Some of you know I've been photographing my niece, Rachel, for the past year. She was born on February 24 and just celebrated her first birthday last Thursday. Her 11 month portrait can be seen in the current gallery here: http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/gallery/lmurphy.html Most of the images were day-to-day types of things with occassional formal portraits thown in for good measure (and because this past year I bought new studio lights). Undecided about how to present the images to Rachel's parents (my sister and her hubby) I finally settled on the idea of a multimedia presention on dvd. What an incredible experience this has been. I began building the presentation 3 weeks ago by converting all the digital images to bw in Photoshop. These were then put in chronological order and renumbered in PS before I began building the presentation in Roxio Multimedia 7. I added music from several of Rachel's music cds...mostly very soft baby/child music on either guitar or piano. These were clipped and edited to remove dead air space between songs so one flowed into the next. Again, this was done from within Roxio. I placed a slow-fade transition between each image which is very easy on the eyes. There ended up being almost 400 images in the final presentation which I finished last night and will present at Rachel's big birthday bash this afternoon. All this is really a long way of saying that seeing what are traditionally still images moving on a tv screen, presented with music is a very powerful way to view photographs. This is the first time I've seen my work this way and it's as if a door to a whole new world has opened to me...and it will be a door I will enjoy traveling through again and again. I encourage those of you who are so inclined to give it a try. Rachel's first year has come to an end and officially my project is over but I've still not missed a day of shooting...so this may become a two year project. We'll just have to see. Lea Murphy Photography www.whinydogpress.com
