Thanks Nancy! I’m pleased you enjoyed it. I hope all is well.

Thanks Mark!

Thanks Mark!

Thanks SM!

I actually did lengthen some of the images, but not many. When you lengthen them more than a second or so though, a lot of the time it really throws off the rhythm and flow of the presentation, and double the length (10 seconds) is too long, so it’s always a tough one to pull off.

That’s great Luc. I’m pleased you like it. I watched this on my large screen 4K TV too, and it looks pretty good. The sky full of stars with the Milky Way is insane. You wouldn’t think there were that many stars up there, but the 5Ds R sees them pretty well. 🙂

Thanks Rick! I really struggled with the music, as I made it from scratch, so that’s really good to hear.

Thanks Dave!

Yes, I love those Himba people shots too. Mostly done inside their huts with just the natural light coming through the small door, and high ISO, from around 3200 to 5000 mostly.

I used Photodex Producer on Windows too. Good software.

I made the music in Ableton Live, so it’s a bit of both, i.e me playing and software. All of the sounds were created using a MIDI keyboard. I chose the chord sequence based on but slightly different to a song that the staff at one of the lodges sang, but slowed it down from a tempo of 120 to 96, to give me a 2.5 second bar, which meant two bars would give me 5 second per slide.

The synth sounds were modified Ableton Live instruments, and the piano was an unmodified Grand Piano instrument. In Ableton you create little MIDI sequences, then you can click and select them, recording them to a timeline, and then move the sequences around and add extra instruments etc. You basically build the song up piece by piece.

The piano piece was basically me playing, but I’m not good enough to just play it as is. I could play the end piece if I practiced it more, but basically I played each 8 bar phrase first, then added the bass chords afterwards, and tweaked the position of some of the notes to make it better sounding. I didn’t simply Quantize it, as I wanted to keep a little bit of the natural feel to it.

Those 32 bars of piano are what I struggled with the most though. I tend to get stuck in corny sounding chord sequences and waste hours trying to let go of them. 🙂

I also have an AKAI EWI 5000 which is a MIDI wind instrument. I wasted another day or so on a breathy flute solo with the EWI, but it didn’t match the song, so I left it out in the end.

All good fun, but it took way too long. In the future I’m going to try to create the music for possible use well in advance of creating a slideshow, so that I can get a head start on it. For example, I’d like to update my Nature of Japan slideshow, and create a new Iceland slideshow, but I’m now going to try to at least make a good start on the music for these in my spare time beforehand. 🙂

Cheers,
Martin.

Thanks Dave. I need it! 🙂

I can’t wait to get back there with you in the group. You are going to have a great time Jenn.

Thanks so much Janet!

Thanks Zeofoto. If you plan to visit, it would be great to see you on a future tour. 🙂