Had a question about what others have found successful/aesthetic. I'm including a slide show in a video for a family member. I'm using iMovie. Of course, the video is horizontal in format. Many of the photos which have been given to me (prints - not digital or slides) are vertical. In some cases the photos have been cut to be very vertical (3 X 6, 2 X 6), and there is no way to crop it to make it usable in any way as a horizontal shot. I was wondering what others have done to use shots which don't fit the horizontal format. Is there an overall technique that allows for the use of vertical shots? I'm sure many others have addressed this. Just wondering what has been successful. Bob

I would use the Ken Burns effect to zoom out from the main subject of the photo to the entire photo.

One other approach would be to use several related pix side by side - just make them tell a story together...

When neither of the previous suggestions works out for a particular photo, a plain black bar on either side of a single photo is just fine. It's fast and I haven't had any rotten tomatoes thrown at me yet for doing it.

Well, okay, one more thing. If the background of the photo lends itself to this, you can grow a vertical photo into a horizontal by cloning similar background to each side. But doing it seamlessly takes a lot of time time and some skill. I end of doing at least one or two of these for every slide show, but it's not really worth the time.

Hi Bob,

Had a question about what others have found successful/aesthetic. I was wondering what others have done to use shots which don't fit the horizontal format.

This is even more of an issue if your project is 16:9 rather than 4:3. I'm not sure if iMovie allows the layering of elements, but one way is to put a picture or group of pictures in the background to fill the empty space left by the vertical picture. Dropping the background picture out of focus helps to make the main picture pop as does placing a drop shadow on the top layer picture. Some examples are in here:

http://www.WeddingFilms.com/meghanandjoe/photo_retro

If you can't layer in iMovie it could be done in an image manipulation app like Photoshop for each picture, although that could get tedious.

You can also tilt up or down the vertical photo.

Thanks everyone. Good suggestions. I've been playing with it and have found that subtle Ken Burns plus the black borders affords quite a lot of variety while keeping a uniform look. That seems to be what's working for me so I'll start with that and try to judiciously use a few other effects on the images and the transitions. (Rachmaninoff piano preludes in the background are also helping to disguise my inexperience.) Thanks for the help. Bob