Finally the world is ready for my vacation pictures

It's been a while since my last post here. Not for lack of picture-taking or writing-desire. On the contrary, during my annual voyage to the United States (with side trips to Canada and Iceland) in September, I took a couple of thousand. So instead of blogging, I have actually been busy selecting, post-processing, and organizing those pictures.

Out of the approximately 2000 pictures taken, I have saved around 400 to what I call my Master Collection. They are the pictures that I like, as well as those I want to keep for other reasons, like an important moment captured.

The challenge is to present some of those pictures. When you are an amateur photographer you go back and forth between loving and loathing your own work. During the former periods when you are full of confidence in your own skills, you want to show all your pictures to everybody, and you cannot fathom if everybody is not interested in seeing all your pictures. Nonetheless, that's what the experts say: choose a few. And by "a few" they mean less than 50.

Of course, there's no way I can just pick 50 or less, so what do you do? You turn them into a slideshow, or even a movie, and you add music and cool effects, and voila, suddenly 100+ pictures go down a lot easier. So that's what I did, and I am happy enough with the result that I will share it here. I used Camtasia 9 from TechSmith, which I highly recommend. It may be primarily for screen capturing, but it works really well for slideshows too. It's easy to use, and has tons of features and tweeking options.

It should be pointed out that some of the photos used in the video were taken by my wife Peggy and her daughter Jen, who are both much better than me at getting people to pose and capturing those familiy moments that are probably much more important to save than all the landscape pictures in the world.

And while I'm giving credit to others, the music in the video is "Drive All Night" by Bruce Springsteen, "500 Miles" by Peter, Paul, and Mary, and "Way Back Home" by Band of Horses.

Later on I hope to post high definition versions of a few of the pictures included in the video - and possibly some not in the video - that I like and talk more about them and how they were taken.