CogBlogged Tagged ‘animated gif’

Gotta feed the animated GIF bacteria that lives in my gut. I had a few sets of photos I have taken over the travel span that I took series of things in motion for the express purpose of making them animated. I did these in PhotoShop via the method blogged earlier – essentially importing files as a stack, setting frame sequences in he animation palette, and sometimes masking out to reduce the elements being animated. These will be tagged to end up in the Photo it Like Peanut Butter ds106 assignment. First up, from the great state of New York, at the small town where I crossed the Hudspn River, I had just hopped out of the truck to take a photo of the bridge when the sound of a train grabbed my attention (I literally ran across the tracks to get the angle) – this one is 549k. Next [...]

I could not resist this, even though I really should have spent the last hour doing something productive. But I read Mike Caulfield’s post on True of EdTech As Well, where he latches on to a criticism of the TED technocratic approach to world problems, and this quote from a quote just cried out to be animated: According to the Khannas, “centuries of colonialism and decades of aid haven’t lifted Africa’s fortunes the way technology can.” Hence the latest urge to bombard Africa with tablets and Kindles—even when an average African kid would find it impossible to repair a damaged Kindle. And the gadgets do drop from the sky—Nicholas Negroponte, having spectacularly failed in his One Laptop Per Child quest, now wants to drop his own tablets from helicopters, which would make it harder for the African savages to say “no” to MIT’s (and TED’s) civilization. This is la mission [...]

This has to stop, but not tonight. I missed the fun of the afternoon shit talking and gif smacking today. With some positive feedback on the last batch, I set out again to see what I could do with GIMP as a tool. For these next two I went for very original material, stuff you cannot get on the internet- some of the videos from the Storybox as my intended purpose was to keep the raw material on the pirate box but allow remixes to float out on the open web. This first one was a barbershop pole spotted maybe in British Columbia- I had some shaky hand held video, but found at least one short segment where there was little jarring for one spin: BUt there was still jiggle. So I made a selection of just the moving pole part, and deleted everything else from 6 of the 7 [...]

During my hike today to see Dark Hollow waterfall (in Shenandoah National Park), I did some more experiments with doing some rapid sequence shot of the water detail. It was cloudy, but ay ISO 200 I set the aperture open enough for fast shutter speeds 1/1250, 1/3200 to freeze the motion, and taking a rapid sequence of 4-6 shots. Here are three more shots for the ds106 Photo It Like Peanut Butter assignment where you are charged with creating an animated GIF from your own photos. I’ve written up before on the method on how I do these in Photoshop. In 128 colors, I get these GIFs to under 700k each. There is an entire universe of movement in water, here are but a few atoms There is potential for movement in many photos…

I’ve been a month in Fredericksburg, living just around the corner from locations of major Civil War battles 150 years ago. On Friday, I took a stroll down Sunken Road, a place where the Confederate Forces held a commanding position on a hill, and some 15,000 Union soldiers died trying to charge it. That’s war, what is it good for? This wall, likely reconstructed (?) is part of the original wall that existed here, when ti was the major road to Richmond. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Tonight I came across a stunning set of 48 photos in The Atlantic, part of their series commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, in this piece, showing photos of the locations. What’s remarkable, is that the war coincided around the time when photography started to be viable, and this was the first war (I am guessing) [...]

Day four of the Fort Myers (FL) to Strawberry (AZ) CogDog Express. It’s been drive, drive, drive. Today was the stretch of Texas from Dallas to Amarillo, and the dry southwest land I know and feel just slowly, every slowly merged – the big sky, the sparse plants, the space- big wide space. With a population density approaching zero I cannot help buy wonder about the creatures that tirelessly pound away at the land, over and over again. Like giant metal dog monsters, they just cried to be animated GIF-like. What do they say to each other? You know what Freud said, sometimes an oil well is just an oil well… These are done in the same manner as my other photo animated GIFS- Taking a series on multiple shots on the DSLR, bringing into PhotoShop with the file menu script “import into stack”. spread out on time line, crop [...]

The animated GIF still motivates me. I made two more today from photos that just cried out “GIF me! GIF me!). This first represents the loneliness of the road, it just goes on and on and on and on… I’d notice a large number of these log trucks heading north on US 19, and spotted one coming my way when I was stopped for a photo of a decrepit hotel. I snapped 3 photos, mainly hoping one might work to be interesting. Looking at them in aperture, the repetition cried “GIF” to me. The method I used was more or less same as I did for the window water reflection project I fund something was missing, that I really needed the last shot of the truck way down the road… or not at all! I took the first and last ones and mode copies of both layers. I then started [...]

Flags make for great animated GIFs- I spotted this set of flags in Cookesville Tennessee, a US flag at half mast and a MIA flag. The first one is only 2 frames, the second 4. I was not even planning to GIF these, but the camera was in the mode of rapid fire shooting. And the light was good in the morning. These were done in same fashion as my other photo gifs- import as stack into Photoshop, use its alignment option, and then monkey around in animation window.

While in Nashville, I noticed these interesting series of reflections from the Cumberland River in an office building, literally twinkling in the windows. I wondered if I could take a series of these to create an animated GIF. I used the camera in multiple shot mode, but still felt like the camera moved slightly (it did). In Photoshop (CS5), I used the option Files -> Scripts -> Load Files into Stack.. This places each image in its own layer. I chose the option to “Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images” From here I crop to take care of the off alignment of edges, and resize to 500 pixels wide (the size of my main blog column). I can then use the Animation window to set up the timing, and preview the effect. I then Save for Web & Devices using the GIF option, and here we go: I like the [...]

This was purely an academic exercuse (that typo is intentional) in learning how to import video into Photoshop and use animation and masks to create animated GIFs. I just used a random video I had laying around in the Storybox… First turn on the music… dance music Get up out of your chair and dance along: FYI for those WordPress bloggers uploading your animated GIFs, be sure your original file size is the one you intend for your blog- if you end up with one of the other files WordPress makes when it resizes images for different options, you will lose the animated features in the GIF.