Just when I'd lost faith in customer service...

**This is a bit of a long rant and if you don't read the whole thing you may get a bad opinion of the EyeFi company, I just want to state here that I fully recommend their innovative product. I had a bad experience at first but their amazing customer support rectified the problems and then some.**

I've been having real bad luck lately with products and services. It seems everywhere I turn its as if I'm being given the "priviledge" of spending my money instead of the stores being greatful to have me as a customer. I've seen a drop in service everywhere ranging from getting a burger in a drivethru that was missing the most important part, the meat patty, to waiting 3 months for an order to ship. I starting thinking that maybe the economic crisis might actually be a good thing, the companies that don't wise up will simply be replaced by the ones that do because the others will be filing for bankruptcy.


"Where's the beef?"

It was with this gloomy picture in my head that I decided to purchase one of the new Eye-Fi SD cards for my camera. If you haven't heard of them I suggest you check out their site at www.eye.fi They have an ingenious little product that will automatically upload the photos from your camera to your computer (and photo sharing sites like Flickr etc) and geotag them so you know where you were when you took them.

Upon purchasing a card I was immediately greeted with a defective card reader that came with the card. Not a huge deal since I have multiple readers. I notified customer service and requested a replacement. I was later told that a replacement was issued and would be shipped to the address I provided. Ok. Great.

I then took advantage of thier "suggest a feature" in the Eye-Fi forums. I suggested that they offer a free trial for their Geotagging service. As I had only bought the EyeFi "Share" model my card did not have this feature though a 1yr subcription was available for a small fee. Since the geotagging feature works best in densly populated urban areas I did not want to take the plunge and go for a full year only to find out it didn't work. A few days later I had a reply stating they liked the idea and would let me know when this was available. A few weeks later and I was given instructions on how to access my free trial. I still had to provide a credit card number so that if I liked the service it would automatically subcribe me for 1yr if I did not cancel before the end of the 30 days. Fine, sounds reasonable, I'll do it. I try out the service over the Christmas holidays and I find it neat but given the small size of my city there was not enough wifi coverage to always get an accurate geotag. I decided in the end to hold off a little while, cancel my trial, then maybe renew it if I new I'd be going on a trip.

This is where I got frustrated. I could not find a way to cancel the trial so I had to email support, ok no big deal. I received a repsonse saying my autorenewal had been cancelled and that I would not be billed for the 1yr subscription. A few days later I receive and automated email stating that my autorenewal had just been completed and I was now subscribed for 1yr. Ok, maybe they forgot to cancel the automailer no big deal. Fast forward a few days again and I see it on my bank statement. I now was billed for a service I cancelled and to top it off I couldn't even use the feature because it had been disabled in my Eyefi account. This is when I lost it. I wrote a lengthy email explaining just what happened to me from the beginning of my whole experience. I was not vulgar, I did not swear, but I was maybe a little scathing albeit in an articulate fashion. Then I waited.

Later that same day I saw an email pop up in my inbox from Eyefi, to be honest I wasn't expecting much. I was wrong, not only did they address all of my problems and refund my autorenewal, they went on to apologize for my experience and to make up for it sent me an EyeFi Explore card (the step up from mine) that has unlimited geotagging. I was floored, I wasn't expecting this at all. Most times its hard enough to get what is owed to you, very seldomly do you also get compensated for your troubles.

Now I don't want people expecting to get free stuff from EyeFi or any other company by writing letters complaining about stuff. I know there are people out there who would try to take advantage of something like this and perhaps even lie to do so. Please do not do this. I would however say that you should give feedback, both negative and positive, when it is due. Stand up for your rights as a consumer, it is ok to complain if it is warranted. On the flip side, if a company has a good product or you've had a great experience dealing with them by all means spread the word and help them out!! Its by doing this that you'll help the companies that are worth keeping stay around while the out of touch companies file for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

I plan on posting a full review of the EyeFi card in the next few days. I won't pull any punches just because of the great service I got, there are a few things I'd change with the product but all in all I would still highly recommend it. Stay tuned to find out why.

Photography 101 - An introduction to light

Everything you need to know about shutter speeds, aperture, and ISO.

*All images contained in this document are either being used under a creative commons license or are the author's own work.

(Link to pdf version of this document)

Preface:

Before we start lets look at the word “Photograph”. The word was originally coined by Sir John Herschel and won out over “photogene” and “heliograph”. All of three words have Greek origins meaning light, photo or phos and helios. Immediately you should see how relevant understanding light is since it’s built into the word photography. We’re graphing light here!

