Take your Friends on a Walk While They Stay at Home

Why not take your friends on a walk while they stay at home? It’s easy to do. Just grab that digital camera and head out to your favorite trail. Since you’ll be taking a lot of pictures, make sure your memory card can hold enough pictures; otherwise you’ll need a spare card, and why not bring along some extra batteries, just in case. You can carefully frame each shot, or, if you have a camera strap long enough, you can let the camera hang from your neck and shoot from there. Start with a shot of your car, the door being opened, the trailhead, and then start out.

Every twenty yards or so, take a picture. If you shoot nothing but straight ahead shots you can assemble them later into a stop-motion-frame effect slideshow. If you want to take some side shots or close-ups of flowers, etc., you’ll have to do some editing later. As you walk, keep in mind what you might be saying to your ‘imaginary’ trail partners. Later, when you assemble the slideshow, you’ll want to add a narrative.
You could also take your shots in a pattern: walk twenty yards, shoot 45 degrees to your left, one straight ahead, and one off to your right. Walk another twenty yards and repeat the pattern, over and over. You could vary the pattern of picture taking on different parts of the trail. Where the trail is thick with trees on the sides, just shoot straight ahead. If the trail circumscribes a lake or river, then shoot one towards the water, one towards the trail, and repeat.

When you come to a particularly scenic place, you could shoot a 360-degree pan. Simply start straight ahead; take note of what detail is in the upper right hand corner of your viewer, take the shot, then move that detail to the upper left corner and shoot; take note of any object in the upper right corner, move it to the left corner, shoot, and repeat until you are facing forward again. At the end of the hike, you might want to take a time-delay self-portrait. Set the camera on a safe, level surface, look through the viewfinder and note what’s in the frame and where you should stand; hit the delay button and run over and strike your best trailblazer pose. Review the shot to make sure you are in the picture! Now head on back home for the really fun part.

After you transfer all the pictures to your computer, take a program like Windows Movie Maker and load in your images; they should be pretty close to the right order. Once you get them arranged, decide how long you want to show each picture; set the length of the first one to this value and apply it to all the others. Make a note of the length of the entire show.

Now fire up a program like Avnex’s Voice Changer Software Diamond 5.0. With that little gem you can create an impressive narration to complete your slideshow. Try the voice morpher module. You can enrich your voice with just a few simple adjustments to sound like a professional voiceover talent. I like to drop the pitch and timbre just a few notches, and my voice comes out like a Darth Vader wannabe. Because you can add more than one sound file, think about adding some sound effects to the presentation as well. It’s always a good idea to adjust the volume of the sound effects to be softer than the narrative; you don’t want the sounds to overpower the vocal. Voice Changer can also allow you to alter your voice dynamically, so that you could add a second or even a third voice to the narrative. If your narrative comes out a little long or a little short, consider simply adjusting one or two or a few slide lengths, especially at the beginning or the end.

Once you’ve completed and saved the project, give your friends a call. Tell them you want to go hiking with them. Tell them to meet you at your house. When they arrive invite them in, and sit them down. When they ask what’s going on, start the slideshow! Be sure to have plenty of refreshments on hand, in case they get a little restless. I hope they enjoy the walk!