Anyone still projecting?

[guangong]

ETN, what a great story!

 

[tomfrh]

make a selection of the best 20-30 pictures and leave it at that. 50 at the very maximum

I agree with the "less is more" philosophy.
20-50 makes sense.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

A lot to be said for a 4K 75" UHDTV and a scanned display. The background music, fades, titles, credits, and index selection makes for interesting presentations. You can turn the show on in the middle of the football game.

You can have the greatest slides. But if your guests fall asleep or excuse themselves and leave early due to a "headache", like they use to in the old days, they're not going to see them.

 

[OlyMan]

...make a selection of the best 20-30 pictures and leave it at that. 50 at the very maximum.

^^ This is some of the best advice. Keep it short and interesting. With two projectors each with 80-slot Carousels it's not unusual for me to fit three or four shows into a pair of mags. In fact this was one reason I chose to move over to Kodak Carousels from the Rolleis I had previously that took straight mags: storing between 3-4 shows in a pair of rotaries takes up much less room than in straight magazines, because I need less of them.

 

[AgX]

This is the first time I read that circular magazines/trays take less space than the straight ones. And I do not see how. To be fair, I only got two german types of circular magazines and no Kodak one.

 

[OlyMan]

This is the first time I read that circular magazines/trays take less space than the straight ones. And I do not see how. To be fair, I only got two german types of circular magazines and no Kodak one.

The Kodak rotaries take 80 slides each. If you estimate that the average slideshow is between 30-40 slides split between two crossfaded magazines (i.e. 15-20 in each), you can fit between 4-5 shows per pair of mags. With straight magazines you can really only fit 2-3 shows per pair at best (with 50-capacity mags) and are left with wasted slots you can't use.

 

[FujiLove]

I agree. I have a proper projection screen, but I prefer to point the projector at a white wall. The image is just as good, and I really like having a magic window open up on the wall.

Really? Thanks for saving me money and a load of hassle

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

The Kodak rotaries take 80 slides each. If you estimate that the average slideshow is between 30-40 slides split between two crossfaded magazines (i.e. 15-20 in each), you can fit between 4-5 shows per pair of mags. With straight magazines you can really only fit 2-3 shows per pair at best (with 50-capacity mags) and are left with wasted slots you can't use.

At 5 seconds a picture that's about 3-4 minutes for a show. 30-40 seems too short to cover much of a vacation.

 

[OlyMan]

You're not factoring in cross-fade time. Unless the subject of the show demands quick changes, you're talking closer to 10-15 sec per slide including the time where it is cross-faded with its predecessor and successor.

 

[etn]

At 5 seconds a picture that's about 3-4 minutes for a show. 30-40 seems too short to cover much of a vacation.

I realized that people do not mind watching “good” pictures longer, maybe 30s to a minute. A similar amount of time is spent looking at individual pictures at an exhibition. This makes for a 10-20 mins show. For comparison, many youtube videos (of the interesting and informative kind) are of similar duration.

 

[Alan Gales]

I realized that people do not mind watching “good” pictures longer, maybe 30s to a minute. A similar amount of time is spent looking at individual pictures at an exhibition. This makes for a 10-20 mins show. For comparison, many youtube videos (of the interesting and informative kind) are of similar duration.

It's the same in Germany, huh? Everyone here in the U.S. has a very short attention span any more.

 

[AgX]

I think in general the attitude of viewers has changed. As still projection shows got utmost scarce, I refer to current moving images: fast cuts, fast zooms and the prerequisite of the camera operator to have Parkinson disease.

But for myself a slow pace on the other hand is not a guarantee that I remain watching. It must be intriguing, somehow.

 

[tomfrh]

30-40 seems too short to cover much of a vacation

Interesting the different numbers people come up with. 30-40 should be enough in my opinion, as one’s own experiences simply aren’t as interesting to other people as they are to you.

The way I look at at - a national geographic photo story may have 20 or so photos, out of thousands shot. If photos of that caliber can be pruned down to a couple of dozen shots, then my trip down the south coast can too.

 

[guangong]

I get the impression that most of the responders to this thread only project pictures of their vacations, which is something I don’t really do. This begs the question: Just what do most people who use slide film shoot?

 

[Malcolm Stewart]

I project 35mm. 5x4.5, 6v7, and 6x9 in both color and b/w. I have several projectors: a very small Leitz traveling projector, a 35mm manual Prado, a Pradovit 250, a Prado 500 and a Linhof for 6x7(also made by Leitz). ....

I'm in the UK, and in the corner of my lounge, I still have two Kodak Carousel projectors set up for stereo projection, as well as several Leitz projectors in storage. A decade or more ago I gave a 3D slide show to the UK Stereoscopic Society at one of their Coventry meetings. The subject matter was pairs of images taken by the NASA(?) Hipparchus project and attempted to show the galaxies in 3D. (Can't remember how I got the images from the computer monitor onto slides...) I think some of us could see the effect!
I think digital, and particularly phone photography with poor technical quality, but having a high transient interest has changed this area, probably for ever.

