Use the right tools (visual aids) to give a great speech

If I was speaking in a conference room that holds about twenty people, then either a whiteboard or a flipchart would be suitable for displaying a limited amount of text to my audience. For a larger audience, like a ballroom, I'd need to use other visual aids.

Suppose instead that I wanted to discuss teamwork, and convey that I did not want my co-workers to go off in eight different directions. Then I might want to present a projected image like the one shown above as part of a PowerPoint presentation. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer view).

Next I might present another image with all nine of us going in the very same direction (in a very precise diamond formation).

And I might also present an image with one of us putting on the brakes (arrow) in order to line up with a couple others. The three images shown above are of the RCAF Snowbirds, and were taken on October 15 during the Gowen Thunder airshow held at the Boise airport (also known as Gowen Field).

Those images were taken with my Olympus E330 8-Megapixel digital single-lens reflex camera   equipped with a 40-to-150-mm zoom lens, as shown above. I was about two miles from the airport control tower, on Cole Road.  

The United States Air Force Thunderbirds also were there, and a bottom view of one of their four-plane formations is shown from about a mile away. The camera was hand-held, with both elbows braced against my chest. Photographing the Thunderbirds F-16 fighters going perhaps 400 mph is much more challenging than photographing hot air balloons, as I blogged about back on August 30, 2012 in a post titled After all… tomorrow is another day.

Those balloons were moving slowly enough that I could probably instead have used a little, pocket-sized Nikon Coolpix L110 camera which later bought and more commonly carry. The Coolpix has an LCD viewfinder, and a shutter lag of a few tenths of a second, which is completely unacceptable for catching fast- moving F-16s. But for most subjects it is far easier to use than the E330. The E330 runs on lithium-ion rechargeable battery, and I have to remember to take a charged-up spare along with me. The Coolpix runs on four AA penlight batteries which can be purchased almost anywhere if I forget to take along a spare set.