Software to Make Memorable Slide Shows

Dec. 19 -- Please fasten your safety belt. This column is a paean of praise to an almost unheard-of product — Microsoft Plus! Photo Story.

It's one of eight applications in the Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition pack ($19.95), and it's worth the entire price of admission — and then some.

In a nutshell, Photo Story turns digital photographs into professional-looking slide shows. Unlike every other slide show maker I've seen, however, Photo Story pans across photos and zooms in or out, much like the effects you'd see in a Ken Burns documentary.

Your static photos suddenly come to life and are imbued with new meaning as you pan across a bunch of smiling faces to the one glowing in the light of the candles on the birthday cake, or pull back to reveal scenic grandeur. Transitions are limited to a simple dissolve, which works well with the pan-and-zoom presentation and maintains a certain level of tasteful dignity. Photo Story allows slide-by-slide narration or an audio soundtrack.

Microsoft's developers worked hard on this product to make it foolproof for the most amateur digital photographer. The default pans and zooms can bring any collection of pictures to life, but the advanced settings let you control the start and end points and duration of each animation.

With these features, you can decide whether to focus in on a person or object progressively or to pull back and reveal a larger context. Or you can just cruise across an image — right to left, left to right, up, down, or diagonally. After you're satisfied, Photo Story burns your show to a Video CD (VCD) or creates a compressed WMV file you can play on any machine with Windows Media Player 9 Series.

A Show That Really Wows 'Em

Our church recently celebrated Children's Sabbath, a nondenominational observation of children's rights and needs, organized by the Children's Defense Fund. My friend Barbara, who designed our service, asked me to put together a slide show presentation. She suggested the John Denver song "I Want to Live," with its stirring chorus "I want to live, I want to grow / I want to see, I want to know" as a musical accompaniment.