Photo Books Make Great Gifts

If you are an Apple user, you already have access to book making software in iPhoto.  Many Mac and iPad users know that iPhoto lets you create photo books, cards and calendars, but did you know you could combine those photos with text and create a storybook?  I have found that adding a few text pages to a my photos brings the stories behind the pictures to life.  It's true that a picture can tell a story, but there can be many ways to turn those photos into memorable gifts.

My wife hates looking at photos on a computer or on her phone.  She is a book lover.  She reads all the time, and rarely is seen without a book.  So, it is natural for her to want to have something to hold and enjoy at her leisure in her comfortable chair.  One of the first books I created for her was an eclectic compilation of the best photos I could find from our vacations with friends, and family outings with our grandsons.  I used iPhoto because it was simple.  I decided on a hard cover book and selected the photos I wanted, letting iPhoto do most of the work.  I added a forward at the beginning and that was all the text I needed to set the stage for the story that unfolded.

Since then, I have found there are many more stories I can tell by adding text to photos and photos to text.  I have added other tools to my toolkit, like Blurb and Lulu for those books that require more options for layouts and text formatting, but I come back to Apple's iPhoto often.  I find the more photos I take, the more I want to share.

Just recently, I used iPhoto to create a 100 page softcover book of our pilgrimage to the Holy Lands.  It took me several hours and the book cost about $87 to have printed and shipped to me.  I realized when I finished it that twenty years earlier, we had traveled to England and I put a photo album together by hand.  That was in the days of 35 mm film and large binders with sticky back pages and plastic protectors.  That project took me days to complete and cost hundreds of dollars in film developing costs.  We still have that album, but I think I prefer the digital approach.  If I ever need another copy of the book, I can just order it, rather than go through all the trouble to make another album.

5 Tips on Creating Moving Presentations

Chances are at one time or another in your career, you have created, viewed, endured or slept through a presentation.  If you are old enough to remember transparencies, you probably have a deep-rooted disdain for slide presentations, regardless of the form, format or function.  Boring or confusing presentation-style slides can not be improved upon by making them move on the screen.  It may make them funny, but that may not be what you intended.  So, should you convert your presentation to video?

Here are a few things you may want to consider before you dismiss the idea altogether and run for cover.

1. Think scenes, not slides.  What I mean is think of the window as a movie screen or canvas, rather than as a slide in a series.  Slides are static.  Scenes are alive with color and action.  Use the slides as a means of organizing scenes.  Each scene should have a focus and theme.  Let your imagination flow, but keep it simple.  
2. Don't over-animate.  You don't need to have everything whizzing across the screen.  Incorporate the transitions and movements into the message.  Just like in the movies, try not to build the scene around the special effects.
3. Size really matters.  Think about the display format and size of the video you create from the presentation.  A slide with many lines of text may be impossible to read on a 600x400 pixel video, especially if it displays on a smartphone.  Displaying one word at a time on the screen may be better for some messages than entire lines of text.  
4. Edit before you Embed.   Embedding video and music in a presentation may be a frustrating experience when you go to convert the presentation to video.  Different presentation software packages and versions treat embedded video differently.  You sacrifice control when you play a video within a presentation, so use it sparingly and if possible, and embed to just the scene or scenes you want. 
5. Add audio by page.  Audio can be controlled more at the page level than as a soundtrack for the entire presentation.  Use action settings to set the timing on when the audio starts and ends.  If you use audio, though, make sure you have the rights to it.  When you upload your video to a hosting site, you may find that the site warns you about this and may refuse to post it.

The overall message is this, Start from scratch, even if you have a presentation created.  Design your presentation with video in mind and you will have a much more interesting and viewable outcome.