Musings on Photography

As part of the household switch to Macs, we’ve taken delivery on one of the iMacs that Paula will be using. As a bit of a treat, I gathered up a bunch of photos that I’ve made in and around the house, and put them in a folder, and told the iMac to use the photos in the folder to make a slideshow as the screen saver. I don’t know what I expected - snap transitions, blah blah, but I thought it would be fun. But it turns out that the Mac does cross fades between the photos, and it also does a little Ken Burns style pan-and-zoom across/into/out of the photos, so that the slideshow is filled with motion. And, you know, I watched it go, and I thought “Hey, this looks pretty darn good. Especially for no effort!”

And that got me thinking about slideshows. It got me thinking about slideshows as a way to present a body of related photos, in a sequence. I’ve always hated, and I mean intensely hated, those web sites where portfolios are presented as slideshows. I hate that I want to flip through the photos quickly, and can’t, or that I want to go more slowly, and can’t. I guess slideshows are like children’s invented summer plays - when it’s not your children they’re excruciatingly horrid, but when it’s your children, the same play is a beautiful testament to the wonderful imagination and creativity encoded in your genes.

So I was sort of expecting that the next slideshow I came across I would think was the same old horrid painful dreadful stuff.

But no. This morning, I came across this slideshow on Dave Beckerman’s blog. I sort of winced when I hit the ’start’ button. And then I was entranced. A slideshow. A slideshow with MUSIC, the very sort of slideshow I hate, hate, hate. And, truth be told, I loved it. It doesn’t hurt, certainly, that Dave’s photos are awesome. It doesn’t hurt that I like the music, either.

But a week ago, I would have hated it intensely. Interesting.