The goal of this article is to explain a little about how light works and how the various features of your camera control it to produce an image. Ideally you'll need a camera that lets you control these settings but even if your camera doesn't allow you to just understanding how these work will still help you greatly.

The three main controls you have over light are the time or the duration your film is exposed to light, the amount of light by changing the size of the hole, and the film’s sensitivity to light. Shutter speed. Aperture size. ISO. 1-2-3.

Shutter speed, aperture, and ISO all play different parts in contributing to your overall exposure as well as having special properties of their own. We’ll look at them individually and then see how they work together.

Chapter 1: ISO with relation to exposure

ISO (formally ASA)

Regardless of what is inside your camera you’re still trying to capture light, film and digital sensors both accomplish this. With film it is tiny crystals that are sensitive to light (silver halide salts bonded with gelatin), digital sensors have similar things called “photosites” and these too are sensitive to light.

Either way you need a certain amount of light to make an image show up, the amount of light depends on how sensitive the film is to light. This is where the ISO number comes in. The ISO rating for film, carried over to the digital realm, is a means of expressing the sensitivity to light. The higher the number the more sensitive to light the film is. For example a film with ISO 400 will need half as much light as ISO200 would need to get the same exposure. You’ll also notice that ISO tends to work in multiples starting at ISO 50, then 100, 200, 400, 800 and so on.

Imagine if you will a tap that will represent shutter and aperture, and a glass that when full is the proper exposure. The water itself is light. ISO would represent the size of the glass that needs filling. The more sensitive to light the higher the ISO and the less light is needed resulting in a smaller glass to fill.

There is a trade off however between ISO and image quality, if there wasn’t then we’d always want the high ISO and never use the lower one. In order to make the film more sensitive to light the crystals that are used are much larger (more room for the photons to hit), it is similar in digital sensors but more complicated to explain. By using larger crystals the resulting image will appear coarser or grainier and the same effect occurs with digital. The higher the ISO the coarser your image will look, once you understand the rest about shutter speed and aperture you’ll be able to determine what ISO you’ll need for whatever shooting conditions you are in.

Low ISO sharp image ----High ISO grainy image

You’ll almost always want to keep the ISO as low as you can to get the sharpest photo. That being said, sometimes using a higher ISO can make the image “grittier” and add to the feeling of the image. For example if you’re taking a portrait of a woman and want to imply smoothness and femininity you’d probably want to shoot as low an ISO as possible. If you’re shooting the weather beaten face of a prairie farmer who is tough and hearty you might accentuate those qualities by using an higher ISO for more grain.

Chapter 2: Shutter Speed and Aperture regarding exposure.

Both of these controls work hand in hand, it is hard to explain one without explaining the other. To help explain these we’ll go back to water as an analogy for light.

Imagine again an empty glass representing an unexposed frame, when it filled to the brim means a proper exposure. The time that the shutter is held open is represented by how long we leave the tap on, the size of the tap is representing the aperture.

To show you the two extremes we could fill the glass up very quickly or very slowly. If we had a tap that was very small we’d have to leave it on for a long time to fill the glass up, or we could have a really big tap and only turn it on for a short period of time.

If we use a big tap and leave it on too long the water will spill over the edge of the cups, or in other words a large aperture and long shutter speed will result in an over exposure. Conversely a small tap not left on long enough won’t fill the cup, a fast shutter speed and a small aperture will result in underexposure.

As was stated previously this example shows the extremes, either control can be varied to compensate for the other. Often you'll need to vary your aperture to allow you to shoot at a safe shutter speed to avoid blurry photos. Generally 1/60^th is considered safe to shoot hand held, slower and you should use a tripod.

Here are some examples, if we were taking a picture of something that is happening quickly we’d want to use a fast shutter speed, or in the case of the water analogy a quick on/off of the tap. Because we’re only turning the tap on for a short duration we’ll have to increase the tap size or “aperture” if we still want to fill the glass.

Let’s break away for a second to explain a little more about aperture. The size of the aperture is measured in F-Stops. It’s a little counter-intuitive because the larger the F number the smaller hole or aperture. It might help to think of it as how much light the aperture “stops”, the higher number means its stopping more light. These numbers are setup in fixed increments and depending on your lens you may not have exactly the same numbers.

