Eye Candy: slide shows

(Yum Yum image from FreeFoto.com)

Innovation abounds in the blogosphere. The World Wide no longer consists of mere words. The amount of band width now available to most of us makes the Internet rich with imagery. I call it "eye candy."

I do so because of my early experiences with a good 35mm camera. I bought it in the 1970's just before I took two semesters of college photography classes. I had everything eventually. . . a bunch of different focal length lenses, a variety of filters, a good flash unit, a light box, a viewing lupe, a tripod, a slide projector and portable screen and a darkroom. And I produced a fairly good number of slide shows, beginning with one I did as a class project. I found a mail-in photo processing place on the west coast that would send me a free 36 exposure roll of 35mm film, a set of mounted slides and a roll of negatives with each order. I was in heaven. I used that service for years. They are now out of business, another casualty of the digital age.

Slides -- I have a trunk full of old 35mm slides that I hope to scan and store digitally some day. (Another of my oft repeated New Year's resolutions). Do you know what I mean by the photographic term, slides? Philip Guo explained it well in "Integrity in Digital Photography:" To quote:

Slide, Film, and Digital Photography

What does a photograph truly look like after you have taken it?

In traditional slide photography, the slide that results from the development process is your final photograph. Take it or leave it. That's it. That is why professionals love to use slides. There is a certain satisfaction in knowing that if your picture looks good when it is projected onto the wall, then you did everything perfectly - you chose the correct film, you set the right f-stop and shutter speed, and you composed the shot optimally. However, if the picture is a bit darker or lighter than you intended, but you like everything else about it, then you're flat out of luck. There ain't nothing you can do. Slide photography is costly (and thus mostly reserved for pros) because there is no forgiveness for even minor mistakes.

Film photography is a bit more forgiving since photographs are developed into negatives before being printed onto photo paper. Through proper darkroom techniques, a photographer can control the brightness, contrast, and color balance of a photograph. He can even make specific changes to certain areas of a photograph in a process known as dodging and burning. The great landscape photographer Ansel Adams is well-known for his remarkable ability to dodge and burn photos in the darkroom. However, most people do not have the time nor skill to custom process every photo in the darkroom. We take our film to photo labs where a computer decides what the best darkroom processing settings are for our photographs. A picture that is a bit darker or lighter than intended can be fixed in the darkroom to a certain extent. As a result, just because a photograph looks great as a print does not mean that you did everything perfectly. The photo lab computer probably fixed some of your minor mistakes to give you a good-looking print.

All of the photos on the Internet are in digital format, and many of them were originally taken as slide or film photographs. They were scanned in using either a conventional flatbed scanner or using a more expensive (but higher-quality) film scanner that scans negatives instead of prints.

Google hosts all but one of my blog websites. The photos or clipart that I use to illustrate my blog posts at South by Southwest and at this blog, Making Good Mondays, were all stored on Picasa Web Albums, Google's great feature. It is where I have made all my Internet slide shows available to the public. I have also added or embedded several "slide shows" on the pages of my blogs. Here's a list:

South by Southwest slide shows --

• "john & karen hollingsworth wildlife photos" is a series of lovely nature photos for the National Wildlife Refuge System. It is located about midway in the right sidebar column.


• "millennium slide show" is political commentary about the Bush administration. It has captions, and is located at the bottom left of the page.

Making Good Mondays slide shows --

• "Life is Good" is my little photo montage celebrating life. It leads the left column.


• "Spacey Shots" is another captioned photo essay recognizing my "space junky" side. It is also at the bottom right of my posting section.
  

The end of this story illustrates why slide shows have such a warm place in my heart. That first slide show I produced back in the mid-1970's eventually let me into my late-blooming career as a Social Worker. Though I eventually landed in my counseling office after reaching the age of 50, I never lost my love for imagery. And here I am again 30 years later doing slide shows, but in a much more magical way.

My New Year's resolution is to scan my old slides, and only then buy myself a digital camera for being such a good girl.

Cross-posted at Southwest Blogger

My topical post today at South by Southwest and The Reaction is about a war casualty.

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