Last updated on May 25, 2020
Do you take a lot of pictures with your smartphone or your DLSR camera? For a lot of people, the answer to that question would be a resounding “yes.”
What happens to the pictures that you take? Do they get saved on a disk or in the cloud to be forgotten? Or do you share them on Facebook or WhatsApp or some other favorite social platform? If you do share, how do you share them?
Sharing pictures in the form of an online album is probably the most common way in which people showcase the best pictures that they have captured. It is easy: there are many online resources besides social media that make it simple, Flickr, Pinterest, Google Photos, Amazon Photos, and so on, to name just a few.
This works well. You group your pictures based on some theme: wildlife, landscape, interesting places, school or family events, pets, or your portraits. You share them when your acquaintances by sending them a link or adding to your social wall, and you get some likes and some comments.
However, sharing your pictures in the form of an album has its limitations. Your audience that enjoys pictures of “Wildlife” may not appreciate some interesting pictures that you took in your “Neighborhood” regardless of how creative you were. The title of your album can create a certain expectation in the viewers mind that may affect their ability to fully appreciate the details in your pictures. Sometimes the pictures you take are commonplace — like a spider-web — but there may be something that you are trying to convey in that picture that the viewer might miss if that was a picture in an album called “Backyard.”
Having been working from home over the last 10 weeks or so, I took some interesting pictures in my backyard when taking short breaks from my work. These were pictures of trees in full bloom, some birds, some insects, and yes, a spider-web too. The pictures themselves were of good quality, and I had used some creative techniques; but they were all pictures of fairly common things.
I wanted to share these pictures with my coworkers during a remote “social meeting.” We were encouraged to share anything interesting that we did while working from home. But what is the best way to share some pictures that I took in my backyard? Should I put them all in a PowerPoint presentation and flash them in a sequence while I said things like “Here is a hummingbird,” or “This is an apple tree in full bloom,” etc. As you can imagine, that would make for a very boring presentation.
I decided to try something different: present the pictures as part of a fictional story. I thought that might make it more interesting. So I came up with a name for my backyard, “El Patio”, which means “the backyard” in Spanish. I made up a story of me visiting El Patio during my lunch break, where I met interesting visitors — birds, squirrels, and the like — and shared their picture as if I was describing a trip that I made to some place.
That surely made the presentation funny and enjoyable, and I could tell that all the pictures felt more interesting because of the underlying story that I was narrating as I shared them.
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