An afternoon at International Business Machines

The other afternoon I was invited to talk to a group of photography enthusiasts at IBM Sweden here in Västra Hamnen. I chose to focus the session on “visual storytelling” and sharing some insights to my job as a commercial and editorial photographer and video producer.

I rarely recycle my slide decks and so, the IBM presentation was entirely crafted from scratch – a couple of days prior to the engagement. Like with more or less everything I do, there was some creative angst involved, especially when deciding what the heck to put on the very first slide. For this particular talk, I chose to start with something (for me, anyway) unusual; a pie chart showcasing a rough division of my various endeavors as a freelance photog.

Once completed in the excellent authoring environment of Keynote, the presentation was sent to IBM and shown to the group via a PC laptop using PowerPoint. In a previous career, a previous life, really, I spent a lot of time (probably several months, if I were to combine all of the days, nights and weekends) composing more or less memorable presentations for clients in the for PC:s ubiquitous, Microsoft PowerPoint. I recently took a look at what that app looks like today and though still nowhere near as UI sleek, creatively empowering or even as pedagogically sophisticated as Keynote, it looks a helluva a lot nicer than it did back in the day.

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