As part of the ritual of saving travel memories over the years I have gone from single lens reflex film based still photography to Hi 8 video to point and shoot digital still photography. In my goal to carry less while traveling I have made compromises, the two biggest have been the lack of decent zoom capability and the poor video quality of digital point and shoot cameras. Over 25 years I owned only 2 single lens reflex cameras the Canon TLB and the A1 along a myriad of Canon FD lens. The A1 was a fabulous camera, but over time the bulk got to me. Along with the laptop and the Sony Hi 8 video camera, it just got to be too much, so I decided to try digital photography with an Olympus 2.1 mega pixel camera. It was my first point and shoot, the picture quality was decent but could not compare with A1 and the video feature, although advanced for its time was unusable. I also had problem with the size of the camera, my goal was to carry a point and shoot in my pocket and the Olympus did not fit. As the pixels ratcheted up and prices came down I decided to try the 5.1 mega pixel Sony DSC-P10. Great size, very good picture quality (almost equal to the A1), better video but not yet good enough to use on anything but a PC monitor. With the DSC-P10, I started experimenting with digital slide shows. After trying several applications that are no longer around, I settled on the Microsoft Digital Image Suite (it had another name when I started using). Microsoft was ahead of the game when it came to creating slide shows. Photo Story 3 ,which can now be downloaded for free here, is extremely intuitive and produces decent results with the ability to easily add an electronically generated soundtrack. Sound is key to producing a more enjoyable experience for our forced viewing audience, remember the dry 35 mm slide shows and 8 mm movies we had to sit through in our youth.
Back in June of this year before a trip to Scotland, my wife and I discussed taking the old video camera with us. I balked at carrying an extra piece of gear and decided to go examine the available technologies. I settled on another point and shoot camera, the Sony DSC-W70 (see my entries on it here). One of the key reasons from picking the DSC-W70 was its ability to create decent quality video at a 640 x 480 resolution and 30 frames per second. I am very impressed with the quality of the video and this feature is great while traveling. It is great to have one device to shoot excellent 7.1 mega pixel still pictures and very good quality videos, good enough to show on a television. It does not have all the manual adjustments of my previous cameras, but for the price it is tough to beat and it produces excellent quality stills pictures As good as my A1.
I came back from out trip to Scotland with almost 400 still pictures and about 20 minutes of video, now I needed to assemble them together into a coherent story using Microsoft's Photo Story 3.0.
Go to Part 2.
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