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Very interesting to hear about your experience,
Mary. In my experience, switching to digital has been very satisfying
photographically, but expensive in terms of equipment. I'm finding now that I
need a new desktop computer as my Pentium 3 groans under the load of Photoshop
and large picture files. There's still that laptop to be bought and the
projector.
Digital may be fun, but it eats mega $$$. And those
hort presentations, at least in Canada, earn you maybe $150-$350 a pop. I'd love
the equipment, and I may get it in the end, but it's hard to justify the expense
when you do maybe five to 10 talks a season, as I do. Still, I'm
tempted.
Yvonne Cunnington
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2005 11:41
PM
Subject: [GWL] Re: potential
problem
I used to work for a large garden center chain in Minneapolis.
I did lots of presentations using their digital projection equipment with my
own laptop. The articles I was writing then accepted either slides or high res
digital images. Though I had been taking slides for years and had a large
collection, including many from those sources that are "drying up", those
experiences really started me on the digital path. When I was "down-sized", I
began lecturing (among other things) as a freelancer.
I'm really a
small potatoes garden lecturer, I suppose. I did only 29 garden programs last
year and have only 10 booked so far for 2005. I bought a digital camera and
began collecting digital "slides" in 2001. I began offering programs in
digital format as I accumulated enough pictures for each topic. A year later,
I bought a small digital projector. Mine cost $1200 - (a business expense) and
comparable ones are today in the $1000 range. In the last two years, I have
not given a slide presentation at all. I would like to acquire a suitable film
scanner and salvage my 35 mm slides to use digitally.
I don't like to
use PowerPoint either. I use Keynote from Apple. My laptop is a PowerBook. The
color is as good as my slides ever were or can be enhanced with a photo
editor. I use Photoshop Elements. There are some color problems inherent with
digital media similar to the ageratum effect with film. My clients are
extremely happy with the quality of the images. They cannot be told from
slides unless you are an expert in those subtleties I mentioned.
My
presentations with Keynote are exactly the same as my slide presentations with
the exception of the fact that I can easily add text slides if I wish. I can
add text (that Latin binomial) or other computer generated marks to the
pictures themselves. Keynote is a graphic presentation application that
permits text and PowerPoint is a business application that permits graphics.
Keynote will even import and run PowerPoint presentations if you already have
some. It was simple to learn too.
I would highly recommend that anyone
who does more than two or three presentations a year consider getting a
digital projector - as I said - it's a business expense taxwise. They are now
very light weight and more affordable than mine was in 2001. With a laptop and
the projector, you can handle most opportunities you may be offered. I request
the organization I'm working for to provide a screen. If they don't, I use a
wall. It works fine.
Since I work this way now, it has been a good
thing for me to find that I can still get the latest specialty plant images as
digital files from websites, often without even having to ask. I no longer buy
film (digital media just keeps getting cheaper) and never have processing
fees. I can take as many shots as I can and cull all I want without losing
anything but my time.
It's like paper checks. I shall soundly hate to
go to debit or credit cards only because I don't want to have to change the
way I manage my money, but it's the way the world is going and it's not going
back.
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