AV News 193 - August 2013
Letters
Well Done
Robert Albright FRPS
An excellent issue 192 May 2013. I particularly liked your comments on page
20 about judging club competitions and lectures where members ‘class an AV
as a collection of their sometimes excellent images shown sequentially without
any consistency of format, progression or storyline and accompanied by a
sometimes suitable piece of music’. O dear- we have all been there so often.
You go on to say that the first step in the learning curve is to go along to events
and see what the current standard is – and then learn from that and produce
better. In my experience the average club photographer wants a quick and easy
way to produce a good AV. Often I am asked how many hours it took to produce
a sequence, revealing anxiety on the part of the questioner about the
commitment to be made. Let’s face it, club members are used to producing very
acceptable competition print entries in a few hours work. They are not so
dedicated to photography that they want to spend, say, 50 hours in making one
acceptable AV production with storyline, sound recording and mixing - areas
which do not fall within their main purely visual line of interest.
3
Another tip to give your AV presentations a professional touch! Make a
nice background image such as the one below left. Make another image
with the title of your show on the background, below right. Put together
a soundtrack with 20-30 minutes of some nice gentle music, nothing too
dramatic. Then in PTE set the default effect to a 20 second fade and
insert your two images in the slide list.
Copy and paste these until you have
enough for the length of music. Then
scroll along the timeline, inserting new
transitions at the end of every slide, until
you have reached the end of the music.
Now your audience will have
something to look at, something to
look forward to, and the music will
help create a nice atmosphere as
people come in.
Malcolm Imhoff FRPS
Page 44