Presentation Zen: Pecha Kucha and the art of liberating constraints

In reading the Presentaion Zen blog on Pecha Kucha, I have learned many things.  Pecha Kucha was invinted in Japan in 2003 in Tokyo by two Japanese architects.  A Pecha Kucha is a powerpoint presentation that is twenty slides long, and you must spend twenty seconds talking about each slide, therefore your presentation will last six minutes and forty seconds.  Pecha Kucha was developed to keep presentations short and sweet, and to the point, and so more could be seen.  There are Pecha Kucha nights in cities all over the world.  Pecha Kucha is a good training exercise for people to practice, because of the limits that it has.  The Pecha Kucha method is more more exciting for someone to pay attention to than a 50+ page slideshow that a professor has ready for the class.  Pecha Kucha only lasts for six minutes and forty seconds and is able to offer a stimulating discussion, and a powerpoint takes up an entire classroom session, leaving no time to ask question at all.

Live Blog From Wednesday 11-7-12

There are many do's and don'ts of using Powerpoint Presentations.  Make sure to spell check your work, if a word has a red line under it, go back and check it again.  Do not over use bullets, only mark important information, or "key points" with bullets, every single word should not have a bullet beside it.  Make sure that you don't pick clashing colors on your slides, for example two different tones of the color yellow, this will be very difficult for people to see.  Only put one key point of information on each slide, you don't want to put too much information on a slide and bombard a person with information.
Only give about three or four reasons supporting your arguement, after that people will lose interest in what you are saying.  Make sure that you know what you are talking about, and be interested in what you are going to talk about, no one is going to be interested in listening to you if you aren't having a good time talking about your subject.  Lastly, don't use the Powerpoint as a teleprompter, and read it word for word, the people you are presenting to can read the slides faster than you can speak, and will get bored.  You should have other notes to complement the slides you are using.

Original and Recreated SlideShare Slides

Original Slide from SlideShare

Recreated Slide

The Photoshop Effect

In class we watched a video on the photoshop effect.  In this video a reporter volunteered to be photographed and photoshopped just to see the effect that it has on people.  The reporter was very excited about being able to see herself in a photoshopped point of view, she even said she thought she liked her self better as photoshopped.  In reality most people would like to see themselves as photoshopped, because with photoshop you can always change what you don't like.

In part two of the video on photoshop, there were several comments on taking photoshopped pictures out of the media, because they are causing problems.  Someone also made a statement that photoshopped pictures should be tagged in magazines and other forms of media to let people know that the photos are not "real"and that they have been retouched.  I think that adding a disclaimer to a magazine about the photos would be a good idea if that is what the media thinks is best.  A warning label doesn't really stop people from doing other things that are supposed to be dangerous.  

Dove Beauty Ad

In the Dove Artificial beauty ad we saw that in ad campaigns, pictures are not always what they seem.  The Dove company wanted us to see the process that a model goes through to have her picture taken from looking "normal" to having a styling team fix her hair and do her make up, and then having a professional come and take and edit the pictures.  The girl in the video did not even look like the same person after the team of professionals got through working with her.  It is kind of funny, that we don't even recognize that photoshop has been used in pictures sometimes, because we are so accustomed to pictures looking that way.

Different angles.

Four different angles of the seating area in front of the Hamrick building. I took a picture from the left side, the middle, the right side, and from the steps looking down.

Photographs and Ethics

In Friday's class we viewed many different links to show how ethics can affect the outcome of photographs.  In many ways photographs can be altered for the good, to crop out something that didn't need to be there, to edit the contrast, and other small details.  In the pictures that we viewed, the editing purposes were misused.  The cropping tools were used to make one thing look a different way than it really happened. Also, the editors were superimposing images onto old background of other pictures that had been used several times.  Many photographers also tried to make something seem as if it occured naturally, such as a toy being found during a natural disaster, but one photographer in particular made is very obvious that he was randomly placing objects into the pictures, because the toys weren't dirty and they were oddly placed. 

          Some of the links that we went to were:

1. http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=178
2. http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/classes/csci_2101/false.html
3. http://mediamythbusters.com/index.php?title=Fauxtography
4. http://blogs.photopreneur.com/worlds-most-infamous-staged-photos