Constructing Slide Shows

I first wrote about preserving family photos in a blog post titled Digitizing Memories (7 March 2017). Our photo albums remain in storage boxes but the scanned pages are in the cloud where family members can look at them anytime. Perhaps we will eventually find a place where we can set up shelves and put the books back on display and people can then thumb through them again.

Since that post, I have been meaning to address related subjects involving 35mm slides and 8mm movies. Here is the next part about slides.

I am an incorrigible slide-show maker. For decades now, I have been putting together presentations using photos from our family albums, to celebrate weddings, birthdays and other special occasions. It has been a way to share memories with the whole family. Learning how to do it has also been greatly helpful in putting together the many presentations I have made to the genealogical community.

It seems like centuries have past (well, it was in the last century) since I was doing slide shows with 35mm projectors. I have hundreds of slides from both personal (family) activities as well as professional (geological) pursuits. Prints of some of them were made years ago and put into photo albums. The vast majority, though, have not been scanned and remain hidden away in metal storage boxes. I can inspect them on a hand-held, single-slide viewer, but I gave away/sold my carousel projectors and screens years ago, so I can’t do a regular “slide show” anymore.

One of the projects on my to-do list (which never seems to get shorter) is to digitize all the slides for preservation and possible reference in the future. I do have a slide scanner but it has seen limited action.

The first electronic or digital slide show was one I made was for our daughter Tamara’s wedding in 1999. It was on VHS tape. Many people reading this may remember what that was. That media went out of use and favour with the advent of the DVD and more recently with conversion of video and still picture files to MP4 and other formats that can be stored on personal computers, in the cloud or on a smart phone.

For that first one I found some people whose business it was to digitize photos (among many other digital projects), Myron and Malcom Achtman at Adita Video Inc. in Calgary. I took them photos of my daughter from the time she was born along with a couple of songs on DVDs (Daddy’s Little Girl and Thank Heavens for Little Girls). Yup, that was before you could download them from iTunes.

With a script I wrote and some narrated comments by me, they scanned the photos and put it all together with the music to produce a VHS tape that I showed at her wedding reception. It was not very long (less than seven minutes) and the quality is not as good as I can do today, but it was a hit with the audience and something I am still proud of having done.

I did a similar thing for the 2001 wedding of James (our son) and Alice (his bride). This time I took copies of old photos I had scanned, music I had downloaded, recordings by the parents of the bride and groom, and some videos copied from television and recorded on video cameras. That one was much longer at 21 minutes but still just as much of a tear-jerker as the one for Tammy. Myron and Malcolm put this one directly on to a DVD. I had progressed a bit farther with the technology.

After the wedding projects, I found some software that allowed me to make slide shows on my own. The one I have become comfortable with is put out by AVS4YOU (AVS Video Converter and AVS Video Editor). The basic version is a free download. I can input scanned photos or videos, add music and narration, and other special effects, and do all kinds of things to produce a seamless video file. Then it can be saved in a number of different formats: AVI, DVD, MOV, MP4, MPEG, and others.

Most recently I have saved the finished files on my computer and in the cloud rather than put them on DVDs but I have made copies on DVDs for family members.

For presentations I use PowerPoint. These are basically slide shows as well. The program allows me to add narration to each slide if I want to have them available for recorded webinars.

My last major slide show was one I put together for Christmas 2020 when the family was unable to visit in person. We played it live on Zoom on Christmas Eve so that everyone could view it together.

Slide Shows! They are wonderful ways to share memories and easy to put together. And when they are done you can send them around the world through file transfer services like WeTransfer.

Climate Always Has and Always Will Change

I write a lot about the implications of climate change on people and families of past centuries. What about the future? Here is an article that explains very clearly why what we see today is perfectly natural.

While the Climate Always Has and Always Will Change, There Is no Climate Crisis

• by Wallace Manheimer    

Abstract

The emphasis on a false climate crisis is becoming a tragedy for modern civilization, which depends on reliable, economic, and environmentally viable energy. The windmills, solar panels and backup batteries have none of these qualities. This falsehood is pushed by a powerful lobby which Bjorn Lomborg has called a climate industrial complex, comprising some scientists, most media, industrialists, and legislators. It has somehow managed to convince many that CO2 in the atmosphere, a gas necessary for life on earth, one which we exhale with every breath, is an environmental poison. Multiple scientific theories and measurements show that there is no climate crisis. Radiation forcing calculations by both skeptics and believers show that the carbon dioxide radiation forcing is about 0.3% of the incident radiation, far less than other effects on climate. Over the period of human civilization, the temperature has oscillated between quite a few warm and cold periods, with many of the warm periods being warmer than today. During geological times, it and the carbon dioxide level have been all over the place with no correlation between them.

Download and read the whole piece using the following link. 

https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jsd/article/download/0/0/47745/51231 

Record cold and snow decimates cattle herds: 9 January 1887

Cattle in a blizzard on the plains during the Big Die Up (Harper's Weekly)

If you wonder whether winter conditions are better or worse these days, here is a story from that past that illustrates not much has really changed. The following is from History.com’s This Day In History website:

On one of the worst days of the “worst winter in the West,” nearly an inch of snow falls every hour for 16 hours, impeding the ability of already starving cattle to find food.

The plains ranchers had seen hard winters before, but they had survived because their cattle had been well-fed going into the winter. By the mid-1880s, though, the situation had changed. In the hopes of making quick money, greedy speculators had overstocked the northern ranges in Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. Deceived by a string of mild winters, many ranch managers were also no longer putting up any winter-feed for their stock. Disaster arrived in 1886.

The summer of 1886 was hot and dry, and by autumn, the range was almost barren of grass. The cold and snow came early, and by January, record-breaking snowfalls blanketed the plains, forcing the already weakened cattle to expend vital energy moving through the snow in search of scant forage. In January, a warm Chinook wind briefly melted the top layers of snow. When the brutal cold returned (some ranches recorded temperatures of 63 degrees below zero), a hard thick shell of ice formed over everything, making it almost impossible for the cattle to break through the snow to reach the meager grass below. With no winter hay stored to feed the animals, many ranchers had to sit by idly and watch their herds slowly die. “Starving cattle staggered through village streets,” one historian recalls, “and collapsed and died in dooryards.” In Montana, 5,000 head of cattle invaded the outskirts of Great Falls, eating the saplings the townspeople had planted that spring and “bawling for food.”

When the snow melted in the spring, carcasses of the once massive herds dotted the land as far as the eye could see. One observer recalled that so many rotting carcasses clogged creek and river courses that it was hard to find water fit to drink. Millions of cattle are estimated to have died during the “Great Die Up” as it came to be called, a darkly humorous reference to the celebrated “Round Up.” Montana ranchers alone lost an estimated 362,000 head of cattle, more than half the territory’s herd.

Besides sending hundreds of ranches into bankruptcy, the hard winter also brought an abrupt end to the era of the open range. Realizing they would always have to grow crops to feed their animals, ranchers decreased the size of their herds and began to stretch barbed wire fences across the open range to enclose new hay fields. By the 1890s, the typical rancher was also a farmer, and cowboys spent more time fixing fences than riding herd or roping mavericks. Belatedly, settlers realized that they had to adapt to the often-harsh demands of life on the western plains if they were to survive and thrive.

A quick search of the Internet will reveal other similar storms and outcomes on the North American prairie: Schoolhouse Blizzard (12 January 1888); Kansas Monster Blizzard (1-3 January 1886).