In 1989 I spent a week on a coast-to-coast series of news photography seminars. I was the video speaker and everybody else was from the still photography world. And they all had some great tape-slide shows.
The main technical guy on the trip was a National Geographic employee who was on the NGS payroll doing nothing but putting together tape-slide shows for their people to take on the road. A few "rules" he passed on to me... Never, never, NEVER do a slide show with paper mounts. Use the gigantic plastic ones that seem to weigh about a half pound each. They never jam. Never use original slides, especially if it's a slide show you plan to do a bunch of times. Good quality dupes are the way to go and your audience won't tell the difference. And good dupes can do color correction, etc., that you can't do projecting originals. And if your dupes get trashed somehow in an accident, you're only out a bunch of dupes, not irreplacable originals. Never allow a non-professional to read a script for narration. "Non professional" also means National Geographic photographer. The photographer's narration consisted of recorded sound bites of the photographer talking off the top of his head about the pictures...nothing written, nothing scripted. That, with low-key music, sounds absolutely great. I should have picked his brain for more hints, but these were the three he mentioned several times and I actually remembered them. Never saw one of his shows suffer a technical error. Eight shows at each stop; five cities all told. 40 slide shows in a week, all perfect. No jammed slides, nothing. Flawless. I was impressed. --David R. Busse Diamond Bar, California -> SPORRS: 'Serious Photographers Of Railroad Related Subjects' -> Web Site: http://www.anet-stl.com/acphotog/sporrs/ -> Message © 1998 SPORRS® - All Rights Reserved
