I’ve been looking recently at new ways to promote my photography online and, as an experiment, have created a ‘video scrapbook’ of some of my best work…
Video Scrapbook
Below is the video, which I have uploaded to my YouTube channel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0BNDkJrGqU
As you can see, it is basically a slideshow of my photos set to music. The featured photos include a range of my most popular photos (and some of my favourites), including pictures of Newcastle’s Quayside, Niagara Falls and the New York Skyline.
Music
The music in the video is a piece called ‘Pacific’ by Psychadelik Pedestrian. I found this music on http://freemusicarchive.org/, which has a number of tracks available. Since this is an experimental video and I do not intend to monetise it, I decided to go for this track, which is available for non-commercial use, but there are some tracks there that you could use in a monetised video.
The Video
The video itself is made in Windows Movie Maker, which is free and was already installed on my Windows 7 machine.
You can load photos into it to create a slideshow, and then set up the transitions between them as well as the panning effect using the animations tab. I had to crop my landscape images to 16:9 in order for them to fit into the video properly without black borders. I cropped the portrait images to square ones to minimise the black edges.
I experimented with a range of transition effects, including a page turning effect that made it look like a proper scrapbook. However, I felt that it didn’t look professional enough, so I went with the circle wipe instead.
Final Thoughts
I thought this was an interesting idea, and a good way to show off my photos in a more dynamic way. I have plans for more such videos that have more specific themes, but this video is just an experiment to show off my best work. I’m intrigued to know what people think of it…