Archive for the ‘ds106’ Category

 

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.

The Unexplainable, Explained

Sunday, June 10th, 2012

I’ve really wanted to try this DS106 visual assignment in which you try to illustrate a word/phrase that has no English equivalent. Alan actually built a little randomizer that will give you a word to work with, and then you’ve got search Flickr for a CC image that works as the description. 

The phrase I got was “Pana Po’o” which is apparently the act of scratching one’s head to try and remember something. Yep, no English equivalent for that. 

I found an image on Flickr (see below) and pulled it into SketchBook Pro on my iPad. I added the phrase and a thought bubble—with a DS106-related thought to complete the whole thing. 

I’m not sure that you come away from this really getting what Pana Po’o means, though. It’s a tough assignment once you dig it into it. 

BUT, I think my next project is going to be to turn this into an animated gif with that finger moving. 

Original Photo: 
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by minusequalsplus

Triple Troll Quote: Harrison Ford vs. John Cazale

Sunday, June 10th, 2012

Just so that people don’t think I am relying entirely on animated GIFs for this week’s visual assignments, here are a couple of Triple Troll Quotes. What’s more, they are themed—both of thee triple troll quotes are centered around an actor who was in a number of amazing films in a very short period of time.

First, between 1977 and 1983 Harrison Ford was in Star Wars (1977), Apocalypse Now! (1979), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Blade Runner (1982) (all within 5 years!). What’s even more remarkable about this is he couldn’t act to save his life. Ford was an icon for me as a kid, but in the 2000s I began to like him less and less given his dismissal of Charles Bronson’s career, which I’ve already discussed on this blog. Regardless, he was in the holy trinity of films for me as a kid: Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Blade Runner—what ever I may think of him now, that’s a pretty sick run.

And while Ford’s run is impressive, it doesn’t hold a candle to John Cazale’s—who actually could act!—he was only in five films over his entirely too short career, but every single one of them was a masterpiece (I’ve written about this before as well). That’s a hard act to follow. The five films are: The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather II (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and The Deer Hunter (1978).  Wow! Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, and Michael Cimino. He died way too early, but he leaves behind him a filmography few, if any, could ever match.

My Eyes Are Wide Open

Saturday, June 9th, 2012
Monochrome
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:

Yesterday
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:

Stone, Water and Clouds
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:

Sixpast

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:

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:

OldBuilding
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:

Jasmine
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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Seasonally Friendly?

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

Visual Assignment 129—Cropped Signs (2 stars). I’m finding these assignments a lot of fun. They really challenge you to look at things differently, creatively. The thinking about it, trolling for an appropriate sign and planning the execution was a little time consuming, but I was thinking about it all day, all week, looking around as a went about my days. At work, driving to and from work, every place I visited, every sign I saw, I was contemplating if it was crop worthy for this assignment. I knew this would be fun if I could just find the right subject sign. But I was challenging myself to just be able to take the shot, isolating the right words, without editing the photo later.

Today, I decided to take a walk around historic downtown Fredericksburg to take photos. For visual assignments, for daily creates, for fun. Along the way, I took notice of all sorts of signs, evaluating them skeptically for potential for this assignment. Store signs, road signs, advertisements, etc. It was hot and busy, and my camera was dying. I gave up. I got back into my car and made my way back through downtown to head home. Then it caught my eye! It was on the edge of an alleyway. After finding a place to park and walking several blocks back to the scene, I got the perfect shot! No editing, just using the megazoom on my new Canon PowerShot SX260. I love it!

Seasonally Friendly

Here is the whole sign for The Back Yard at J. Brian’s Tap Room at 200 Hanover Street, Fredericksburg, Va.

The Back Yard

I doubt the owner’s would approve of my creative cropping of their signage as the new meaning, while funny, is not very hospitable. :)

Now I can’t stop looking at signs in a new way…creatively, and a little twisted maybe, but fun nonetheless.

