Before I got sidetracked last week, we were talking about adding music to computer-generated slideshows containing your digital photos. I left off exhorting the technique of adjusting the durations of each of your photo “slides” to coincide with the inherent phrasing of your selected music. This technique works very well, especially if you’re sensitive to the emotion highs and lows of the piece of the music.

However, this doesn’t mean you have to transition between slides exactly on the musical phrasing transition points. There’s nothing wrong with occasionally placing the slide transitions in the middle of the musical phrases. In fact, as “variety is the spice of life”, so is variety in your slideshow a way to keep your show lively and maintain viewer interest.

Variety in slide duration is another way to keep your audience involved. Remember that you can frustrate your audience by choosing slide durations that are either too short or too long. While you may only need a few seconds to effectively and efficiently show the beaming face of a single two-year-old, you most certainly will need a longer time span to allow your audience to see all the faces in a group photo. Simple enough.

Also apply the “spice of life” rule to transitions. While it may be easier to tell your slideshow software to uniformly apply a one or two second dissolve between each photo, you may find that some parts of your show are better served by shorter or longer transitions. I recently put together a slide show depicting the launching of a boat. I used fairly slow transitions between photos depicting the emotional faces of the onlookers. However, during the sequence showing the boat headed down the ramp into the water, I used the quickest possible dissolves to create a sense of motion, similar to if I had used actual video.

While we’re on the “spice” metaphor, have you ever accidentally used salt instead of sugar in a recipe? Or perhaps used way too much of a certain spice? Your slideshow software may offer dozens of eye-catching, Hollywood-produced, cinematic transitions. That doesn’t mean you have to use every one in every slideshow. There’s nothing that can ruin the slowly-building emotion of “you may kiss the bride” like the next slide twirling in like a majorette’s baton on dropping in like a guillotine’s blade. Makes me ill just talking about it. Sure, you can vary the duration and style of your transitions – just don’t get carried away.

More advanced photo manipulation applications (like Apple’s iPhoto) may offer the ability to move into or out of (called “zooming”), or move horizontally or vertically across (called “panning”), a photo, over a specified period of time. Apple calls this the “Ken Burns Effect”, in honor of the celebrated documentary filmmaker. While this effect certainly adds motion and emotion, it can be temperamental and requires a high level of attention. As a general rule, if you’re adding this kind of motion to an image , it must be displayed longer than if it was static, to allow the audience’s eyes to follow and their brains to comprehend. The more distance the zoom or pan covers in the photo, the more time you need to allocate to it. If done poorly, you end up with one of those nightmarish, jittery music videos that never stands still for a nanosecond. Makes me ill just talking about it.

So, now you’ve got a great slideshow. But how can you share it with your far-flung family and friends? We’ll tackle that next time.

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski