How To Make A Photo Montage Slide Show

How often do you dig out that shoe box of old photos anymore? Or when was the last time you had friends over to look at slides, or flip through your old photo albums?

Weddings are a good time to look back at how you got to where you are now, but sometimes its just to much of a pain to put something together from the pictures!

Let me start off by saying that one of the services I offer is making a Photo Montage from your photos or slides. Some people call it a Video Scrap book, or a photo to video conversion. What ever you would like to call it is fine with me, right? What I do is start with a stack of photos, and when its all done, you have a video that you can watch on your big screen at home.

Now, lets say you'd like to have one of these made. The first few steps are the same, regardless of who actually makes the end product, so we'll just kind of go through the steps together, ok?

Step 1. What is the program about? This is really important! The biggest reason that family slide shows are so boring is there is no theme. You just show the whole stack of slides in your collection. Actually that is two reasons its so boring... no theme, and no "editing". So your first step is to define what you want to do with the pictures. Who is your subject. For weddings, I'd recommend that most of the photos are the Bride and Groom, as they grow up. You can put in a few of siblings and parents, since they'll probably be known to most people who will be watching this, but the Bride and Groom are your Stars.

Step 2. Great, you know why you're doing this, and who will be in it. Now you can start going through the shoe boxes, the old albums, the slides, and maybe even the home movies and family videos. At the moment, I don't offer home movie transfer, but I can work with most formats of home video. But you can ask about this, and I may be offering it in the future, or know someone who is.

For any still image, picture, slide, etc, plan on it being on the screen for between 5 and 10 seconds. Anything longer, and in my experience, people will start to get bored. We are in a fast moving society I guess or something, but we have a very short attention span. So we'll try to keep it moving.

Something that we can do to spice things up is to add motion to the photo. For example, if you've seen those documentaries on TV with the old photos, the camera slowly pans across the photo, zooms in to a single person, etc. If there is motion like this, you could have that single picture on the screen quite a long time, and people would keep interest in it.

Depending on how you expect to show this masterpiece, I'd recommend keeping it to less than 150 photos. If you go 8 seconds per photo (on average), 8 x 150 = 1200 seconds, or 20 minutes. People are expecting a commercial break at the 12 - 15 minute mark now, so by 20 minutes you're starting to stretch them a bit. If you have a lot of photos, you may consider making several shorter programs.

A word on editing: Editing is a brutal art. You have to cut until it hurts! People are expecting the very best, and we have become jaded. So you'll start off with way too many pictures, that's ok. Now go through them again, and find the very best ones. Start listening to music as you look at the pics, and you'll get in a rhythm.

All about music... I'm not going to get into the issues about using copywrited music here. Lets just assume that you have a piece of music that you would like to use with your photos. In your early stage editing, you can just listen to the music, and every so many seconds, flip to the next picture. Its a great way to feel the timing, and imagine how it will be on the screen. By adjusting how long each photo is on screen, you can control the tempo of the show. Slow song, slower pictures, fast song, maybe 4 seconds per picture.

Ok, now you have the photos picked out, and some music. Great! That was really the hardest part, so congratulations! What I would recommend is to number the photos in the order you want them to appear. Do this carefully! You could use some post it notes, or lightly pencil the numbers on the back, or something else like that. Post its are handy, they come off easily, and if you want to change the order, you can just pull them off, and put them on again. The problem is that they do come off!
If you have groups of photos that should stay together, put them in zip lock bags. Then label the bag! If music goes with a specific group, you could put the CD in the bag with the pics, for example. If you were going to put titles in, you could draw out what you wanted on paper and include that with the group, etc. The more time you spend at this stage, the easier it goes from here on, so take your time.

How long will this take? Less than a year, more than a day! I am talking about the time it will take to find and sort the photos. It can be a lot more work than you would imagine. But its fun, especially if you have enough time to enjoy it!

Step 3. Yeah, I know, Step 2 was a long one! In Step 3, we have some choices here. This is where you have to decide if you're up to the job of making the video, or if you'd like to hire some help. I'll cover the basic steps, and maybe you'll decide you could do this yourself!

First, are you going to use a computer to make a video, or would you use your video camera instead? Lets see how the video camera idea works out, ok? You could set up a video camera, and just record each photo for a few seconds. Hit Pause, change photos, adjust your shot, hit record for a few seconds, hit pause, change pics and set up, repeat. This used to be the only way to really do this. There are some advantages to this, and also some disadvantages. On the plus side, it can be pretty quick. If you have a decent video camera, the quality is going to be very good, if you have enough light and can avoid reflections on the pictures. One of the limiting factors here is it is very difficult to do a smooth move across the picture or control your zooms, etc. I have seen motion rigs that cost thousands of dollars, made specifically for this. But, its worth a try, and you might just have fun. Tape is cheap, right?

For now, we'll go through the video camera method from start to finish, just to show you it can be done. Lets say you've gone through all the photos, and have them all on the tape now. Rewind it, and hit play. You should see all your photos on your TV. How does it look? You could also hit Play on your CD player and get the music going, and see how it looks with music. If all is well, you could make your video now. All you'd do is hook the video cable from your camera to your VCR, and the sound cable from your CD player to the audio ports on your VCR, hit Play on both and Record on the VCR, and let it roll. If you'd like to adjust the timing, you could pause the camera on some pictures, to make them "longer" on the tape, etc. This is really the simplest way, but it soon becomes obvious it is not very flexible.

You could also use a digital still camera and take pictures of the pictures. I do this sometimes, and again, if you can avoid the reflections, the quality is pretty good. Sometimes even great! Many digital cameras can be hooked to a TV for viewing, if this is the case with yours, you can finish this to tape the same as the video camera above.

My personal favorite way is to use a photo scanner, hooked up to a computer. I scan each photo, in order, so that they are numbered on the computer the same way they were numbered in the begining.

Here is a side note. Many of your photos may be digital already, so you can skip some of the hard parts right? Our goal is to either get the photo onto video tape, or onto the computer, as a digital image.

Here several of the methods sort of merge. If you have digital pics, or have scanned the pics into digital, they're pretty much the same now. An advantage of having them in the "digital world" is that you can edit them easier. Want to crop a picture? Or make it black and white? Or blur the background, or anything else you can imagine? Computers are your friend!

I'm going to make a few wild assumpions here, so hang in there ok? If you have a digital camera, it probably came with some software to let you work with the pictures. Most scanners also come with picture editing software. So far, so good, right?

Now lets say you've gone through all the photos, you've removed red eyes, you've cropped the pictures to help make them more interesting, you've done some black and whites, you maybe even added "picture frames" to some of them. Books could be, and probably have been written on this subject! What is next?

You'll also need software to make the pictures into a movie. If you have a video camera, odds are it came with software that will do this just fine. There are lots of different levels and brands of software, so I'm not going to get into details here. If you have something, and would like to ask me about it, feel free to email me. There is a link on this page somewhere to do that! But let me go through some basic steps that should work with most of the movie softwares. If you have a newer Apple or Windows XP, you probably have a free movie maker program that came with the computer.

First, you would "import" the pictures into the movie making program. Then usually you would put the pictures on a "time line". Then you could add music. At this point, you could probably just hit a Play button and see how it looks. The great part about doing this on a computer, as opposed to doing it with a video camera as above, is you can make changes more easily. Want to change the order of some pictures? Just grab them and move them on the time line. New song? No problem, just put it in, and move or delete theold one. Want to fade pictures into the next one? That is usually called a cross fade transition. Most programs will have help or tutorials that will get you started.

Now we have it just perfect! How do we show it to people? Lets assume that its not practical for you to bring everyone to your house, or to bring your computer with you. You could either make a DVD, a VHS tape, or maybe even a computer file to put on a web page. How cool is that?

If your computer has a DVD or CD recorder, it probably came with software to make movies on disk. Your movie making software that you made the video on may also have features to "burn to disk". I have no idea what your computer came with! Usually, though, you would "Export" the movie to some kind of file. Then you would take that file to the disk burning software, and it would convert the program into a CD or DVD.

If you'd liketo put the movie on the web, you'd convert your file into a web compatible format, and then find a website to put it on. If you have a personal website already, you could probably just use that, or there are websites that let you post your video clips for free sometimes.

You might even be able to just hook your VCR to your computer, and play the movie out to the VCR. Look on your computer, and see if it has a TV Out port that looks like the Red White Yellow jacks on your VCR. Not all computers have this, but if they do, it can be pretty simple.

Well, that is just about it. The secone one is easy!

Lets say this all sounds great, but you just don't want to do it yourself. I offer this as a service, if you send me the photos and the music, I can make the DVD and mail it back to you. My rates start at $1 per picture and $5 per song, and videos are $17.95 each. So, for example, you have 3 songs, 75 pictures, and want 2 copies.
3 x $5 (song) = $15
$75 for the pictures,
2 x 17.95 = $35.90,
and the total would be $125.90.
Considering that might take you a day or two to do yourself, and its not so bad! I looked into this a few years ago, and I saw websites that were charging $5 per photo. I also know a few people who have done it all themselves the first time, they are now bringing the projects to me!

There you have it! If you're interested in doing something like this, please email me at
mailto:bluestar@televar.com?subject=Lens Tales Blog Response

Thanks for reading!
Carlin