bunk4 — Camp Magic MacGuffin

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Monday, June 11th, 2012

Great great great third week here at CMM. I learned my way around GIMP decently, and though it’ll be a long journey, I’m feeling pretty confident in my progress thus far. I’m digging the .gifs and I’ll probably be experimenting more and more with those as they go on. As soon as I can do it without flubs, I’ll make a tutorial on it!

My daily creates this week were pretty straight forward, all photography-related minus a thrilling tale about my strangest job. A little more detail on that, I was not in fact dressed as a burrito, but rather I just sat there, trying to look attractive enough for male patrons to come over and buy burritos but trying to stay warm enough to stay alive (it was November/December). The restaurant was unorganized, unprofitable, and generally unsuccessful as a whole. But, it was delicious!

Had some fun with the photography this week, but my favorite was probably my monochrome photo.

I love this photo. I took it in Carova, NC where the wild horses roam the beach free. I love the beach and the mountains equally, but a beach with wild horses trumps all. They’re beautiful animals and I really can’t get enough of them. You should all check out the area if you haven’t! It’s on the border of Virginia and North Carolina, but because of the False Cape State Park (which is also beautiful and full of a variety of fantastic creatures like boars and rare birds), you have to go all the way down to the Outerbanks Bridge and then head back up north once you cross over. The trip, while long, is worth it because of the isolation.

The point is: Great week! I’m looking forward to more adventures. I screwed around in Minecraft a bit. I’m completely lost. Hopefully this week will bring me more knowledge in that.

Week four and on will prove to be a bit of a challenge for me, as I start my own camping adventure as a camp counselor at Four Star Camps at UVA. 10 years at my 4-H camp at Holiday Lake, 1 year at C’ville Parks and Rec, another semester at Camp Magic MacGuffin and now, I’m going to conquer UVA camp. I just can’t get enough.

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Week 3 Letter Home!

Monday, June 11th, 2012

Hey Mom and Dad!

This week has been CRAZY. Our counselors are in full swing right now. They are teaching us how to tell stories through visual creations, such as photography.

However though the load did get heavy, it’s been a lot of fun working with different outlets to make goofy/symbolic images.

Every week as I have said in previous letters (if I haven’t, apologies) we do an activity called The Daily Create. There is one assigned daily and this week we chose five out of the seven to work on. The first one I “focused” on is taking a picture of something that isn’t it focus or apart of it isn’t in focus. I used my I phone and smeared the lenses a little bit to make it out of focus and voilà!

The second one was to take a picture 6 minutes after the hour. My mom graduated from Ohio University this week so I waited until 11:06 and took a quick snapshot of my brother, mother, and myself J.

The third Daily Create was to create a monochrome picture, I’m maybe a little too much in love with crew, and therefor I edited an image in sepia tone on Photoshop. [

The fourth objective was to capture an image of something physical or metaphorical that I am envious of. Hiking is one of my passions, not just for the healthy aspect of it but for all of the beautiful views you get through out the hike and at the end (usually). I took a picture of the view on top of Old Rag in the Shenandoah. It was breathtaking and reminded me why I love hiking.

The fifth Daily Create….

Visual Assignments

This week we explored how to play and manipulate photographs through visual assignments that past students have created! We had to earn at least 10 stars in order to be “C” students. I hopefully earned 13-14 stars (fingers crossed!).

Mine Craft

A virtual world that I can connect with other campers while building myself a fortress to keep out the monsters… yes that’s right monsters. At nighttime monsters come out and can potentially kill you if you don’t have shelter and the more you play the more extensive your shelter can become. I’m going to download this game by the end of the week and let you know how it goes! Stay tuned. J

Additional Blog Related News

Our head counselors showed us tutorials on plug ins for our blogging websites. We learned how to install them and what they are valuable for. Different plug ins does different things such as keeping out spammers, uploading photos from Flickr, and twitter usage.

That’s all for now!

Miss you guys and the dogs!

Love,
Katie

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Littlefoot on the Move

Sunday, June 10th, 2012

Staying on the trend of making .gifs in an attempt to master them, this gem took me only a few minutes. Over the holiday break I got a new camera (thanks, Santa!), so I was experimenting with rapid shots and using my favorite model, my adorable cat I got some great shots.

