My colleague, Alistair McKinnell, and I both feel that presentation slides are abused.
In the previous post, I described how we did the same presentation twice, but the second presentation was more compelling than the first one. We didn't use slides in our first presentation, but we found them very effective in our second presentation.
We used slides, not to communicate with our audience, but as milestones in our presentation to serve as guides for us, the presenters.
We were conscious, from the first presentation, how presentation jitters can cause us to forget what we want to communicate. We selected a few photographs that strongly suggest the ideas we wanted to communicate. The audience may have found them entertaining and appropriate. If so, bonus. Their primary role was to guide Alistair and myself.