A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

It's been several months since I read Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds, but I think I needed that time to reflect, process and enact change before sharing my thoughts.

I've never been a big fan of powerpoint. It always seemed more like a prop for the speaker than something that added to the speech. In Presentation Zen, Garr uses Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind as a framework for explaining how presentations should target the left brain and right brain. A presentation is really storytelling and storytelling is made more powerful with the images. I learned so much from this book about images. How negative space in an image conveys part of the message...how choosing the right image can change the point of the message. A book well worth reading, and one I will return to for reference.

With Presentation Zen in mind, I built my first Keynote presentation. Searching for the right image to convey a message became my mission when I began working on the presentation for my principal's opening day message. I really enjoyed perusing through stock photos and thinking about how particular images changed the message. Here's how it ended up:

What I didn't expect was for my personal lens to change as I chose photo shots of family, school life and nature. I'm as amateur as you get when it comes to photography, but now I think about composition before I shoot and I find myself searching for the camera when I normally wouldn't have taken a photo. Today was the perfect example, I took my kids shopping at the party shop and they hopped up on these fun little stools. Normally I would have smiled and said "let's go", but today I saw the image in head and began reaching for the camera from my purse.

I've joined a group on the photo sharing website, flickr, called 366photos. They take a photo a day from their life, a snapshot in time each day over the year. I can't wait to see how I grow as a photographer and a storyteller. I hope you'll follow along...