Back from your holidays, with about a million photos to show to your family and your friends? You are about to start preparing a digital slide show. You will take risks, like so many other photographers, that may lead to pure chaos in the family if you do not work perfectly on this. Here are my own tricks and tips:
- 1 audience: Be sure that the subject is right for your public (your kids will get all the attention of your parents and in-laws, but not from your office colleagues or friends).
- 1 subject: Don’t cover everything you can and stay concentrated onto only one theme per slide show.
- Be short: It’s always easier said than done, but you must absolutely limit yourself; You will be forced to choose only your BEST pictures, that’s a good thing; I already heard people say that a good slide show should not go over 15 or 20 photos, NEVER do more than 100 images.
- 1 story: To maintain attention, nothing is better than a story to tell or a scenario to follow; Leaving the straight path may be worth another slide show… another time.
- 1 music score: Do not select more than 1 musical style (If you want more, it is probably because you are tempted by more than 1 theme; Don’t go there).
- 1 format: All the pictures must be of the same format (JPEG, 8-bit, sRGB) and of the same size (No more than 1920 pixels width and 1080 pixels height) to better adapt to the projection tool.
- 1 copy: The pictures that you will show may be lost or deleted; Always show a copy on a small mobile device like a USB thumb-drive (don’t use the original files, from the original disk drive used for their archiving).
- Test it: Before starting, you’d better fully test the slide show with a simple viewer like Windows Picture Viewer or Mac Preview; This is rough, but it does the job and you don’t want to discover that nothing working front of your fan club.
Small advice for vertical pictures: Since the display screen will nearly always e horizontal, you can put two vertical/portrait pictures side-by-side to use all the surface.
With this, I can’t guarantee success, but I can tell that your slide show will go smoothly and your pictures will be showing their best colors.