With regards to getting the proper exposure (ie filling the glass exactly to the top) both of these controls are proportional to each other.

If we took a photo with a shutter speed of 1/1000^th of a second at F8 the exposure would be the same as taking a photo at 1/500^th of a second at F16. Since we doubled the time of the exposure (time the tap was on) we had to halve the size of the hole (size of the tap) in order to get the same amount of “water into the glass” or light into the camera. We'll explore the relationship more in chapter 4.

Chapter 3: The other properties of the 3 controls.

ISO

Ok so we've sort of already covered most of this one during the explanation of what ISO is. The special property of ISO, outside of how it affects exposure, is the fact that it will change how your image looks depending on the “grain size”. High ISO images will be coarser and grainier than low ISO images; you'll have to weigh the pros and cons when shooting. Some digital camera's noise is very much like that of film and can look nice in certain shots, other cameras the noise will just take away from the image completely. Some cameras handle noise better than others. A shot at ISO800 using one camera may look like it has less noise than an ISO200 shot from a different camera. Not all cameras are created equal, the point and shoot variety tend to suffer the most with high ISO noise and should normally be kept under ISO 400 if at all possible.

Shutter

How the shutter effects exposure is pretty straight forward, it is like a valve that turns on for specific duration of time letting light into the camera. The special property aside from exposure though is the ability to freeze or expand time. A fast enough shutter speed can stop a bullet in mid air or stop the beating wings of a humming bird. A slow shutter speed can drag out an instant and show motion. There are many ways to use this to your advantage to completely change the mood of a shot.

Left. By allowing the shutter to remain open for several seconds the headlights of a car can be seen continuing on as the vehicle moves past leaving a light trail.

Right. Using a very fast shutter speed of 1/8000^th you can make out the individual droplets of water formed by the jets in a water fountain.

Aperture

As we saw previously, aperture is basically the size of the end of our faucet or the opening to our camera. The bigger it is the more water flows out or the more light that gets let into the camera. Aperture has not one but two special properties, both have to do with what is called “depth of field” or “DOF”.

With a small aperture (high F#) you can have a very large DOF meaning that everything in the depth of field will be relatively in focus. A large aperture on the other hand will of course do the opposite, only a shallow distance will be in focus.

Left. This image is using a very small aperture so that the DOF is huge stretching all the way across the riverbank so that both the foreground and background are in focus.

Right. The opposite is true for a large aperture, the DOF is very shallow and only extends a few inches in front of and behind the flower.

Think of depth of field as a flat plane that has a thickness, as you close your aperture making it smaller the DOF gets deeper or thicker. Everything that is the same distance or “depth” from you will be in the same DOF.

Here's a little more information on the topic. If the opening or aperture is small then there is very little variance allowed in the path of light through the aperture. As seen in the image below if the line varied up or down it wouldn't make it through the hole, this results in a sharp image. With a hole small enough you wouldn't actually need a lens to focus, this is the principle behind pinhole cameras. Pinhole cameras have very high F#'s because the hole is so small, F stops of F150 and higher are common. In case you're wondering where the F# comes from it is the ratio of the focal length (distance from aperture to film surface) to the diameter of the aperture. So a 100mm lens set to F4 would have an aperture of 25mm (F#=ƒ/D). You don't need to know this but its interesting to understand the origins.

Tree in real life ------------- Tree as it appears in camera

Now if we open up the aperture as shown in the image below we will allow more variance in the path the light can take from a single point. This results in a blurry image.

The other special property of aperture is that the shape of the out of focus stuff can take on the shape of your aperture under certain circumstances.

In this photograph a person covered their lens with construction paper that had a star shaped hole on the front. They then made the image out of focus intentionally. In this instance the star shaped hole acted as an aperture and allowed the out of focus light to take on the shape.

Another place you'll notice this is if you take a picture of bright lights at night or even the sun, the glare will often form a 6 point star pattern. This is because a lot of apertures use a 6 blade configuration that form a hexagonal hole.

In case you're wondering if the “out of focus stuff” has a name it does, well sort of. Somewhere along the lines someone started calling it “Bokeh” pronounced Bo-Kuh. The word is derived from the Japanese noun “Boke” meaning blurry or fuzzy.