 

 

Unlikely Intersections visual assignment for #DS106

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

I spotted these street names signs and remembered there was a DS106 assignment for this, Unlikely Intersections. Well the combination of street names is not really all that unlikely, in fact they kind of go together. The unlikely part is the survival of the photographer as the only way to get this shot is to stand out in the road.


To round out the story, this intersection is in a mostly residential suburban area, though the corner with the street signs houses the fire department and across the street is a large private high school and convent. The other two corners are private homes. Blossom road is a main feed road from the city and this intersection is about a block from an expressway ramp. Clover street here is residential and there are some very nice looking houses there.

The hardest part of this assignment  (aside from taking pictures while standing in the road) is finding an appropriate intersection. So its good to be aware of the assignment in case you come across one. It’s also helpful to have a camera on hand when that happens.

That’s my story. Any Questions?

 

 

Venus Transit Swede Animated GIF #DS106

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

On June 6, 2012 millions watched the transit of Venus across the sun. While millions watched, many others missed this rare celestial phenomenon. Some people missed it because they were looking the wrong way or they live on the wrong side of the planet. Others missed out simply because the didn’t give a hoot, or they were nestled deep underground tunneling through their mine craft worlds.
Whatever the reason, if you missed it, here is a  re-enactment  based on detailed eyewitness accounts.

 

I don’t know which ds106 assignment this really belongs under.  I used Swede a Scene even though this is an animated gif, not a video.

That’s my story. Any questions?

photo credits
Orange:cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by richard_north
Venus: Wikimedia Commons

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

Slow Life Down with Photobooth

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

lazy weekends call for lazy art, right?

It’s the weekend, time for a few errands, grocery shopping, mending a bit of that landscape edging you promised your wife you’d get to a month ago, and spending some time with the kids. Truth be told, our weekends are usually all sorts of busy here in the Rimes’ household, and I’m sure any other family with younger children will agree, it’s far too easy to find yourself working harder on a Saturday than you might have during the week. We’d like to think of Saturday and Sunday as “lazy” days in which we can relax with our family and friends, and just enjoy the brief time we have before heading “back to the edu-coal mines” on Monday. Reality though, typically means that we plan more activities and structure instead of playtime on those two precious days (at least it feels that way in our house many weekends).

So I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone by capturing a silly moment, and completing a ds106 assignment (yes, even ds106 can feel like one of those weekend chores if you’re trying to “play good” and complete the right number of assignments).

But that’s beside the point! How in the world is this applicable to the classroom? Quite often I see teachers in my district using Photobooth for one of two projects; either photos of everyone at the beginning of the year to go up on walls or special bulletin boards, or “special effects” photos for big projects. It’s a shame that they don’t have access to the Macbooks more often (each elementary only has 2 MacBook carts, the MS and HS 3 carts apiece), because Photobooth would make an excellent visual journaling tool for capturing daily learning experiences, moods, and just the general well-being of learning going on in a classroom. Photobooth does stills and video, so you could switch it up from day to day, maybe even taking subsequent shots to stitch together as an animated gif, or create a series of video reflections from a bunch of students after a rather large project.

Today, I just used it to capture the kids and me being silly around the breakfast table. The “Warhol Effect” was appropriate, and rather than print it out, post it on a nice bulletin board to make the hallways or classroom walls “more presentable” like I see at school, I’m just going to post it here in a quick “this is what’s going through my head right now” manner. No doubt the kids and I will stumble across it in a few years time (I’ve dumped it into my iPhoto album as well) and have a nice memory of this morning.

My Day in Pictures

Saturday, June 9th, 2012
What Is This?
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:

One Shot
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:

My Favourite Things

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:

AlbumCover
Visual Assignment 44 – An Album Cover

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

Love: In Three Frames
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:

UnderConstruction
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:

My Demotivational Poster
Visual Assignment 191 – Demotivate Yourself

And then I opened that fridge…