 

[OlyMan]

I get the impression that most of the responders to this thread only project pictures of their vacations, which is something I don’t really do. This begs the question: Just what do most people who use slide film shoot?

I'm an outdoors type and I like going places, mostly I shoot places I visit, but I don't really go places just to shoot. I have shot on vacations obviously, but only rarely do I actually shoot the people I'm with except to add context. I.e they might be in the photo but they won't be the main subject. Generally I'm trying to capture the mood and convey in vision and audio a sense of whatever it is that's making the experience special for me. If I'm showing the slides to someone who wasn't there, I want them to get a taste of the experience. That's what I try to keep in mind both when I'm shooting and when I'm compiling the slideshow.

It's very usual for me to do the clichéd photo of a family member stood near some national landmark etc. Might do that on the smartphone for a Facebook update, but I won't waste the film.

 

[tessar]

I have a large collection of Kodachrome slides, some shot by my father which date back to the 1940s amd '50s, later ones shot by me right up till the death of Kodachrome. The colors of the old Kodachromes have hardly faded at all. There's nothing like seeing them projected on a good-quality screen. Young people used to seeing images on a video monitor are always impressed

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Interesting the different numbers people come up with. 30-40 should be enough in my opinion, as one’s own experiences simply aren’t as interesting to other people as they are to you.

The way I look at at - a national geographic photo story may have 20 or so photos, out of thousands shot. If photos of that caliber can be pruned down to a couple of dozen shots, then my trip down the south coast can too.

I create the slide show basically for myself and family. So if it runs 20 minutes , that's OK. But I don't kid myself that friends and family members who didn't go on the trip are really interested. The short shows that have music and caption and stuff like that appear to get a kind reception. But they're probably lying and hate me for making them watch. Someone posted that 30 seconds seems about right to view each picture. Who wants to looks at someone else's picture for that long? I don't want to look at my own for that time, much less 5 different angles shot of the Parthenon or twenty different pictures of someone's granddaughter. Did anyone ever ask you to swipe through their cell phone's pictures of their kids? No storyline, just one picture of the snotty kid after another. You want to shoot yourself.

Even beautiful pictures can get old pretty quick. My camera club invited a pro to give a lecture. He's into flowers. We saw a 40 minute slide show (digital) of every flower that God ever made, it seemed like. All very pretty and all very boring. In that case I wanted to shoot the pro.

 

[OlyMan]

I create the slide show basically for myself and family. So if it runs 20 minutes , that's OK. But I don't kid myself that friends and family members who didn't go on the trip are really interested. The short shows that have music and caption and stuff like that appear to get a kind reception. But they're probably lying and hate me for making them watch. Someone posted that 30 seconds seems about right to view each picture. Who wants to looks at someone else's picture for that long? I don't want to look at my own for that time, much less 5 different angles shot of the Parthenon or twenty different pictures of someone's granddaughter. Did anyone ever ask you to swipe through their cell phone's pictures of their kids? No storyline, just one picture of the snotty kid after another. You want to shoot yourself.

Even beautiful pictures can get old pretty quick. My camera club invited a pro to give a lecture. He's into flowers. We saw a 40 minute slide show (digital) of every flower that God ever made, it seemed like. All very pretty and all very boring. In that case I wanted to shoot the pro.

There was a book by Brian Duncalf, first printed nearly 40 years ago now, called The Focal Guide To Slide Tape. Although the technology has moved on, the are still many truths with its pages, and I still see it as a bit of a bible. One of the truths is that when presenting to a generalist audience with mixed interests, most slideshows of the same subject longer than 15 mins are probably going to bore at least half the audience suicidal. Exceptions might be specialist subjects presented to like-minded enthusiasts, for example the 40 minute slideshow you had to endure would probably have been of great interest to a botanist or someone fascinated by floriculture.

Making a great slideshow which will capture the interest of your audience is far more than just a stringing nice photos together one after the other to some appropriate background music. It's almost a completely different discipline, albeit that you can't make great slideshows with cr-p photos.

 

[AgX]

Strange enough I hardly come across old literature on slide presentations. I find it even more likely to come across books on police-, stereo- or aerial-photography

 

[OlyMan]

Strange enough I hardly come across old literature on slide presentations. I find it even more likely to come across books on police-, stereo- or aerial-photography

Correct there are not many. Not sure if you will find any in your native language, but the aforementioned Focal Guide To Slide Tape is not too difficult to find if you look for it on UK eBay, in fact there are currently three listed. Front cover looks like this:

Not written too formally, I've read it cover to cover at least five times in 30+ years because it's just just a really inspiring read.