Chapter 4 – Putting it all together

By now you know that each of the 3 controls influence exposure, but with all the variables its a little hard to keep track of them. Lucky for us a few people have been nice enough to make this easier on us so we don't have to do the math in our heads. Michael from Imageguy has made a quick reference card to use if you need to adjust your settings while keeping the exposure the same. If I fail to explain it well here you can watch a video over at http://www.imageguy.com/exposureadjustment-chart/

They also have a dowloadable PDF of it there that is much more suitable for printing.

To use this chart you will have to already know what settings will get you a proper exposure. If you have a digital SLR all you have to do is set your camera to auto, take a photo of what you plan to shoot, and then review the image information. Let’s say for this example your camera determines that 1/60^th of a second at ISO200 with F8 is properly exposed. Unfortunately you want to take a photo of your kid playing baseball and you want to freeze time as he swings the bat. 1/60^th of a second just isn't quick enough to capture that. Don’t fret just put your camera into manual mode and we'll use the chart to figure out what we need to do to shoot it at a quicker speed of say 1/500th of a second.

Start by counting the dots between 1/60^th and 1/500^th of a second. There are 3 dots and we're moving up, this means that we'll have to compensate either our aperture or ISO settings by 3 stops or a combination of the two. Remember since we're compensating for 3 stops up we need to go the other way on the other settings to reduce by 3 stops.

We could either reduce our aperture by 3 stops to F2.8, or we could increase our ISO to 1600, or a combination of the two. Since we learnt earlier that it is always a good idea to keep the ISO a bit lower let’s only go one stop to 400, and then we'll drop the aperture to F4. As you see we move the opposite direction on the lines we're using to compensate.

Another example, say we're shooting a flower up close but we want to blur out the background by having a shallow DOF. Lets say we know that we're getting a proper exposure at 1/125s with ISO 400 at F16. Because the aperture is so small our depth of field would be huge causing the background to remain in focus.

What settings would we want to use if we knew increasing the aperture size to F2.8 would give us a nice blurry background?

Count the dots, we're reducing the aperture by 5 F stops if we're going to drop from F16 to F2.8 so therefore we need to increase the other settings by 5 stops total.

I'd say that for flowers we're again going to want to reduce film grain, also the fact that we're doing a close up of a flower means we want as much detail as possible. This means we should start by changing the ISO from 400 to 100 which gives us 2 stops. We still need another 3 stops so lets increase our shutter speed from 1/125^th to 1/1000^th .

You see how this is working? It’s really not that hard at all.

Ok so this is great if you know the proper exposure but say you found an old film camera in your grandpa's basement and it doesn't have a built in light meter to do the work for you. There is a trick called the “Sunny 16 Rule” that is very easy to remember. If it is sunny outside set your camera to F16 then set your shutter speed to 1/ your ISO. For example if you were shooting ISO 200 you'd set your shutter to 1/200. Now you know the proper exposure and can compensate from there by counting stops to get to any combination of settings you need.

Chapter 5 – For those of you with Point and Shoot cameras

Ever notice how all these cameras, even DSLRs, have “program” modes like “Sports” “Indoor” “Outdoor” “Portrait” “Kids & Pets” etc ? Well since your camera never knows what type of subject you're shooting (yet anyways) they build in presets to at least give you a little control.

This may not be exactly what your camera does since each manufacturer has slightly different methods but this should be close. These presets will often also change other settings such as the colour and amount of sharpening, however for the purposes of this document I'll only address what affects exposure.

Sports. This will often raise your ISO and Aperture size to allow for a faster shutter speed, thus allowing you to freeze the action.

Indoor. Will do the same as sports but adjust to a shutter speed that is safe enough for a hand held shot not to be blurry. If this still isn't possible it will turn on the flash.

Outdoor. This will often lower your ISO and increase the aperture, since its bright outside you don't need the extra light sensitivity.

Portrait. Depending on your camera it may lower ISO to give you a cleaner image. Most often it just reduces the in-camera sharpening of the image so that it is softer, this doesn't affect exposure though.

Landscape. Often this will try to set a smaller aperture to allow for a greater depth of field. This setting will also normally enhance green and blue colours for more vivid skies and trees, again this does not effect exposure.

Kids & Pets. Both of these subjects tend to move fast and unpredictably, like the sports setting it will open up your aperture and increase your ISO to allow for a quick shutter speed.

All cameras are different, take the time to fool around with yours and see what it is doing. Now that you understand how the shutter, aperture, and ISO work you should be able to figure out what your camera is doing when you put it in one of these auto modes just by looking at the image information after you take the picture.

