Tag: Sharing and Websites

One of the most exciting advantages of digital photography is the ability to transmit images electronically without any degradation of picture quality. This feature spawned new business opportunities and shook up the long-established operating procedures of the photo-processing industry.

E-mail is ideal for quick notes, but it’s not a great way to share photos. There are better options. Software and Web-based services make it easy to create multimedia slideshows and professionally printed books, cards and photo gifts. You can even create your own online broadcast of photos to which friends and family can subscribe. All of these options are an improvement over the chore of saving and opening attachments, especially when you want to share lots of photos.

It has happened to all of us. You click on an e-mail to open it and the waiting begins. The little spinning e-mail icon goes around and around. Your patience is running thin. Well, Uncle Pete didn’t really mean to e-mail you a 10-megabyte file; he just didn’t realize the necessity of resizing.

The holidays offer us the opportunity to spend time with the people who mean the most to us. But if you’re anything like me, the idea of braving the local malls doesn’t fill you with anything remotely resembling yuletide cheer.

Unpacking some old boxes in storage, I stumbled on a relic from my childhood: a book by Dr. Seuss entitled My Book About Me. It’s intended for young children and attempts to capture all of the little details of the child’s daily life. The book lets the child be co-author, filling in details from his or her height and weight to the number of steps to the nearest mailbox and all kinds of other facts and trivia. I was happy that my parents had helped me make this record, and it was a blast learning that when I was five, I wanted to grow up to be either a fireman or a magician. I guess editor falls somewhere in between.

Now that archival-quality, large-format prints cost only a few dollars and can be produced quickly, I find myself creating many more prints than I’m able to frame and display. The cost of framing prints hasn’t declined, nor do I have much wall space left in my home to display my newly printed images.

Has one of your friends or relatives ever e-mailed you a whole collection of their pictures? Wasn’t it annoying to have to download all those attachments and open each one separately? We’re probably all guilty of bombarding the people in our lives with a barrage of e-mailed images, and there’s a better way—send them a slideshow. Instead of e-mailing an assortment of individual images, you can take advantage of a wide variety of programs that compile your selected images and put them all together in an easy-to-use format.

One of the most convenient ways to present a slideshow is on your television. Invite friends, gather the family around, grab some popcorn and you’re ready to wow them with your best shots. There are several ways to put your slideshow on television, ranging from the very easy to more sophisticated shows that require you to do some prep work in the computer.

The slideshow in a darkened room is a long tradition with photographers. Of course, slideshows range from the interminable travel shows from untalented relatives to spectacular programs using two projectors showing images that dissolve from one to another, all synced to music.

For me, one of the greatest joys of photography is sharing my work with others, and a favorite way of doing this has long been through multimedia slideshows. For years, I’ve used multiple projectors and a dissolve unit to set my slideshows to music. Putting the show together and then syncing it to the music took a great deal of time and effort.