the small arrows inward until they reach the edge of the grey curve. This can often have miraculous results.
Finally, save your hopefully improved picture by clicking on “Close File,” that big red X at the upper left-hand corner of the screen.
4. Tell a story. Now it’s time to arrange your pictures into a slide show or presentation. Hopefully you already know how to use PowerPoint. If not, just find a nine-year old to help you set up your show!
But now, take a moment to think about what you are about to do: you will be subjecting your audience to a series of pictures, one following the next. How much will they be able to take? Have you ever seen one of those PowerPoints that make the rounds of the net showing a collection of utterly gorgeous, mind-blowing pictures? If you’ve noticed, most such shows are rather short. This is because the human brain can take in only so many totally unrelated pictures in a row before crying “Enough! Enough!” This phenomenon is related to what could be called Museum Fatigue.
One way to grab people’s attention and keep it (even over the span of as many as 100 slides, believe it or not) is to add a storyline to your set of pictures. Think back on what happened on the way to and from a site you visited. Did you take pictures of that flat tire? Did you get a shot of your spouse’s expression when the GPS tried to lead you straight into a river? If so, dig them up and add them to your show, even if they are not visually attractive. They may be extremely valuable as cues for story-telling.
For example, some years ago we visited Thailand. Our objective was to do a three-day Trek through the jungle in the north of the country. But it just so happened that before we got to Chang-Mai, in the north, we ran into a recently defrocked monk in Bangkok who insisted we had to liberate some animals in order to gain “merit,” which would, according to him, greatly improve our chances of surviving that jungle trek we had it mind. Fortunately, we took plenty of pictures of the squirming eels we bought in a market and “liberated” in a river. After our trek, I woke up in the middle of the night with a cold sweat. I thought it might be malaria and a doctor (plus a nurse and a translator) came to my hotel room the next morning to check me out. I ended up going to a hospital in an ambulance and received an x-ray, blood test and, medicine, plus another ride in an ambulance. Because the medical service was top quality and the total bill for all this was only fifteen US dollars, I definitely wanted to finish up my slide show with this exciting grand finale. Fortunately, my wife Suzy took a picture as I was agonizing under the doctor’s scrutiny and even though that photo was out of focus, it proved invaluable as a cue to tell my “Cold Sweat” story. So remember, have that camera ready at all times!
Try these tricks and after your next show, you may find someone coming up to you and quietly saying, “That was really good. We haven’t had such an interesting show here for the last two years.”