After you’ve been learning to take photos for a while, you may want to showcase some of your best work to friends, family, or even potential employers. Creating a video reel of your photography can be a great way to showcase your work, and it is an easy process once you know the basics.
All you’ll need are your photos and Movie Maker software, which comes on many Windows computers or can be downloaded for free on this website. A piece of music can also add a nice finishing touch to the reel.
The purpose of your reel will determine how long it will be. If you’re simply wanting to showcase your work to your friends and family, the length isn’t very important, although I recommend trying to keep it under about two and a half minutes to keep your audience’s attention.
If you’re applying to a job or trying to start a photography business, it’s especially important to keep the reel fairly short – around a minute to no more than a minute and a half.
Choose about a dozen to two dozen of your best photographs to start with. Both the length of your finished reel and the amount of time each photo plays will determine the number of photos you will need.
The first step after opening Movie Maker is to import your photos. You can do this either by clicking anywhere on the right to launch File Explorer
or by clicking the “Add Videos and Photos” button in the “Home” tab in the upper left of the screen.
You can select multiple photos by holding down the Ctrl key. They will appear in Movie Maker on the right, where you can click and drag them to rearrange them.
Selecting a photo and going under the yellow “Video Tools” tab will allow you to change the duration of the photo. I recommend a duration of anywhere between 3 to 6 seconds for each photo, depending on how much detail the photo has. Remember that not every photo needs to play for the same length of time.
Tomorrow in part 2 of this article, we’ll look at how you can use effects, titles, and muisc to make your slideshow stand out.
~ Rachel Van Tuyl