Friday, August 25, 2006


Laura and Frieda in a very natural pose, showing off Laura's new line of fabric, from Free Spirit, which Laura made into this lovely throw pillow.

What you can't see is the coffee table in front of them, so just imagine it.... on the table are two books with openings cut out of the covers, each revealing a photo. It turns out that these are photo books which Laura had made from an online site called Shutterfly Studios. One book held pictures of her vacation in the wild places of Utah, and the other were shots of her family reunion in Colorado. Both were of such high quality that I assumed they were really editions of National Geographic Magazine! To be clearer, the pages were prints of digital images, some with captions, some with a single 8.5x11 image and others with several images on the page. A REAL BOOK.

I was just so impressed that I couldn't stop thinking about it. What a great way to self publish! Not to laud myself, but I am often nagged about not having a book. I know that the interested parties don't care about what I might write in this desired book. They really only want the pictures, all nicely done, all in one place. I could do that. I COULD DO THAT. I should do that.

So forgetting everything she told me, I emailed Laura for the website. It is www.shutterfly.com

I downloaded the free software and it found all the zillions of jpegs on my hard drive, and then I picked one folder to view as a slide show. WOWIE ZOWIE! Here's the deal. It shows the image and then zooms in or out on it, and then the image moves to one side, fades out and then the next one descends or drifts on, just like a Power Point presentation, without me doing anything!

I am gasping with delight!

I know how excellent this is, because yesterday I spent two hours making a new slide presentation, which could have easily have been done by this program...INSTANTLY. YIPES!

Now which shall I do first? Make a book, or collect images to be made into a slide show?

BOTH!!

7 comments:

  1. Isn't technology amazing!? I love Shutterfly and have several volumns of "snapbooks" from our family pictures. They are just little 4x6 spiral bound books with our pictures and all my captions. (So much easier than scrapbooking. Ug.)

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  2. If you really like the idea of self-publishing books, you could go to LuLu.com, choose those blogposts that you highlight in your sidebar and publish them as a book, too!! Imagine people's glee when you are speaking at a guild, and tell them they can buy Melody's "greatest hits"!! And the photos.

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  3. Anonymous3:25 PM

    Holy socks.....make a book whatever, so we can picture your enthusiasm in WOWIE,ZOWIE and YIPES whenever you discover a new technique. Your tribe enlivens you and those of us who read your blog. Oh!! but if the world could exhibit a little of your style.
    As in the words of that reknown philospher and musician L. Welk....vunnerful,vunnerful anna one, anna two, anna way to go.
    I would like to order one of your first editions.

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  4. Anonymous3:59 PM

    My son did this for his father with a years worth of photos from the swim club. It was a fabulous gift. I checked out the viovio.com site and notice that they let other people order books that have been published. So then you could just send us there and we could get a copy. There are a few weddings from this last few weeks on there. Very cool ideas for page set ups too.

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  5. Anonymous10:00 AM

    wow to the fabulous fabric! I can't wait to get my hands on some...very yummy looking, as are the ladies holding the pillow!I'm so old that I remember when artists were a scraggly old looking bunch of bohemians...

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  6. I recently discovered slideshow software too, and was so excited about how quickly and easily it could be done. As you can tell from the comments, there are many different software programs out there, some of them are free, that have different features, so you can pick and choose what you like. I like the ones that let you add music so you can completely create the mood. You can also record it on a DVD so your friends and family can watch your slideshow even when they don't use computers or have your software.

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  7. I made a wedding album for my parents (since they footed the bill!) for a thank you present, and they loved it. The options ARE limited, but, honestly, that helped me to just *get it done*!

    Best of luck on your endeavors!

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