#4 Picture Show

7 Tips for Taking Great Vacation Photos of Your Kids

If you’re like me you take a ton of videos of your kids on vacation, download them to your computer and never see them again. I always have the best intentions when taking videos; I think – this one will make a great short movie – It will go on Facebook – all my friends will love it – and it will be perfect for that great big movie I’m making of my kids to share on their wedding day. Yeah… right. So far, after seven years of parenthood I’ve had about 4 computers and 6 hard drives and I could not even tell you where half my videos ended up. Nor do I have the will power to look for them.

Photographs, on the other hand, tend to be easier for me to manage; probably because it only takes a split second glance at the picture to know what you’re looking at. No need to review 10 minutes of footage to know if you’ve got the right file. But when it comes to certain activities like your child’s first steps or first jump off the diving board, one single photograph doesn’t always do it justice. That’s usually when we break out the video camera, yet hardly ever look at the video again once it’s downloaded. After all, videos can’t go in that fun family yearbook you leave on the coffee table for your house guests to look through each year.

That’s where a DIY picture show could come in handy. You can do this with any camera that has the ability to change the drive mode from single shot to continuous, or it may say ‘high’ {H} and ‘low’ {L}. The icon for this mode is typically a single rectangle outline for ‘single shot’ or ‘low’, and multiple stacked rectangles indicating continuous or high allowing you to take rapid consecutive shots. Each camera has differences in the amount it will take and how fast, but you can get a good picture show with your most basic point and shoot camera.

The creative possibilities with this technique are only limited by your imagination and displaying them can be as simple as side by side as I’ve done above, or more involved like creating a fun flip book or even using the images to then in turn create a video… yes, I see the irony.