Barry Beckham

Jeff I am not sure I can find two Av's under 7 minutes combined, if I read it right, so the two entries being from different people will attract the full £20 I expect. What does the entrance fee fund, do you know?

Great photography here. Good seeing eye and lots of variety. It does make you want to visit China, when you see a sequence like this. The music was good, but I agree with someone else who said it could have done with a bit more variety there, but it is a small point. I liked the simplify affects too. I am not so keen on such big text, I think it will be just as easy to read if it were smaller. Smaller seems to be more stylish to me, but again its a small point and more of a personal one.

Well, they certainly bury the entry form well, so you have to seach for ages to find it and then they want £10 per entry. I was thinking of sending one from me and the other half, but that seems rather a lot of money to enter an AV competition.

Now, how would you define ‘Dramatic images’ in your terms? Anything that stands out from the run of the mill photography. and do you have any? Obviously not.

Davy Define good weather in the terms you mean here?

But good weather is no guarrantee of good images, in fact the most dramatic images are often shot in not so good weather.

I think emoticons can have a use in forums because its important sometimes to let people know, what your saying is being said with a smile. Or an attempt at humour can be misread and dummies start flying out of prams.

Greg Why did you have to ask that question. The truth is I havn't seen it.

Davy The humour on this occasion went over my head, sorry. Forums can be a great source of information, but they are also notorious for making life far more complex than it needs to be on accoasions. I was more concerned about others who pick up on the post and think they must create a show above 20MB.

Davy Not sure why, but I'm going along with Barry B's advice, that all AV's should now be above 20mb in size I managed to pad this one out, to tip the scales at just over. Firstly, you seem to have the wrong end of the stick. I have never given advice that a slide show should be over 20 MB. I am in favour of keeping them as small as possible, while retaining quality. The size is determined by the content of the images anyway. Secondly, if you don't know why your doing something, then don't do it. What possible advantage is there to padding out a show to be larger than 20MB. Not sure where you got that from. The 20MB is a limit one member places on slide shows and he will not download any over that limit. That is a personal choice, but he will change his mind or sooner or later he will have precious little to download. The size of our slide shows are generally increasing naturally as we move more towards larger wide screen format images, but it will be greatly affected by the Jpg compression the author chooses and the content of the images. I suspect there is a large size increase on the way when Version 7 is released and video is included. At the moment a slide show ends up the size it ends up, there is no benefit I can see for deliberately making your show larger.

Well, I wouldn't exactly call them rejects, I must have seen some merit in them to produce them, they are just images that havn't yet found their way into an AV

I have no expereience of HDMI and TV, but is this method similer to creating a dvd. For an exe file we normally tick the fixed size of slide option, but for a DVD you need to untick it. Try that, but you will have a black area left and right of course. You will have to live with that while your still with 4:3 or 5:4 format.

This is a simple image presentation, what I call a slide show, that term that seems to upset so many of you It contains images I have created in 2010, but those that never made it into any slide shows I created during the year. Well, as far as memory allows, one or two may have. Download from the top of the page HERE for PC and Mac Best viewed at 1920*1200, but should run reasonably OK on all monitors.

Dadou I think the use of the picture in picture in this show worked very well and I can say that the animation was flawless on my computer. Smooth as silk. Your images made at 16:10 format 1728*1080 would not be quite a crisp on my PC because my monitor runs at 1920 * 1200. I saw your show full screen, which was nice, but to see the images the size you created them, I should have had a border all the way around the images. The fact that I didn't, meant your images must have been enlarged slightly and quality may be lost, although I have to say there was not too much evidence of that. Looks like a great festival, but all in a tight area, must have been difficult to photograph. For those involved with the fiesta, I think and 7:47 minute show is fine, but for me, perhaps 2 -3 minutes less would be better. After 5 minutes I have the flavour of the festival, which the music helped, and I have seen a wide variety of images. So an ending around 5 minutes would have improved it for me. You were blessed with fine weather too at a time when the worlds weather seems to be going mad !!

