For my first Visual Assignment I chose the “Make An Album Cover“. I’ve done this before on some other blog of mine but, I enjoy the random elements to this assingment.

Gathering the pieces

The first step is picking the band name via the random page function in wikipedia. I landed on a page about the Carex nudata, which is apparently a species of true sedge.

Next is the album name through another random function of Quotations Page. The random quote ended up being, “Last week, I went to Philadelphia, but it was closed.”

Lastly, the hardest part, finding an image on the Explore Page of Flickr that had a creative commons license on it. By the third roll I lucked out with this one:

Credit to Michael Lamberty for the original photo

Also does anyone know what good practice in when remixing someones photo when they put their name at the bottom of the photo? Is it ok to delete that? Or should I maintain that as a way to connect back to the original source? Deleting is probably ok as long as I give credit somewhere, right?

The Creation

So the first thing I notice is the nice open space at the top of the image. A good spot to put some sort of text, right? I chose to place the band name there and stick with the kind of italics I associate with scientific naming of things.

I also noticed the brightness of the flowers might be a good place to drop some text. So after typing it in and playing with a bit of transformation in Gimp I got it to look mostly the way I wanted it to. I liked the combination of the word “closed” and the strike-through at first. I’m still not sure if I love it but, I think it works.

Once the text was placed I wondered what would happen if not only the far background was blurred but all the image surrounding the flower. As I began playing I noticed it made the flower pop and seem almost surreal. It lost a bit of its flower look when it became disconnected from the rest of the image but, I think I like the fact that it became this lone, weirdly shaped object. If I was a bit more daring I think I would have blurred the background even further to really isolate the flower.

Overall, I like the way this one came out. I imagine this band would be some kind of folksy, alt-rock kind of band. You know, a hipster kind of group that would think a scientific name was clever for a band.

I find these 3d wiggle stereoscopy animated gifs really fascinating, so I tried it.
I took a lot of pictures down at Lake MacGuffin this past weekend, so I found some shots that looked like they would work.
If you haven’t seen them before, here’s the basic idea. You take 2 shots of a subject from slightly different position or angle and then make them into an animated gif. If done right, you get a 3d-like effect.

If they’re not wigglin’, click on the image to get it going.

For the bird gif, I put the two images into separate layers in Gimp. I made one of them 50% opaque while I worked so I could see them both superimposed. Then I used the move tool, the scale tool and the rotate tool to try to get the main body of the bird matched up in both layers. Then I set the opacity  back to 100% and cropped the whole thing so that both layers were the same size and shape. I saved it as an animated gif and set the interval to about 150ms. I used the same general technique for the other one as well.

Here’s a few links with some more examples and explanations of the effect.

Jim Gasperini http://www.well.com/user/jimg/index.html
Wiggle stereoscopy – a new approach http://sunpig.com/martin/archives/2005/12/12/wiggle-stereoscopy-a-new-approach.html

That’s my story. Any Questions?