Walter Hutchens’ Blog

Here’s a video (a slideshow, really) based on the undergraduate-level course I led in Hong Kong last month.

It runs about 19 minutes. Pictures of our speakers appear at about the 8 minute mark.

Currently there’s no soundtrack (I may add a Canto-Pop one later).

I made this show using Photo Story software, something I discovered in December 2004. It has some limitations that are starting to annoy me (it can be excruciatingly slooooow on some operations, it only lets you work with 300 shots per show, and it doesn’t allow you much control over the text you add to a slide, for example), but it is extremely easy to use and currently is free from Microsoft. For that price, it is great software.

I took most of the pictures using a Pentax S5i, a small digital camera I bought shortly before the trip. It’s not the finest digital camera in the world, but there’s something magical about its size–it’s so small that I was willing to keep it on a string around my neck, so I took a lot more photos than I otherwise would have.

I retouched some of the photos slightly using Picasa, another free software product (this one from Google). Version 2 has recently been released, and it has some very nice new features. Picasa and a related product Hello work well with Blogger.

Some students shared their photos with me, so this is a group project.

I had a great time on the trip; the students were smart, conscientious and engaged, and Hong Kong was an outstanding venue. It is like an air lock between the U.S. and the challenges of mainland China; it is exciting, teeming with life and profoundly unlike what most of the students are accustomed to, but yet it is exceedingly visitor-friendly. It’s safe, there’s good public transportation, and visitors can get around quite well using only English. I hope to go back with another group next year.