Eric No, the images are not HDR, you will not be very sucessful with HDR with any moving subjects and the sea tends to move a bit The secret is making sure you capture the best exposure possible, at the right time and the rest is Photoshop work. I never did say anything about Pacific Islands, you did in the Amazon search engines. I have a good Enya collection, but usually steer well clear of that music, simply because that is where all AV'ers seem to head for. Sometimes its OK to follow the crowd, sometimes not. The sequence does have some sea sounds effects that come in a short time after the start, but I kept them low, or they can often just make the music sound as though there is a fault with it.

Eric Thank you for the pointers, but I confess I found it a little ledious and soon started to loose the will to live, searching on Amazon. I don't usually have this trouble finding music, but it has to happen sometimes I suppose. I have settled and changed the music to a simple pianno piece from our own copyright free music called appropriatley "The Sea at Sunset" Good news too, the slide show is under 20Mb How about that?

Thank you for the suggestions, but Debussey didn't do much for me, not for these images, and amazon doesn't seem to have samples of all the albums, only those which sell as mp3 downloads.

Eric In fact I have been through all those albums and hundreds more of my own, including classical, but I cannot find anything that shouts "Perfect" to me. It happenes sometimes. Having 37 albums to call from is no guarrantee of finding the perfect choice. I tried again today and listened to loads of other music tracks and I still can't find something that I think is perfect for the images. Suggestions gratefully accepted. Those pictures demand the right music, I just need to find it.

Maureen I am not over struck on the music myself, it was the best I could find at the time. but if anything better came up I would consider a change.

Here is another new sequence, called The South Pacific. Download HERE, top of the page for PC and Mac

Ken and Dadou I ran the show on my older PC and then on my old laptop and I cannot recreate what your describing. There was a little error in the animation end point of the first slide, cause by all my changes, perhaps it was that which caused the jerk, but all animations have smooth starts and finishes and I am not seeing any technical issues, even on the old laptop. The longest animation is the first one and that is only 18 seconds from start to finish. Those viewing on lower resolution monitors, may see a little of the moire effect, so I have ticked the anti shimmering box. I am not a great fan of spending good money and effort to get sharp images and then softening the image in PTE, but needs must I suppose. Dadou Point taken, the short transitions could do with a tightening up. I have reduced them to 500 in the transition length, anything less doesn't look right to me, a bit too quick. I will upload this version to my web site after I have viewed it a few more times, just to make sure I am happy with it. Gayland What a nice smile you have, thank you for that.

Ken and others You do mean transitions and not animations don't you? Its not usual to have any problem with transitions, no matter what size the images are. I will have to test the show on another machine to see if I can see what your seeing. On my machine there are no technical isses at all. Daniel I'll take a look, already fiddled with the short transitions quite a bit and I am at the stage where I seem to make a change, every time I view the show. I need a day or two away from it and then come back I think.

Well Maureen, what do you make of that. Praise indeed and not a word about the ..shhhh (you know what). What makes this sequence work so well for me, is the atmosphere you have captured. If you have ever been to the lakes in any time but summer, this is the sort of sequence that transports you back, not just with the images. Its the atmpsphere which seems to invoke memories, the cold air, the smells etc. This is the time when the end result is far greater than the two parts. The A and the V I think you should be banned from the lake district now though, give some other poor soles a chance

Despite Gaylands views, I have been working on another version in light of peoples views. PC only for the moment below. Its a different style completely, and the birds twittereing didn't seem to fit in this version, but I have kept the rain in. Download from Here

Gayland Oh dear. I nearly caught your dummy as it flew out of the pram, but thrown with such vigour, I missed it. At least I stired you into a response. but you have missed the point, again. I have been working on the same slide show, taking on board some of the comments made, to see if I could get it more to my liking. I prbably have to be honest. Apart from the frame of course. Relax mate and recognice when someone is smiling at you, when their talking.