I saw this assignment and I immediately thought of this series of frames.

This assignment is appropriately titled: Animated Pet and can be found here.

Look at that guy. Adorable.

I made this one just like I did when I made Hugh Mercer dance. This time I played around more with speeds so you can actually see the progression between the frames without getting dizzy. I’ll probably make a tutorial of this later because I’m not ashamed of publishing photographs of my cat.

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Hoops

Sunday, June 10th, 2012

I took a picture of our old basketball hoop that we were getting rid of and manipulated the warmth and saturation of the colors. This was the result. Instead of looking like the normal beginning of fall when the picture was actually taken; it looks like late autumn and no one has raked the pine needles. Everything looks sickly, which in this case, seems appropriate because I liked this hoop.

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My Eyes Are Wide Open

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

The Daily Create 150 – Monochrome

After reading this week’s resources on photography I have only started to realise how much I have to learn. I never considered myself a great photographer and I am quite happy to let other people hold the camera. Whenever I wanted to express myself creatively, I used words. This shows in my Daily Create activities, especially in the first ones, where I felt the need to supplement my photo with words:

The Daily Create 146 – a photo that represents destruction

If I wanted something to be in the photo and it wasn’t there, I used words to conjure it up:

The Daily Create 147 – a picture containing stone, water and clouds

But I persisted. I took a photo a day, often after I had come home from work. I worked with what I had and what I didn’t have that late at night was natural light. So, a pattern started to emerge. Minimalistic and mostly monochrome.

When you rely on what you have, you start using metaphors and then you realise that telling a story through photography is not that different from using words. The Daily Create 149 gave us an impossible task – to take a photo at six minutes past the hour for an entire day and to share only one picture. I decided to take a photo at six minutes after the day had passed:

I recycled the above image and used it as a CD cover ( you can see the relevant post here). I am grateful to Chad for this idea.

This picture shows envy:

I do envy people who can eat cakes and not put on weight, so I recycled this picture and used it as a demotivating poster. You can see it in my previous post.

I also envy people who would have done a better job with this photograph than I did. I took the photo through a shop window and it shows. I tried editing it and it got slightly better, but I am still not happy with it.

While I am not particularly good with the camera, I am quite happy to use picture editors. Ever since Picnik got invaded by ants (rest in peace, Picnik), PicMonkey has been my faithful friend. I used it to edit all of the above photos, but it really came in handy here:

The Daily Create 153 – the oldest building in my neighbourhood

I have to be honest with you – this building is from the 1980s and it is, in fact, the building I live in. It was really hot outside today and I was too lazy to leave my air-conditioned flat. So I took a picture of what I could see from my balcony and aged it artificially using PicMonkey. I can’t tell you exactly what I did – I kept clicking on different effects until I was happy with the result.

I experimented with different types of focal effects here:

The Daily Create 148 – Out of Focus

To sum up: What have I learned this week?

1. That I am slowly beginning to get addicted to photography. That I don’t care whether I am producing art or just fooling around. As long as it is fun, I will continue doing it.

2. That I want to learn more about photography and that I will continue learning.

3. That looking at the world through the lens is not distracting. On the contrary. It makes me more aware of my surroundings.

4. That ordinary things and everyday objects have their own beauty.

5. That this is my life. Whether I am manipulating an image of myself until I look like my grandmother did 70 years ago or taking pictures of yesterday’s shopping list, this is who I am.

See you in the next Daily Create.

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Messing About with Mood in Image Composites

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

Taking another stab at visual assignments, I opted for Switch up the Mood, mostly because I had a few photographs that I had taken with a colleague’s top-shelf digital SLR camera the other day. Consequently, shooting in RAW format, I … Continue reading →

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I’m Not Flipping Over this Idea

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

Flipping the classroom is an idea being thrown around everywhere. I’ve had conversations about it with folks both in and out of education and teaching at all levels. No one has convinced me.

I may be hard to convince because it’s not something I seriously need to consider. I teach first graders. I don’t give them homework much less expect them to do any significant academic work outside the classroom. Plus, many of them lack internet access. So, the idea is shot down on two counts.

That doesn’t stop me from having strong opinions on it. Why should it?

