A Nocturnal Road Trip
...The Slide Show
For
a while now, I've had this idea that I wanted to put together a slide show
-- just something which would display a handful of images to give new visitors
an idea of what this site is about.
Music plays an important part in my night photography, both when I'm heading down the highway by moonlight and when I'm working on the web site. It helps create an atmosphere and seems to influence the mood of my photos. Rather than just flipping through a series of pictures in silence, I wanted to try presenting the images along with music, so the slide show eventually evolved into a RealMedia video. I call it "A Nocturnal Road Trip".
This is the way I remember my night shooting road trips -- as a blur of experiences and places, accompanied by a sound track of whatever was on the stereo in the Starving Artist Van at the time. I've attempted to share the road trip experience in this virtual realm, with a sampling of night images set to the music of Grammy-nominated Composer/Multi-Instrumentalist Patrick O'Hearn. Hope you like it!
By the way, if you find yourself as captivated by the music as I was, be sure to visit Patrick's web site. There you can check out more of his work, plus listen to full length samples from his new CD Beautiful World. I have this one and it's great! You can order it right there on his web site.
Watching the show:
Because thumbnail sized images and telephone quality sound would render the whole exercise pointless, I've created the video to run at 675X450 with full quality stereo sound. At this resolution it is quite watchable in full screen mode too. The disadvantage, of course, is that the show is quite demanding on both connection speed and CPU resources.
To
view the show online in real time, you
will need a very good high speed connection. If you are connecting via standard
telephone modem or your Cable/DSL provider's service is less than promised,
you will run into trouble streaming this video. For these situations and for
those of you with dial up modems and lots of spare time, I have also provided
a button where you can download the show before viewing. The project weighs
in at just under 17 MB, so if you actually take the time to download
it on a dialup connection, I sincerely and humbly thank you. You are a true
night photography fan! :)
You will need at least a Pentium II/350Mhz with lots of RAM and a good graphics card to view the show with perfectly smooth movement and transitions. I wish I knew a bit more about Macs, but if you have one, you probably know what would be a suitable Mac equivalent. I have also ran into problems with smoothness of motion on PCs with shared video ram, and on some laptop screens. If you have trouble, try watching it full screen. For some reason it actually works better this way on certain systems. Sorry about all the bad news but I hope the results will be worth it, so if you think your system has a chance, why not give it a try?
To watch the show you will need a RealMedia player installed on your system. If you don't have one already, you can download it free from Real Networks here. When installing it, take an extra moment and avoid the express setup. That way you can choose which file types it will play and which should remain with your existing software.
Hope you enjoy the show! I'm very interested in your thoughts on it and your experiences with downloading, streaming and viewing it. Feel free to e-mail me with any comments.