Sherlockian Power Points
By Don Hobbs

A few years ago, as I prepared to fly off to New York City and be part of the Sherlock Holmes Birthday Weekend Celebration, my camera died. I rushed out and bought a pair of the required lithium batteries. After I installed the new batteries, the camera was still unresponsive. I had not budgeted for such a fate but my fears soon turned to terror. My wife Joyce suggested I take her new-fangled digital camera to New York.

She had received a digital camera from some promotion she had entered. I did the real unmanly thing and read the instruction manual, packed the charger and the transfer cables along with my laptop computer and created my first Sherlockian Power Point Presentation. Sherlock Holmes' 151st Birthday Celebration is thirty-five slides long and it covers the events of the 2005 celebration from my point of view.

It was about twenty-eight seconds later that I fell in love with digital photography. I am never without one of our digital cameras. As it was once said by a great Sherlockian philosopher, "There is very little in this world of ours that doesn’t have something to do with Sherlock Holmes if you look hard enough. And we Sherlockians like to celebrate the Sherlock-ness of all things". I love living by those simple words and using my digital camera to find that Sherlock-ness. I like using Power Point. It allows me to tell my story along with the pictures.

The next presentation I created, was a hundred + slide show - The Great Whimsical Sherlockian Tour of Oklahoma & Texas. This photographic journey catches some of the more eclectic moments from the 2005 trip that is already becoming stuff that folklore arises from. It was also during this trip that the idea for the next Power Point was hatched. I started photographing state highway 4 signs, in honor of The Sign of Four, the second Sherlock Holmes novel.

This presentation is currently thirty-nine slides. Its main section features the seventeen state highway 4 signs I have been able to photograph. It will grow to twenty-one states over the next six weeks, when my travel takes me past four more. There are sections for fantasy 4's and miscellaneous 4's. A similar presentation can be seen on the homepage of Sherlockpeoria.

In January, I returned to NYC and created Sherlock Holmes' 153rdBirthday Celebration. This one is condensed into twenty-seven slides but many are multi-pictured slides. This one begins with the Christopher Morley Memorial Walk on Thursday morning and winds down with one last breakfast at the Red Flame.

The latest presentation is another expanding work. The Hansom Clock Club is currently twenty-nine slides and follows the history of this Time-Honored Sherlockian society and also has a gallery of the members’ clocks. This presentation was co-authored with Brad Keefauver, even though he is not aware of such co-authorship. I used the available history and pictures on the homepage of Sherlockpeoria and created the slide show.

If anyone is interested in seeing any of the Sherlockian Power Point presentations, contact me and I will get a copy off to you.

Happy collecting!!