by Janet Mobley, NCMUG member

At one time, my goal was to eat my way around the world and view the great artworks of the world. Having taught Art, including art history and Home Economics, including foreign foods, for many years, I wanted to see all of the beautiful art of foreign lands and indulge myself in the cuisine of other cultures, and take pictures of the wonders that I experienced.

Like many people, most of my travel experiences took place after my husband, Paul, and I both retired. That is about the time that I really got serious about taking pictures on our trips and had my shots developed into slides. It wasn't until 1998 that I bought my first digital camera and found that that is certainly the best way for me to record my travels.

The closet in Paul's home office was full of slide cases, holding thousands of slides, starting with our trip of 25 days to Mainland China in 1988. Not only were there slide cases but also slide wheels, a slide projector and screen taking up real estate in his closet.

So, this spring I decided to scan all of my slides and put them into slide shows using iPhoto. Then I could throw away all of the slides and get rid of the other photographic equipment and leave his closet in pristine order. Then I would burn the photos and the slide shows onto discs. I bought an Epson printer that prints directly and beautifully onto discs.

Having a dot Mac account, I have put travel photos onto my homepage as photo albums. I put music to some of the photos and put them on as iMovies but was dissatisfied with the small dimensions of the pictures that were available.

Then I discovered that a saved file with music was also saved in a .mov format in Quicktime. You can expand the document to as large as your screen will show. My goal was to make files of each trip with the still pictures and then make a slide show with music of each trip. I wasn't very concerned about the sizes of each photo but if they were over 1MB, then I reduced them in Photoshop. I kept thinking that I might some day want to print them on paper and didn't want to reduce the resolution so much that printing would not be an option. Adding music enlarges the file significantly so you may want to omit it for sharing on the Internet and just use to play slide shows for home use.

My first task was to get music to accompany my photos. When in Kenya, I bought an audiotape of African singers accompanied by drums and something that sounded like a xylophone. I downloaded the great shareware program, Sound Studio, put the tape in the tape recorder and started Sound Studio and recorded the forty-two minutes of music on one side of the tape.

I discovered that music takes up a huge amount of ROM on the system but I discovered that by taking the musical selection into iTunes, I could convert it to an ACC format in the Advanced area of iTunes. Don't ask me what it means, but I know that it works. When I downloaded some Turkish music and recorded it with Sound Studio, it was 34.3 MB but after compressing in iTunes, it became 2.9 MB.

If you want to save the size of your final project, you can record a short file of a minute or two and have it loop so that it plays the same piece over and over. I didn't do that with the Kenyan slide show as I really like the musical selections and that trip was so special that I didn't want to cut the music. The show has 330 slides and is 35MB and is 16 minutes, thirty seconds long.

I have used some of my own purchased music for some of my shows. I used Segovia's guitar music for my shows of Spain, Portugal and also for South America. I bought a very nice album of Chinese music in San Francisco's Chinatown recently and used that for our trip to China.

I decided that it would make a more interesting presentation if I added pictures scanned from brochures showing our itineraries, hotels, etc. to the photos I had taken. I bought several pieces of jewelry in Egypt and scanned those too. I also made a title slide and an ending slide for each show. http://homepage.mac.com/janmobley/FileSharing52.html

This project has been a lot of fun and a great learning experience. I had never worked with sound files before and found Sound Studio to be a terrific program. The company lets you use it for 14 days and then you have to buy it. The cost is US $49.95 to download and US $59.95 for a CD disc. It is certainly worth the price and I will buy it soon.

Sound Studio http://www.felttip.com/

MACinations December 04