Valerie Strauss, at the Washington Post, wrote about the flipped classroom this week. She quotes some folks to explain their support and shares others’ concerns about the idea. To my mind, nothing there hits on my really big issues.

First of all, a flipped classroom is not revolutionary. (I do understand that many folks don’t feel we need to be revolutionizing education but plenty are throwing this idea out there as groundbreaking.) All it does is take traditional instruction and switch it around. Teachers are still lecturing at students.* Recording those lectures and sending them home allows students to watch them multiple times but doesn’t allow any interaction. If something in the video doesn’t make sense, there is no way for that to be addressed. How does watching a video, possibly more than once, equate to significant learning?

Secondly, let’s imagine this really flies and most folks start doing it. How long will these videos be? How many videos will each student watch at night? Are we talking about half an hour per class? A high school student taking six class will have three hours of video to watch. Is that a good use of time? Is that even remotely reasonable? If teachers are taking their classroom lectures, from each class period of nearly an hour, that may be a conservative estimate. (Of course, I have serious issues with homework in general so these thoughts are tainted by that.)

Finally, this idea is so teacher focused it causes me pain. Students all get the same instruction at home (or possibly a teacher makes multiple videos for the same idea to offer differentiation – that’s a lot of work for something that is not really specific to student needs). The message is that a teacher knows exactly what the students need to know and can just impart that knowledge and move on. The student’s role is simply to listen and soak it all in.

I’d much rather see us rethinking our use of classroom time, rethinking our instructional models. Not just moving around the deck chairs.

* I do believe there is a place for lecture. My concern is that currently it is the default mode, used most often without any thought or question.

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My Day in Pictures

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

Visual Assignment 107 – Common Everyday Object

I admit, I am not one of those people who wake up easily. It usually takes me a while to focus and at first my surroundings might seem strange and unfamiliar to me. Is it a wonder, then, that the object you see in the picture above appeared to me exactly as you see it? It is one of the first things I see when I open my eyes every day. Can you guess what it is? Though, I have to say, I am notorious for giving tasks that are too easy. See my previous attempt at being mysterious.

It took me a lot of coffee and tea and good music to wake up properly:

Visual Assignment 42 - One Shot

I should have read the task more carefully, though, since I missed an important point here – this set of photos doesn’t really tell a story, nor does it create tension, unless you are worried about what I might write into that notebook after all the caffeine that I am about to consume.

By the way, the above set of photos were created from a single shot which looks like this:

The photo was taken in front of my holiday house in the country last spring and it shows some of my favourite things, including a Kurt Vonnegut book. As I am a proud resident of Slaughterhouse 4, I chose this picture on purpose here.

If you are wondering what music my ipod was playing at the time, wonder no more. It was my favourite group, Experience Rating. Their new album The Spiritual Equivalent of Oxygen is something I warmly recommend:

Visual Assignment 44 – An Album Cover

Then I spent some time thinking about people who really matter to me:

Visual Assignment 357 – Love: In Three Frames

After that, I was ready to face the world. And this time I faced it with a camera in hand.

The school where I teach is in the centre of Belgrade and the day was lovely, so I decided to attempt Visual Assignment 376. I was also influenced by several of our weekly readings, particularly by Photography as Mindful Seeing and the advice that we should take photos of ugly things and constantly search for the odd angle. What this meant for me was walking down the street and quickly shooting random photos at some really weird angles. Some of the photos were terrible, some barely usable. I chose ten of the barely usable ones and kept them just as they were. So I produced this:

Visual Assignment 376 – Mission Defamiliarize

After school, I listened to Experience Rating some more and did my Daily Create assignment. I also wrote a blog post.

It was getting rather late at night (or, shall I say, early in the morning) and I was beginning to feel hungry, so first I demotivated myself:

Visual Assignment 191 – Demotivate Yourself

And then I opened that fridge…

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Having fun with Visual Media

Friday, June 8th, 2012

This week we had to work on “Visual Assignments” dealing with photography, editing images, and just having fun! All campers had to at least earn 10 stars in order to get a good ol’ pat on the back and completion for the week.

The first visual assignment I worked on is called “Splash The Color.”

