In six years at Skyline, no one has ever asked me over to see their vacation pictures. It is only in the past year that I’ve seen a returned traveler pull out their iPhone and show off a few pictures around the dinner table. However, it is really the loss of the accompanying tale that I am bemoaning, not the pictures themselves.
Is offering a proper 20-minute travelogue deemed impolite, an imposition on others? Does the returning traveler feel that giving talks at Skyline requires an invitation from some administrator or resident committee? Let us hope not (though it was once true). Hence this preliminary exploration of how we might encourage Skyline residents to volunteer their travel tales.
A little cognitive backgrounder: Aristotle identified three segments of the good story. It has a beginning, an identifiable middle, and an end. The latter was not the modern “wrap” as the literary form of his times 2,400 years ago was tragedy (“end” usually meant someone had to die, for reasons explained by a Greek chorus or deus ex machina). How much of this beginning-middle-end expectation is sheer inborn instinct? A good stand-up comedian has a superb sense of managing expectations via timing—and that too says something about the “good story” instincts we humans are born with.
Experienced storytellers such as Marjorie Hemphill utilize these natural cognitive instincts as they craft good stories that will hold the attention even of children with short attention spans. The journey framework is not essential, but any tale framed by a journey already has Aristotle’s expectations built in: even when you are inexperienced at telling a good story, your audience will stick with you because the travelogue framework encourages them to anticipate the ending.
The returning traveler may perceive some social barriers to volunteering more than an elevator-length description. We can work on that, such as finding someone (perhaps some committee) willing to do the asking and scheduling for a proper talk. Social engineering and committees are not among my strengths but I can offer some suggestions for easing the other perceived barriers, such as getting print collections into the form needed for digital projectors.
The venue? I’d suggest the scale of the Arts & Crafts Room or a corner of the Living Room, not Mount Baker. The windowless corner of the Bistro near the stairs might work nicely as a bring-your-lunch venue. Think of a long table and six people, with a free-standing projection screen at one end and a portable digital projector at the other, with a feed from an iPad, iPhone, or laptop. Lifestyle ought to be able to supply all; if they cannot, borrow mine.
The learning curve is no longer as steep as it used to be, largely because most tourist pictures of the last 20 years exist as digital files. What? You mostly have prints? And no scanner? One can now easily take an iPhone snapshot of a print that corrects for any skew and eliminates reflections from the shiny surface (try Google’s free app, Photo Scan).
If your own picture of a mountain was foiled by clouds, you can now substitute a picture taken by another tourist. Just browse Wikipedia or use Google Maps or Google Earth to see the tourist viewpoint and start clicking on a few of those little markers. This means that you can present a picture-rich travelogue without being much of a photographer yourself: use borrowed pictures (with little credit lines) for the scenic shots, utilizing your cell phone camera only for fellow travelers and selfies.
There is still the unavoidable task of editing down the slideshow, finding maps to copy off the web, and otherwise assembling a coherent package that will interest others. I have been looking at software for slideshows. The best is Google Photos (http://photos.google.com), available for Windows, Macs, iPad, iPhone, and the Android phones. It all works in the cloud, so there are no programs to install on your computer; on the other hand, you need to remain connected to the web while sorting slides, etc.
Take a look at the Italy Volcano travelogue I prepared with it:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/tHcBhCiO9fD1FsXA2
I have created an Album of instructions for using Google Photos as a slideshow:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/Ro8fmYvrAzDFENgg1
If enough people are interested, I’d be willing to do a workshop someday on making a presentation out of your travel pictures, both old and new, stills and video. But if no one volunteers to take on the organizing for travelogues, there is likely no need for a do-it-yourself workshop.
Remember that you can tell a good tale without any pictures at all, New Yorker style. A travel tale is not a photo competition. The story’s the thing; all the rest is embellishment.