That's it for this edition, now stop reading and get out there and start shooting!

Shooting in winter - Tips & Tricks

Winter has definitely planted some firm roots and isn't going away any time soon and eventually you're going to have to venture out with your camera. Hoar frost is always a very enticing subject however it seems to only form when it's ridiculously cold outside and only sticks around until the sun starts to come out. This means you'll probably be shooting in the early morning and one of the coldest parts of the day.



If you're brave enough to venture out into these frigid tempuratures here are a few tricks to keep in mind when you're out shooting.

1) Warm Batteries = Longer Lasting Batteries
Although you may feel frozen to the bone there is a good chance that your body is still actually warm so keep your batteries close to it. I normally wear button up shirts that have a breast pocket and find this to be a good place to put them. I've heard of people putting them in their socks even!
While we're on the topic of batteries you should already be using Nickel Metal-Hydride (NiMH) rechargable batteries in your camera. If your still using alkaline or NiCad its time to switch. NiMH batteries will last much longer than the other two, some as much as 4x or more. Plus they're rechargable so if you were shooting alkaline this is a no brainer, if you were by chance using NiCad (can you even buy those anymore?) then you'll be glad to hear that NiMH batteries do not suffer from the dreaded "memory effect" meaning you can charge them as often as you wish and don't have to wait for them to drain completely. When buying these look on the side for the mAh rating, this stands for Milli-Amp Hours and indicates how long they'll last. A 2000mAh will last twice as long as a 1000mAh, higher the number the better.

2) Humidity & Condensation (IMPORTANT)
So you've been out shooting the best winter scenes you've ever shot, you're memory card is full and it's finally time to retire to the warmth of your house for some hot chocolate. If you do this without taking proper precautions you could do damage to both your camera and your lens (or both if the lens is not removable). While you were shooting your camera has dropped quite a bit in temperature and if you bring it inside a nice warm cozy environment all the moisture in the air is going to condense on all the cold parts of your camera. Your lens could get fog between the elements, your sensor could get water droplets on it which dry and leave marks. Essentially a bunch of things you don't want happening.

The solution. The easiest and most common method is to get a large sealable bag (i.e. Ziplock) and put your camera inside before you leave the cold. This way,when you get back inside, the warm humid air of your house (or warm car) is blocked from getting to your camera. Leave the camera in the bag for at least an hour and let it warm up gradually before taking it out of the bag. You might want to remember to take your memory card out of the camera before you put the camera in the bag though, otherwise you'll have to wait an hour or so before you can look at the pictures ;)

Remember, if you have other lenses with you out in the cold that you'll need to do this for every piece of "frozen" equipment.

A little off topic - Family Crests

So in a totally random happening I discovered the meaning of my last name. The other day I was over at my parents house and we were talking about the new Tom Cruise movie "Valkyrie" when someone asked what the word means.

Valkyrie as defined by wikipedia pertains to Norse Mythology where female figures riding winged horses fly over the battlefield and pick up heroic warriors to take them to Valhalla. In the wiki article it shows an excerpt from a poem which lists one of the Valkyries as "Hildr" meaning "Battle". This caught my attention so I looked into it a little further and it turns out that german surename Hildebrandt is derived from the German personal name "Hildebrand" which is composed of two elements: "hild", derived frome the Old High German "hilja" meaning "fight" or "battle", and "brand" derived from the Old High German "brant" meaning "fire" or "sword".

So I'm James Battle Sword, nice to meet you ;)

I did a bit more digging and came across a few websites with family crests and coat of arms. One of which is http://www.family-crests.org/ you should check them out to see if your crest is listed.

Another site is www.houseofnames.com if you can't find yours at the above site.

Share your lighting setups easily

I've been following David Hobby's Strobist Blog recently as I've started down the road of using off camera flashes instead of full sized studio strobes. On sites like Flickr you'll often find people listing their "strobist info" along with their photos to explain a little about how they shot it. On rare occasions you'll find detailed diagrams of the setup, this post is going to give you the tools to make the same thing.



First you'll need a program called Google Sketchup and with that you can open this template I made.

Contained in the template are a backdrop, two softboxes, as well as a 3d model of a person*. If you're familiar with Sketchup you'll know how easy it is to tweak and modify this to suit your needs. If you've never used the program before I'd recommend going through the tutorial that pops up the first time you open it. This little program is easy to use and its very powerful, I've used it to design countless DIY projects and even plan renovations in my house.



