In almost every workshop that I do, someone asks where you can get great photos to use in your presentation. Today I’d like to discuss another source that is available free of charge in most cases. Governments have staff who take photographs as part of their jobs, and many times these photos are quite good. Fortunately, these photos also belong to the government and the various departments and agencies have generously made a lot of these photos available for use I always mention Microsoft’s online library of images that is accessible through PowerPoint, stock photography

Photos or sketches Photos are great for impact and evoking emotion. If you have a hard time trying to think of a metaphor simply type the concept you want to illustrate into the search engine of a stock photo website (eg: istockphoto ) and it will serve up lots of ideas. Don’t use irrelevent photos for the sake of adding visual interest. It’s called the Assertion-Evidence Format and it was developed by Professor Michael Alley (I’ve mentioned it previously but somehow never devoted a whole post to it). BTW, if you’ve downloaded and

I've talked about this tip before, but ran into the same situation again this month while doing a public speaking engagement in Morocco. The primary languages there are Arabic and French. Just arranging for an overhead projector was very difficult. When I arrived as the opening

So there’s a lot of fine-print type going over the top of photos, which creates production dramas too tedious to relate here, but it has some relevance for creating presentation graphics. A nice photo makes a more compelling background for your screen show than a cheesy graphic template. Some of the earlier versions had a single, very ugly setting with a gray, massively The design guys and I are working on a food packaging project at the moment. It’s quite a fiddly task.

Sometimes the only image of you that potential clients have is your head shot photo. Is it time to freshen your image and have new photos taken? It always amazes me how speakers will spend a small fortune on a website, and still use a photo from long ago as a marketing tool. offer as an example this photo, shown above left, taken by Julie, my photographer. People are visual as well as auditory when it comes to judging your value as a speaker. This happens more than you think. Before sending any image of myself out to the world I made sure that it looked like

Here's the results of a couple of quick photo edits that I did - the first to convert the image to a cartoon style and the second was done with a neon effect and photo corners.   ...Tags: Tags: Photography Presentation Technology Aviary flauntR FotoFlexer Gimp Paint.net Photo editing software PhotoFiltre Photoshop Splashu As presenters, we're often using photographs in our presentations.  There are many free and fee tools to enhance or modify our photographs to better convey our message or engage our audience.  Read Write

Some stuff I once had on SmugMug, now back online, but now on Flickr: ...Tags: Tags: Grab Ba

Let’s be honest, we all hate photos of ourselves. But your photo-self looks like your inbred backwoods cousin. Looking good in photos isn’t a core presentation skill, but it’s useful, particularly for those of you whose entire existence is defined by Facebook. ve spent a bit of time recently doing photo shoots of insurance executives for their annual report. We all carry around a mental picture of how we look – like a more or less normal human. Double chins, jug ears, squinty eyes, pasty skin, and crooked smiles – cameras add all this to you, and more.

Tags: Featured Slide Design Bento images stock photo As we design more and more slide decks, we inevitably create or consume an ever greater number of images, whether they’re photographs, icons, or whatever.  The The problem is, however, it becomes a problem keeping track of them all on your hard drive.  Whether Whether you’re using Windows or the Mac, this is where

I've heard executive women speakers say they sometimes fight their speaking fears by putting a child's drawing or a photo of their child on the lectern during a talk. Now there may be a scientific reason for speaking moms to tote that photo along. An article in today's New York Times reports on a study that suggests there's a positive neurological effect for moms who have their smiling child's photo Here's the main finding noted by the Times : Using a functional MRI scanner to watch the brain in action, researchers have demonstrated that a picture of her own smiling baby activates the critical reward-processing regions of the mother’s brain much more strongly than seeing a picture of an unknown baby with the same happy look.