The Magic School Bus

Can be found at my Flickr account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/79114434@N05/7351847794/in/photostream

I used an application called “Color Splash” that allows you to manipulate the colors in an image. I decided I wanted the bus to be filled in with the color and the rest to be black and white. I wanted the focus of the image to be about the bus. The story behind this bus comes from a trip to Hawaii I went on two years ago. I was driving with my family through some scenic routes and stumbled upon an abandoned bus on the top of a cliff. At the base was the Pacific Ocean. Still to this day it is a mystery on why the bus was left at this cliff, but it makes for a great touristy photograph!

The second visual assignment I worked on is called “Picasso Yourself”

4 Eyes is better then none!

Found on my Flickr account

http://www.flickr.com/photos/79114434@N05/7166722773/

I used photo shop to distort the image of myself. I first used a tool called “Lasso Tool” and drew around the part of my face that I wanted to copy onto other parts of my face. Then I used the “Rectangular Marquee Tool” this gave me the option of where I wanted to place the copied parts of my face, and where I wanted to put them.

The third visual assignment I worked on is called “9 Lives”

9 pictures that symbolize my infanthood to “adult”hood

Found on my Flickr account

http://www.flickr.com/photos/79114434@N05/7351924088/in/photostream

I used PowerPoint and Preview in order to create “9 Lives” I dragged each image into the power point then opened a “word box” to put in captions for each image. I then saved the PowerPoint and turned into a PDF. This was a bit of trial and error. The PDF was simply too large to upload onto my Flickr account, so I turned to Preview. Preview allowed me to make the image much smaller, by turning it into a JPEG. After bringing the size down, I uploaded it onto my Flickr account. J

The fourth visual assignment I worked on is called “Complete Family Photo”

Since our family, like all others, can be slightly dysfunctional, I have photo shopped together one huge group photo!

Photoshop is the outlet I used in order to complete this visual assignment. I used a photograph I took in Hawaii about 2 years ago and made it my background image. Then I gathered multiple images of myself, grandma, parents, brother, and of course the dogs and uploaded them into Photoshop. I cropped down each image to make them small enough to fit on the background image. Then I used my Lasso Tool to select the photograph to copy&paste onto the background picture. I used the Rectangular Marquee Tool to reserve a spot on the background image to paste in the foreground image. I then made the entire “Family Photo” into a JPEG and uploaded it to my Flickr account!

Found on my Flickr account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/79114434@N05/7352054510/in/photostream

The fifth visual assignment I worked on is called “ Is that a ghost?”

I uploaded an image onto Photoshop that had a pretty simple background in order to make room for a ghostly foreground. I then took another image of myself and used the lasso tool to crop out the body specifically. I used the Rectangular Marquee Tool to place the “ghost” image twice on the background. I wanted to give it the feel of a ghost walking along the beach. To make it translucent I went to the layering of Photoshop in the lower right hand corner and adjusted the “fullness” of the foreground image. Then of course I uploaded the finished product to Flickr!

Found on my Flickr account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/79114434@N05/7352476630/in/photostream

The sixth visual assignment I worked on is called “Draw it”

I used an image of my puppy Leo cuddling with a small mouse

This task was not as tricky as some of the others. Thanks to the wonderful diversity in Photoshop, I uploaded a picture of my puppy and used an artistic filter on it. I used a crosshatch filter, and played with the shadow/highlights of the image. I then uploaded it to Flickr.

Found on my Flickr account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/79114434@N05/7167300437/in/photostream

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Look Ma’, First GIF!

Friday, June 8th, 2012

I did my first GIF today as part of an Visual Assignment for this week. This assignment was worth three stars and it was pretty fun. It was called Say It Like the Peanut Butter and you can find it here.

This is a clip from the movie Contagion, which I saw for the first time last night. Though Gwyneth Paltrow wasn’t in the majority of the movie, I thought the time she was in it was hilarious because I got to see some of the best “sick” faces I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t get over the above clip, where she’s sick and the doctors are trying to examine her and she can’t stop making the most unattractive face ever.

I made this clip by taking three screen shots from the actual DVD, saving them as JPEGs and converting them into a GIF in Photoshop. I’ll add more detail to a GIF I add later once I figure out how I actually did it. Mostly I clicked around and I would have you greyscaling it a few times, inverting, accidentally deleting the file, etc.

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