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:



Opening Day 8 11 08


View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2.0 teachers)

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...

3 comments:

How cute is that picture!!

Unknown said...

Melanie,

Thanks for sharing that one. I just passed it along to my colleagues in the hopes that some of them will use it, or something like it on their opening days. Great stuff!

Anonymous said...

that is so so cute
where was it taken?
emily stevens mrs. stevens daghter