I am truly in love with Jacob Black from the movie/book saga Twilight. I know I am a little to old to be obsessing over tween movies.. However, he is super hot! I simply cut my face out of a picture I already had, and laid it over the face of Bella Swan.
#obsessed
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
Dear Mom,
I think I’m officially a hooked DS106er! I’ve learned and created so much this week. Make sure to check out my blog to keep up. I learned to make GIFs, take photos, edit photos, make my own currency, used soundcloud for the first time… the list goes on.
Most importantly I’m getting a better grasp on the concept of creating an online space. My blog is shaping more and more into… myself. Despite things being a little crazy this week in terms of work, school, camp, and personal life… I’ve hung in there. I can’t wait for my course to be finished so I can invest more time into camp though. It was also nice coming home for Marwa’s graduation, I’m so proud of her! and I’ll upload the pictures I took of it soon! Well, write back soon. I’m gonna get going, still have a test to study tomorrow to study for! Good night!
Sincerely,
Mohamed T. Moaz
These are my daily creates (the visual ones) from this week. I really got to explore taking photos and editing them. I have never been one for photography or getting my picture taken. Only in the past 2 years of my life have I allowed people to take a lot of pictures of me, because I realize that they capture memories more than anything. I have friends who are always trigger happy with a camera, but now I understand why. This week, I think I’ve discovered a new passion for photography. I’m no expert, but I love the fact that it not only captures memories… but emotions. Not only those of the subjects, but of the photographer. The lighting, angle, and editing of a photo are an expression of my individuality as the photo-taker. I really got a sense that I was creating an online identity this week. I’m putting more of myself and my aesthetics into my creates and assignments.
I learned about how lighting is important, it can alter the clarity as well as the mood of a photo. Also the angle and positioning of the subjects make a huge difference. Â I used pixlr and GIMP on these photos. I’ve been going on and on about these 2 programs, but they really are amazing!
Click on each picture for a better view, and some commentary on it!!
For this visual assignment mission, I had to take 10 pictures of a place familiar to me and show them in a strange way, with odd zooms and effects.
I took pictures of things around my room. Some of the pictures I left as-is b/c of a natural blur in them, or very zoomed in view. Most of the pictures though, I edited using pixlr. I’m loving this online software, it is so much easier to use than GIMP for me, and some of the features it has are awesome! I went a little crazy with some of them, but hey that makes it all the more unfamiliar.
Dear Mom,
I accomplished a ton this week at camp, I had some fun to. This week we started photography which is interesting to me and I had to do a bunch of assignments and some fun daily creates.
The first daily create I did this week was using my phone I took a picture of our backyard with the black and white effect turned on. I hardly ever use my phone to take pictures for some reason but I think I will start because the camera seems to work pretty well. The next daily create was to take a picture of something I envy. I chose to take a picture of my friends car which happens to be the same as the one I used to have before it broke down. I know have a much older model so I miss having a newer car. The next one was to take a picture that includes water, rocks, and the sky. I used a picture I took last week when I was at Yellowstone park
The assignments for this week were really fun, The ones I found to be the most fun were making a poster to demotivate and the Nine Lives assignment. In the demotivate poster I used a picture of Wayne Rooney who is an English soccer player, and just put a caption on the picture. I had a lot of fun looking through funny pictures and choosing that one. I also enjoyed looking through my old pictures and reminiscing on my child hood. Out of the five assingments I chose to do I found those to be the most interesting. Well its been a good week at camp cant wait for next week to start.
Sincerely,
Kevin
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.
So I created a picture with some of my dreams. First is the background which is a soccer field and i chose this because I have always wanted to play soccer so my dream job would be a professional soccer player. The next picture is of golf clubs and that is because I enjoy playing golf and my dream would be to be a good golfer because at this moment I am not. I would really like to have a Yacht and beach house because I really like going to the ocean and being around water. I used paint to create the image I just copy and pasted them on, the fun part about this assignment was thinking about what my dreams are and what pictures to use to describe them.
I really liked this assignment I think its a fun idea. My thinking behind this photo was that I just wanted to have fun with the assignment and use some of the tools on the website that would make a funny picture of Ben Franklin because all the pictures you see of him are always so serious. The website I used was http://www.befunky.com , it has many tools and funny animations you can use to edit your photos and most of it is free there are premiums items that you have to pay for but I found the free ones to be enough. I used a tool to change his eye color then I tried using a wrinkle reducer but it did not look good so I removed it. I then added glasses and a gold chain to make sure the photo had the right amount of ridiculousness in my opinion.
Whoop Whoop Mommie,
Made it through another week of camp. I know your missing me extremely bad. This week at camp, we learned a lot about picture, and how to make pictures better. You know how much I love to take pictures so here’s all the picture that I took this week.. (don’t worry, you’ll only in one looking REALLY mean). Some of them I edited to make look better, some of them I just uploaded to show how to make pictures look unusual, some I just uploaded randomly.
I know you’re probably thinking, “Oh Lord, this girl is taking all these pictures,” but don’t worry it was part of my assignments. I also had to tell them about my most random job & yes, I told them about the picking of bugs, you  can hear that here.
http://soundcloud.com/kavon-lechae/random-job
Alright Mommie, I have one more task to complete before tomorrow, so I’m going to get to it now. I love you ohhh so much & can’t wait to see you.
Sincerely,
Kavon = )
Sorry, but camp is over! Head over to ds106
The Campfires have all been put out.
Camp is now over (see the final story. If you are craving an experience like this, head over to ds106 and see how to participate. For more on the Summer of Magic Macguffin, see.....
