And the SoundSlides Winner is…

So this was way, way more difficult than I expected. Everyone of you that entered the contest had amazing ideas how you would use the SoundSlides Plus application. I only wish I could give every one of you the application. In fact, I was so impressed by what I read I contacted the folks at SoundSlides and asked them for a special deal. There will be one winner of the free license. But everyone is going to walk away with something. I’ve managed to secure for everyone who commented $20 off the purchase of SoundSlides Plus! $20 is not something to sneeze at, especially for program that’s only $70 to begin with. So SoundSlide is yours for $50. This tells me that SoundSlides also believes in each of your projects. I will be e-mailing each of you directions to access the $20 discount. By the way, the offer expires on June 15th, 2010.

Like I said, it was difficult. In fact, so much so that I struggled over this for most of the night and didn’t sleep hardly at all. Really. I narrowed it down to two entries. The first entry was by Irene Abdou. She wants to use SoundSlides to communicate a dying tradition. Irene wrote:

As for Soundslides, I have a project in mind that I will be shooting later this year to document the Doohi of Burkina Faso. Doohi is a form of Fulani music/song that includes repeated background chants/vocalizations and originates from a specific area of Burkina. It’s traditionally performed at night by children and young adults around campfires in the bush, but with the relentless onset of modernity, it’s sadly practiced less and less. There’s very little existing documentation of doohi – I’ve only been able to find a single CD recording from 1997, which had just a few images as part of the jacket. This is why I believe it’s so important to document this significant cultural heritage while it’s still practiced as a regular form of community entertainment. I’m going to be spending 4 weeks in Burkina later this year and will pursue this project then. It’s particularly interesting to me because I originally got my start as a Peace Corps Volunteer in neighboring Niger, where I spent 3 1/2 years living in Fulani villages. (I speak Fulfulde – the language of the Fulani people, who practice doohi – fluently. Plus, this project can also serve as a foundation for future projects on how Fulani musical forms have evolved after thousands of years of these nomadic pastoralists crisscrossing the Sahel and the Sahara – the Fulani living in different countries across West Africa have developed distinct forms of music specific to their geographic areas.

Soundslides would be a great way to present this project! You can check out my Africa photography at http://www.ireneabdouphotography.com!

This strikes a chord with me. Having worked many years with nomadic herdsman of Kashmir, and seeing this lifestyle vanish in front of me, I would love to see this project happen. It seems to fit very well with the theme that I’ve been doing lately about dying culture.

Then just two entries later, I read John Batdorff’s entry:

Matt, I’ve been asked by a friend in the Chicago Public School system to speak to one of the classrooms about photography. What’s great about this opportunity is I would be providing a very basic workshop for at risk children. The kids all have some form of severe learning disability, so my plan is to cover the very basics of a point/shoot camera and the “why we take photos” aspect. Often times children with learning disabilities are very creative, but these are inner city public school kids who don’t have the resources to be creative and experiment with different artistic mediums. My thought is to spend a few minutes discussing the basics of photography and then providing the kids with disposable cameras. The children would be able to use the cameras for an entire week in school, then I would pick up the cameras at the end of week. The game plan is to return the following week with the developed images to not only share and discuss the photos, but to provide positive feedback. The project should be a ton of fun and we’re trying to get it in before the end of the school year. I think SoundSlides would be a great way to communicate their work. The public schools don’t have many resources, and in this particular classroom the only system they have is an overhead slide projector. So I would love to be able to share their photos in a super cool multimedia aspect to expose them to what’s out there.

This also hits home. Being dyslexic and having a daughter who is also dyslexic, children with severe learning disabilities have a real soft spot in my heart. John is right, often children with learning disabilities are very creative. It’s actually one of the things they look for with dyslexics; a bent towards creativity.

These ideas are both about communicating a vision and a story. They both seem to hit at the heart of why someone would use SoundSlide. In the end I had to choose one. I went with John’s project. Only because it seems to me that this will have immediate impact on some at risk children.  So, congratulations to John Batdorff for winning the free license of SoundSlides Plus. I hope to see John’s work finished. and maybe we’ll even posted here for everyone to view.

Thanks again for everyone who entered the contest. We’ll do this again. Only next time, it might be a random drawing ;-).