Nuts and Bolts

With a simple title like that one, you might expect a simple article. Your expectation was right "on the money," that is, your reading instincts were good ones.

A collection means more than one

What we have here is a small collection of public domain digital images of mechanical nuts and bolts of several types, plus several stray screws tossed in with the rest of the hardware. For each recognizable image, a nut, a bolt, a screw, there was another image developed and saved -- a kaleidoscopic transformation of the original image.

Load 'em up and then sound off

Paired in this manner, the images were then loaded into an easy-to-use piece of software (Microsoft Photo Story 3) which assembled the digital images into a lively presentation that either is a video or could safely be called one. Of interest is the music track that was assembled with the image frames, The Photo Story 3 program actually generates the musical notes to suit the user. You select the sort of instrument sound you want, the tempo, the mood, and so forth. The program makes the right kind of noise based upon your choices.

Freebies

As of the moment of this writing, Photo Story 3 is a program that can be downloaded free of cost from MicroSoft's website. Music other than the program-generated kind can also be used with Photo Story 3, and there are some free download sources available for both public domain music and music licensed without royalty charge under Creative Commons licensing. One of the CC-licensing providers is Jamendo.com. You provide artist attribution for the music you use, and Jamendo will provide the licensing.

Two minutes alone with you

This "Nuts and Bolts" video presentation has a playing time of about two minutes and five seconds. In the event you download it as a file from its place on You Tube, it is in the MPEG4 format. Upon its original construction, the video format was "WMV." Video formats are readily changeable from one to another, so whatever video player software you may have in your computer or other video playing device should work directly or can be made to do so.

Modernizing your photo album

There are video generation software packages available other than the one available from MicroSoft, but that package can be considered to represent the lot of them. You can go back to your old photos that sit inside of the photo albums, digitally photograph or scan them, and, from the digital images, produce your own "history" videos, complete with text captions, voice narrations, and background music and sound effects.

In other words, you can become locally thought of as a copy of the famed historical still photo videographer, "Ken Burns."

For those who don't like fuzzy images

Suggestion - If the video playback, below, sets the screen resolution, it is best to select "360p" or greater for a sharper image screen presence.