*To trim the size down on the template I used a low resolution model of a 3d person that is included in the basic sketchup library. The 3d person shown in the image is downloadable via sketchup, just do a search for "3d Woman" and you'll get quite a few results.

[Update: Apparently I didn't look hard enough the first time because I just found the template that everyone else is using here, its a photoshop file with all the light sources etc housed as seperate layers. I guess mine still has some worth since its 3d but for ease of use you can't beat the original. ]

Cool, fun, creative, group photos

Before I start I should mention that I actually got this idea from Photojojo, a really neat e-newsletter that always has cool photography stuff in it.

Nowadays everyone and their dog has a digital camera, we all snap away at parties and post them on facebook etc but rarely are the shots anything eye catching. Here's a simple way to make a fun group photo with your friends that people may actually take the time to look at ;)
The first thing you need to know is how to set the self timer on your camera. Look for the icon shown above in your cameras menu. Often it is selected by pressing one of the directions on the directional pad on the back of your camera [on my Canon point and shoot its the down arrow].

Now get everyone around you and set the camera on the floor, press the shutter, huddle around and smile!
It may take a few tries to get everyone centered properly, the halloween shot was a little off :)

What are some good slideshow programs?

I wrote this up for the camera club at work originally but it is a question I hear a lot so I figured I'd post it here to help everyone else out (assuming some people will start reading this in the future ;)

The stuff in Green is free, Red costs money, and Blue means it's sort of free because you may already have it bundled with your computer or burner.

For viewing just on pc (they're all FREE yay!)
FastStone image viewer even if you don't necessarily need a slideshow program this is a very solid image viewer that works better than the default windows one.

Irfanview another image viewer like the one above that also allows slideshow viewing except this one lets you customize the slideshow a little more instead of just playing all files in a folder. I find it a little more awkward that FastStone but some people really like it.

Picasa- This is a free program made by Google, it allows you to view your photos in slideshow form but also includes pretty decent image editing and a bunch of other "fun" stuff. I recommend everyone download this, its free and its constantly being updated with more and more stuff. Get it at http://picasa.google.com/ or if you'd just like to see what all you can do with the software you can watch a video clip explaining all the features at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rskC6c_5L1M


For burning DVD/VCD/SVCD slideshows to watch on your TV (Free... not so much, but you may already have some of these)
Windows DVD maker - I totally forgot about this one and its actually one of the best I've used, the best part is its free the only problem is that it only comes with Windows Vista

None - Just burn the photos to a disc and pop it in your player. Nowadays most players will actually play the pictures right from a cd or dvd, the only problem is that this only works if your photos are below a certain size since the player can only hold a certain amount "in memory". One option would be to use Picasa to create a gift cd and under photo size select "640x480" (800x600 or even 1600x1200 could work too), you may be able to just pop the disc right in your player or you may have to copy the resized files off of the disc and re-burn them onto a new disc so that it only contains pictures. Consult your DVD player manual for the most accurate information, normally it states what sizes it accepts and tells you if you should burn the disc in any special way.

Your current buring software - Just about any computer you've purchased in the last 8years or so should come with a burning program (or it would have came with your CD burner or DVD burner), the two most common ones are Nero and Roxio. Both of these will allow you to make slideshow CD's and DVD's that will play in most players. These are normally pretty decent programs that suit the needs of the average everyday person.

Trial Burning Software - The trial versions of most burning programs don't restrict the features of the program, instead they limit the burning speed to 1x and have a time limit. If you really need to make a slideshow though you can download a trial and use it to make a slideshow to burn to disc. Its not the best way to do it but if you're in a pinch its a soloution.

Ulead Pictureshow - I really liked Ulead Pictureshow 2 but unfortunately they are up to #4 now and you can't get 2 anymore. This is a commercial program that costs money but you can download a free trial to see if you like it or not.

Photo DVD Maker Professional - this is another one that costs money, you can download a free trial and check it out if you want. I found it wasn't too bad.

DVD Slideshow GUI - After much searching I did finally find a free program that will create DVD slideshows, I briefly tried it out and its not too bad. There are also a bunch of add ons for more transitions and effects, its all there on the website. Now being that it’s a free open source program it’s a little less user friendly but not too bad, I was able to create a basic slide show in just a few clicks.

Hopefully that gives you some options to more easily share your photos with friends and family.

Enjoy