CogBlogged in ‘2012’

I have been wanting to make a good attempt at Annie Belle’s Switch up the Mood ds106 assignment: Color, lighting, saturation, contrast, and many other factors all play in to taking a decent photo and making it fabulous. This assignment is to change the mood or tone of a photograph by altering the contrast, brightness, hue, saturation, exposure, etc. You do not have to change all of those things about the photo, but you can if you would like to. Experiment. Don’t be afraid to take it to the extremes, and don’t be afraid to be subtle. Familiarize yourself with your editing software, whether it’s Photoshop, GIMP, Picnik, or any number of other editing platforms. Most of all, enjoy what you are doing! Yet I wanted more than just going black and white for a gritty feel. I ended up using as my “pre” image a photo of the Cadillac [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog My variant of the ds106 Parent-Child Headswap assignment, in this case I take some liberty to swap a photo of me and my icon dog, Mickey. The original photo is from August 2001: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This was done in Photoshop, I am planning try and start doing some work in GIMP so I better understand tools my students are using. I used the magnetic lasso selection to choose each head, cut it and past it to new layers. I flipped each one horizontally to get the orientation right, and then the Transform->Scale and Transform-Distort tools to shape the heads. It took a bit of eraser/brush to clean up the selection fringe, and some magic brush on the background layer to fill things out. You know what they say about pets and their [...]

Say it Like the Peanut Butter has been a long standing popular ds106 assignment- capture a key moment in a movie in the form of an animated GIF. Over the summer I did some experiments with using my own photos to generate animated GIFs, and I am making this into a new ds106 assignment. Photo it Like the Peanut Butter For this assignment, generate an animated GIF of a real world object/place by using your own series of photographs as the source material. I have already written up a few blog posts with my method; the key is taking a series of photos with little or no movement of your camera – a tripod is strongly recommended, but I have gotten away with ones done with multiple shot mode on my Canon DSLR. The first one I spotted in Nashville as I was fascinated by the reflections of the Cumberland [...]

Get out in front of this meme or get out of the way! Beyond Cat Breading lies the bizarre space of Jim Groom Breading: This started with the almost incomprehensible Cat Breading ds106 assignment: The latest bizarre trend blowing up Facebook mini-feeds everywhere? Cat Breading. (Think LOLcats, but with a trippy twist—each adorable kitten has been adorned with a slice of bread, which encases their little feline face.)” From this article in Complex’s Pop Culture section So, what do you have to do? Simple: frame a cat’s face with a piece of bread and take a picture of it. Now the Cat Bread Purists will likely insist the true art requires real cats and real pieces of bread, no Photoshopping. Phoooey. As Jim was describing this assignment to his ds106 class tonight, I was watching on the live stream, and it occurred to me that the most appropriate things to [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This audio reflection comes close to the end of my cross country sprint from Arizona to Virginia, as I close in on Fredericksburg Virginia, where I am now, and not planning on driving away from for a while. Maybe it will become Hallowed Ground Slices of Life 009: 90 miles from Fredericksburg I had just listened to Scottlo, who inspired me to try this audio reflection, end his Slices of Life with number 47 “End of this Chapter”, his own path. It’s been remarkable to follow him from his start, when he was questioning everything about his teaching, to the torrent of excitement he achieved by number 47. Many ways to fill in Scottlo’s blank: Always Be _________ing I am looking forward to first face meeting with my ds106 students, and plan to meet individually with students and review their [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Still catching up on the slices of life audio reflection, this one almost two weeks old. ALways Be ‘Poligizing for being behind? This audio recording is from January 26, the morning I left home in Strawberry Arizona, for the 220 mile express trip to Virginia. Slices of Life 008: Leaving Arizona I am going to miss these Big Blue Skies cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog In many ways, this was eerily similar to the day I left on my 5 month odyssey in June 2011, but also very different. At that time was unsure if I could even live the road life; would I hate it? I of course found it I could manage living out of Big Red and being mobile for few months, and that home was always in Strawberry even if I [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today would have been my Mom’s 83rd Birthday, and in honor of her memory and love of butterflies, I asked Tim Owens to do a Makerbot print of a butterfly ornament. If you want to a description of her belief about butterflies, listen to this recording I made last year when I visited her, just a week after her 82nd: Mom on Butterflies It’s been a year of thinking back on events that she was here for last year, and probably the sweetest memory was the outpouring of sympathy for cookielove last September And it was was a year ago last November she was at my home in Strawberry making cookies, and I just felt like there would be many more of these. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo [...]

cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Reaching a bit into the past for today’s Daily Create "a photo that represents that happiest or most memorable moment in your life." As an absolute for "happiest" I find that impossible, so let’s reach into the hat. Having driven across Texas twice in the last 3 months, I went back to first first Trans-Texas tour, in August 1987, when Dominoe and I drove to Arizona from Baltimore in my 1973 Ford Maverick. This trip alone was epic for me, a grand aventure, and I had a perfect, non-complaining travel buddy, though she did not do her share of the driving. This is somewhere on US 387 between Dallas and Amarillo. Dominoe was my first dog I owned on my own, and her story has gone very far with me. Picking happiest is tricky, but this was definitely memorable and rolled around [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A quick one for a new #ds106 assignment created by one of my students: Comic Book Effect Take a picture and experiment with the “Halftone Effect” in some photo editing software to create a comic book effect. There are lots of tutorials on Youtube and Google. This was the original photo, one that Rowan Peter took of me when I visited him in Melbourne and we worked on some lawn art in his back yard: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I did all my edits directly in flickr using Piknic (Using “Edit Photo in Piknic” from the Actions menu). There was no half tone effect there, but I found the textured one worked pretty well. I added the bubble on some next to round it out. Just a quick try!

Inspired by Ben Rimes post today I wanted to take a spin at the ds106 Warning Design assignment: Lots of things today have warning labels. Create warning labels for things that exist only in movies or your imagination I felt that as a weapon of planetary destruction, the Illudium Q-36 Space Modulator wielded by Marvin Martian would definitely need some warning labels. That thing is dangerous. The users manual is about 800 pages long. Marvin is lucky he does not blow his Martian head off. The real device was rather simple, almost just a stick of dynamite. I did a google search on the device and landed on the complex device from a tumblr blog. Building this was just some PhotoShop layering. I placed the device at the center. For each callout, I just copied a selection, pasted to new layer, and resized. Then I overlaid the items with text [...]