After finishing all the photographing of my old 35mm negatives, I have begun cleaning them up (removing dust spots, scratches, etc.) to use them in new fun and creative ways. The plan was to make a a slide show or video, using Picasa.
I started by picking about 120 photos taken during the 1980s of doorways around Portland Maine. I was looking for contrasts, textures, and even occasional humor in the images. Picasa has a feature called, "Retouch" found in the Basic Fixes tab that is fairly useful once you get the hang of it, for removing the occasional dust spot. I tried to use it exclusively, but found myself resorting to Photoshop Elements every now and then (and don't forget our old favorite, GIMP). I think if I become a little more familiar with Picasa's Retouch, I will probably use it more often.
Making a slide-show is really making a movie, or making a video. Once I had settled on about 50 useful images I selected them in Picasa and chose the Make a Movie icon at the bottom of the screen. A window of tabs, similar to the edit tabs opens at the left of the screen, allowing you to add a sound track, change resolution, create transitions, and add text slides. All in all, not that bad. However the sound track never sounded right to me, so I finally left Picasa's Movie maker in the dust.
There seem to be quite a few choices in free movie movie making programs. Windows Movie Maker comes free with Vista and XP, and there is a new version that is part of the recent "Windows Live" effort from Microsoft. Then there is Pinnacle's VideoSpin, also free with a bit more features than Movie Maker. And don't forget Cinelerra, Open Movie Editor, and Kdenlive 0.7 for Linux. Well, I didn't choose any of these. Instead I used Photo Story 3 for Windows. It too is free, but you have to download it from Microsoft. The URL is so long, just do a Google search.
I have used Photo Story 3 for Windows in many of my slide-show classes. The thing I like best is the ability to customize the start-stop locations of the "Pan and Zoom" motion feature within a single slide. The rest of the program is pretty straight forward with the final product being a wmv file along with a project file (.wp3), allowing you to go back and edit the movie without starting over. If you want more help with Photo Story 3 for Windows, check out http://www.papajohn.org/. I will probably, as time allows, try some of those other movie makers with latter projects. I 'll keep you posted.
The final slide-show/video Doors 09, is about 4 minutes long and can be seen over at You Tube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3-jszGlXcI
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