A Saturday with a digital camera and recorder..

I like audio slideshows. Something about being able to enjoy the moments of beautiful photographs while listening to the audio with subjects' voices and other related sounds.

The audio slideshows on the Guardian UK website are some of my favourite. This one from the New York times also shows the power of audio slideshows as a tool of online journalism.

So I have been wondering whether I could use  audio slideshows as part of the blogging experience.

This requires a different kind of organising and skill set. The digital recorder will capture the sound, so you have to be organising the audio and thinking of what audio would be good. The pictures for an audio slideshow need to be composed. They say 4 seconds per image so, a 2 minutes would require about 25 to 30 images, with some time for inter titles. The thing is... composing images while thinking of how the blog and the ideas would be formed is a task.

The first place I went on Saturday was GuyExpo. I was confused at first, wondering how to match my despair at the Guyana 2025 cardboard madness, with the kind of optimism of the exhibitors - especially the young ones. I deleted some of the images I had.. including of the guy who was begging.

The audio setting was bad.. a lot of background noises and I had forgotten to set the recorder to filter out some of the music and so on.  I like when I see audio slideshows of people's hand movements.. but it is not so easy to compose those images .


So after selecting the images, I then decide on the length of the audio based on the number of images. I used Gimp to edit the images, and Audacity to edit the audio.

I then used Windows Movie Maker to create the final slide show.




 On Saturday night, the Ramayana Gole sang at the Rameshwar Ashram. I arrived late, and a bit flustered. I found the part of the Ramayana they were singing.  I turned on the recorder.. this was easy enough.

The pictures though.. I had to take them from sitting in one spot.. while making sure that I was singing on my turn. It was a fascinating experience .. of singing, pointing, shooting.. at some point I realised the camera was not set correctly for the exposure.. and I did not bother to think whether the other singers were wondering if my head was good.

This is the slideshow which resulted.




I will definitely work on some more of these ,, though I have to understand the camera and how to use it. Does the camera reflect what I see, do I need to put titles to enhance the images or can the images reflect what I am thinking? Would people prefer to hear my voice or just read the text
?

I hope that some of the other brilliant photographers consider doing some audio slideshows as well.

Comments

  1. After reflection, I understand your impulse to say what you did, though I don't agree. I came hoping to find a blog post on it, but i found this instead. Great addition to blog -- I like both the historical info (text) and audible landscape of Guyana.

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