How To: How to Have Your Friends Not Roll Their Eyes When You Pull Out Your Travel Pictures to Share

Why is it that people tell jokes about the agony of watching a friend's travel slideshow? Is there something we need to learn? Share your pictures with grace and sensitivity.

Consider your audience.

There are four main types of potential viewers of your travel jewels:

1) People who love you so much that anything you do will be fascinating. This list probably only includes your mom, and maybe a significant other in the EARLY part of a relationship. You won't need to set up a lot of chairs for this showing and maybe Mom will even insist on bringing your favorite dessert.

2) People who love to travel, have the money to travel and have travelled. They are interested partly because your pictures will bring back their own memories, even if they travelled to different places. Be prepared to enjoy sharing and comparing travel adventures. Let your friends tell stories, and you will remind each other of more and more adventures, and no one will want the evening to end. These lucky viewers can share your pictures much more readily because they have the memories and similar pictures of their own. Refreshments will be nice but not necessary for a great time.

3) People who yearn to travel, but have no money for such luxury when they can barely buy gas and food in these days. They will act like good sports and try their best to be interested, but really it is very hard for them to see your pictures because it seems like you are leading the life they want. Your immediate gratification is hard to watch when they are heavily into delayed gratification. I am confessing to my own neuroses here, but I used to feel like a little girl with her nose pressed against the window as she is left behind when I would hear other people's great travel adventures. Now that I have finally been on my one big trip, I am much more relaxed and interested in other people's trips; I guess partly because I don't feel quite so tantalized and left out when I know I have my own trip and memories. Just be sensitive that sometimes what may come across as disinterest is just someone who is wistful for their own adventures. Comfort foods are an excellent choice for these guests..

4) Some people just are not interested in travel. They will never understand the logic of spending big money on something ephemeral when they can buy a new car or other material goodies. If they are not interested in travel for themselves, they are ikely to have a very short attention span for your pictures, no matter how awesome. Generous refreshments will be necessary to keep these friends happy.

You have to realize that your pictures are so remarkable to you partly because of the memories thay evoke and recreate. Your audience does not share the memories, so the pictures will never carry the same emotion. You can look at twenty pictures of the Eiffel Tower because you remember that day, you remember the crowds you manipulated around to get the angle, you remember how hot you were or how cold, you remember struggling with your high school French. "Excusez-moi, qu'est-il la chambre du bain?....Vite, vite, si'l vous plait." You remember the feeling of actually standing there before this famous landmark and wondering whether you will ever be back in your life. You felt the energy of the tower even before she first appeared to you as you approached it for the first time, or towering over your head as you craned your neck but still couldn't get the shot you really wanted. You have personally claimed the Eiffel Tower as "part of all that you have met." Unless you are a professional photographer, your fabulous pictures will look to your friend more like a picture they could see at any time in a travel book.

There are also four kinds of photographers.

1) Sorry to say, some people's pictures are boring and unimaginative. I would say they know who they are, but--uh, they don't. These pictures are not worth a thousand words. Here, the mom is still the best audience. She loves you, no matter what.

2) Some people take 1000 pictures and have potential, but 900 suffer from over exposure, underexposure, lopsidedness, lack of focus, decapitation, or thumbs on the lens. We all have them, but there are those who seem to have MANY of them and do not cull their pictures before they show them.

3) Some people take great pictures, but they kill them with, " I 'm not sure where this building is; it was either Italy or France. I think I have another picture of this building. Let me look back here. Hold on for just a few minutes.... Susie, was that on Tuesday or Thursday? Was that the day we had pasta for lunch? Yadda, yadda, yadda...."

4) The best photographers not only take great photos but they know how to share them with clarity, brevity, humor, and an interesting presentation. These photographers can be professionals, but they are also those special amateurs with a good eye for composition, an interesting angle, a great face, an unexpected detail. If a trip changed his life, it will show in his pictures. Beauty will speak for itself. A photograph that truly captures the glory of what you experienced will leap off the page to a viewer. When a picture is a portrait of a face, not just a snapshot, the spirit behind those eyes, or perhaps it is the body language, will help all to recognize the commonality of all human experience.

Go through your pictures and edit heavily. I know it's hard not to include EVERY view of the Eiffel Tower, but, remember, your attachment is based in the memories your audience does not share. Leave them wanting more, not hoping they never see another picture of the Eiffel Tower again in their lives. Fix up your pictures, even if you only have a basic editor. Crop out scenery that distracts but leave scenery in when it enhances. Often a person in a photo will add interest and perspective as long as the figure doesn't intrude. Brighten or darken when necessary, but don't adjust so much your pictures just look phony. Have pictures organized in some way, whether it is chronological or thematic. Your castle pictures can be shown one at a time as they occurred in your travels of England, Austria, Spain and France, or you can group all your castle pictures together, showing differences in architecture by country or century.

Show a slideshow, but keep it to no longer than 25-30 minutes. Add a little appropriate music to your show. It doesn't have to be music that is perfectly choreographed, just something thst entertains the auditory sense as well as the visual and will help your audience experience the sounds of your journey. Use gentle transitions between your pictures. They don't have to be fancy. If you do too much, they will probably just seem tedious, but a nice fadeout or other transition to the next picture tends to lead the viewer's mind to anticipate what is coming next. Only leave each picture on the screen for a few seconds. You can always pause it, and the timing being built in will help you avoid long digressions.

In the spirit of sharing pictures at its best, I have included here pictures of the joy of sharing instant pictures with an additional unique audience, the people you meet who may never have had a photograph of themselves. There also is a picture of my daughter sharing a small album of photos we brought from home. We were surprised but enlightened by their interest in where we came from and our family. I think sharing your own pictures with the people whom you photograph helps to make it feel like more of a peer relationship instead of our being the ones always intruding on their lives. When you share these pictures with your friends at home, it helps them to also recognize how much we really are all more alike than different.

A good show will a be a lot like writing a good essay in school. You might have a few introductory or concluding pictures but don't overdo it with a picture of every hug goodbye or every hug hello again. Maybe you could begin or end with something imaginative, like out take type pictures of your travel disasters or most embarrassing moments, and then move on to all the highlights of your trip. You hit a topic at a time, showing the details of that location, developing interest in that point and then wrapping it up and moving to the next point. You use a good transition element to move on to the next topic and then spend quality time exploring it, wrap it up, transition, and go to the next group of pictures that are the details for your next paragraph. You don't show pictures in paragraph four that you wrapped up in paragraph one. Share your pictures but not all your pictures. If a person is truly interested in more, they will ask for an encore. (Don't pull out 1000 pictures then either; an encore doesn't mean EVERY picture.)

Serve Mom's apple pie, lots of carbs for comfort or restlessness, beer for the bored and have a great time.