New thread

The post that has nothing to do with my house or my iguana.

Midsummer is here, and the job was feeling a bit humdrum (especially when compared to the new house and the iguana). Yesterday, I came up with a project to give me something productive to do, rather than search Craigslist for a comfy chair on company time.

It’s all about the Audio Slideshow. I downloaded software to practice, and now all I need are some excellent pictures and some audio recording equipment. We have a spectacular new camera that I barely know how to use, so my pictures are turning out rather bleh.

I have taken publishable photos before. And these photos have in fact been published. I once considered myself a decent photographer.

I don’t know what happened, man.

In the first place, I took a half-dozen pictures this morning, wondering what the little flashing “stop” hand and exclamation mark meant, before realizing that I hadn’t pressed the pop-up flash button. Second, I know what Aperture and Shutter are, and what they do, yet I couldn’t remember what the A and S stood for on the camera’s dial. At least the word “Auto” was spelled out, and that function worked just fine.

It is motivating to have the words “Audio slideshow, audio slideshow” running through one’s head while in the field, because it provides an incentive to take a lot of good pictures, ‘sted of one that’s only halfway decent. But then I get back to the office, where I don’t even have Photoshop on my computer (which is fine because I don’t really know how to use that. I went to a class for photojournalists a few weeks ago and felt like a newbie at a Microsoft Word training who can’t find Save under the File menu).

This would be a good place to post one of the photos I took today, but they’re all still on the camera. I don’t have a cardreader and have to have someone else upload the pictures. Then about all I can do with them is put them in order and write clever captions. And a voice over script we can record once we get a microphone.

Instead, I’ll offer you a picture of dairy cows that I took with the company cell phone. Which I am afraid to ever use except for obvious company purposes, like taking pictures of dairy cows.