After searching for "section specific slideshow WordPress" I found the following:

http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/how-to-integrate-a-slideshow-in-your-wordpress-theme
this plug-in and tutorial doesn’t actually create a slideshow from what I can tell… however it does combine your posts main image, title, and description into a large banner image that links to the individual posts. Turns out this article is from 2008… I think were going to need something more fresh than that.

I’m not sure if this can be set up to cycle through the different posts probably. This is nice but not what I wanted. Strike one.

So I tried searching for "section specific content in WordPress" and found this post http://www.kimwoodbridge.com/how-to-conditionally-display-wordpress-sidebar-content-with-is_page/ titled how to conditionally display WordPress sidebar content which I figured might solve half of the problem. This guy was using conditional tags to show testimonials on some of his pages but not all of his pages. The difficult alternative to this is to create additional templates for your WordPress theme which should only be done as a last resort because of the difficulty associated with updating them in the future which you will certainly be doing. So this post led me to the WordPress conditional tags article here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags

After reading that page I learned that nearly everything is possible using these conditional tags.

So it sounds like having a section specific or category conditionally created slideshow in WordPress is not problem… now can this slideshow be automatically created by drawing photos from the pages or posts contained in that category?

So now I’m searching for "wordpress category slider" which brings me to Smooth Slider from "Internet techies"… which appears to do what I want however I’m not sure if this can be 100% image with the content overlaid… in their example of the image is a square thumbnail and the title and headline are located floating off to the right. I’m hoping there is an option to change this.

Update… after installing the smooth slider slideshow for WordPress I am happy to see lots of options that should let me tweak until I’m satisfied.

Impressive Options::
Checkbox to add or remove certain posts from the slider.
Pause interval, transition speed, number of posts in slideshow, ability to add pages and posts to slideshow, slider height and width, border thickness, navigation button options, ability to get first image from the post or use one from the post custom field.

Good deal… might have to donate.