tilt shift

Self-expression poster

I used a picture taken by a family friend in NC, Karen Lane, and cropped my face out of it. I thought about just using my smile, but I figured there'd be more to play with if I just used my face. I added different filters - because of the color of the photo, I kept them all in the same orage/gold color scheme, except for the ones I made black and white. I flipped a few of the images horizontally to add a different dynamic to the photo. I then created a text box with three words that describe me: quirky, loving, and intuitive. All very different parts of me, but all true! I had fun with this project. It's always good to become familiar with the different filters available.

kaleidoscope fun!

Flowers are fun and easy to make into kaleidoscope patterns - the contrast between the darker emerald greens and the lighter pink/yellow tones makes this double kaleidoscope interesting and aesthetically pleasing. Fun fact: I took the original picture at a graveyard in Edinburgh, Scotland.

 I go through phases where I use my body as a canvas. whether it's drawing on my legs with Sharpie or painting rainbows on my hand...it just happens. On one just day, I was feeling particularly inspired and used my hand as photographic inspiration. I never did much with the photo except keep it around for nostalgic purposes, but it does make a fun kaleidoscope!

This one is the most monochromatic as far as color goes, but the fun spikey patterns make it far from boring. This picture was also taken in Scotland - I'm not sure what kind of plant it is. I cropped a pretty small portion of the image to make the patterns stand out.

Wanted: Band Needed To Go With Album Cover

If you happen to belong to group of people hoping to form a chill new folk band and are in need of a swanky CD cover to stir their inspiration (or if by some phenomenon you're a young aspiring folk singer/songwriter named Daisy Days who hasn't quite put together an album yet), then you found the right blog! To make my CD cover, I compiled a set of pictures taken over the years - most in Scotland, actually. I worked with each layer, changing the saturation and opacity to blend them into one surrealistic image. I selected the Home Street sign and moved it onto the back cover image; I had to shrink the size of the entire image first because the sign was a tad bigger than I liked. I had fun with the text, adding drop shadows and strokes to make it easier to see. I was shown a nice little trick for the spine text - I simply rotated the image 90 degrees clockwise so it would type on a horizontal path, then rotated the image back! Overall,I think that the lightened opacity of the images impacted my CD cover the most, giving it a nice, summery feel.

Nonrepresentational Art Creation

I love abstract art (if you haven't figured that out already). Nonrepresentational pieces are perfect for me, since I have the innate inability to create something that looks like anything in the real world. I wanted this piece to be more of a mis-representation than a representation - the yellow/orange COULD be a sun, the blue/gray COULD be sky and clouds, the green COULD be flowers and grass, etc. Though the piece hints at a picture of reality, the filters and blending options I used in Photoshop allowed me to make an extremely jagged, fragmented picture. As a poet, I often find my work incomplete without some jangled word concoction. So while the poem wasn't necessarily part of the assignment...I couldn't help myself. :P

next year's halloween postcard

 While the blue-green background is less than terrifying, the story behind the haiku is (more or less) true. To retell the tale of last Halloween, I combined a picture of my bloody handprint on my friend's bathroom wall with an image of me and my boyfriend's zombie transformation (sorry if the grammar's off...in my sleep deprivated state I just can't make that phrase sound right).  I moved our cheery faces behind the handprint layer, set the opacity to about 70, and erased the top layer so our image would come through. I then captioned my portrait with one of my famous haikus, a skill I mastered during slow days at work. Even though the blood is admittedly fake and our zombie transformation purely artistic, we left an impression that night (of my hand, anyway) that still stands today.

Treacherous Adventure!

 My high school friend Alaina was always one for adventures. She and I spent many afternoons wandering fields, woods, and the local high point dubbed Occoneechee Mountain (though compared to Vermont, it was more like a pretty big hill). But one day she got a little reckless - I think it was around the time of our high school final exams - and decided to go out on a limb...literally. Luckily for her, studying for exams had given her both mental and physical super powers, and we all turned out okay.

I selected Alaina from the first image and moved her onto the second, though since the resolution of her cutout wasn't too great I created a separate layer for her image and sharpened it a couple times. I used the cloning stamp tool to fix the rough spots and help her blend in a little more. Here's to adventures!

Kitties, Masks, and Filters

Today in class we learned about masks, and how they're used to change certain parts of an image but leave the rest untouched. I used the Quick Mask tool to select my cat, Cuddles, then inversed the selection so I could change the background. I added a filter (dark strokes) then reselected the background (under the Select toolbar) and added a warming filter from the adjustments palette. THEN I re-selected once more, inversed the selection so that my cat was the part of the image that would be changed....and made him neon. Because that's what he would want. :)

From My Midterm Project

http://www.tyler-brown.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Fast-Food-Advertisement-Vs-Reality.jpg

This image was pretty hard to see on our powerpoint because of the sheer size of the image, so I wanted to re-post it here. This is a classic example of the powers and deception of digital manipulation in the media. The difference between the image in the advertisement and the real product is striking. In class, Michelle had mentioned certain laws set to limit and restrict false advertising. The discussion made me curious, because it seems impossible that anything real was used in these images!

 I decided to look up these laws to see exactly what limitations advertisers had to work with...or work around, as the case may be. According to one article, "portion controlled products, such as a hamburger, must be the same in advertisements as the actual product for sale." In addition, the main product being sold must BE the actual product, though everything else can be completely fake. But the law pretty much ends there; "advertisers can cut and manipulate the burger, bun, lettuce, etc. to look fuller and prettier than what a consumer will generally get, or they can play with camera angles and sets to make portions appear larger than they are." (http://www.ehow.com/facts_7466829_law-fake-food-advertisements.html)

Advertisements in general tend to make me pretty angry. I don't like being told what I need and why i need it, especially from money-grabbing companies. But this project was interesting - it's nice to research and reveal the truth in the matter.

My Dreams, PhotoShop Style

To be honest, this is a pretty accurate interpretation of what my dreams look like on any given night. I started creating this strange, abstract concoction by taking a couple pictures of Scotland's beautiful sky, making them black and white, playing with the contrast, and pasting them on top of each other to make the neat shadows in the clouds. I rotated one of the pictures so they would align, and really like how it worked out. I then selected pieces of a few other pictures - myself mid-jump, fireworks, a bear from a zoo in Guatemala, and a stop sign on a street in Antigua - and moved them onto the background. I played with each piece separately as a new layer, and as I was satisfied with the outcome I merged layers together to simplify what I was working with. I placed different effects on each piece as well, making it look like I'm fading into the stop sign and background.

Here are some of the pictures I used to make the montage:

Playing With Colors

My original idea for this photo, as often happens, was nothing like how it turned out. I wanted to brighten the image a bit and maybe play with the colors of the sky to make them a bit more iridescent. Instead, I ended up finding the "invert color" button. I had been changing the hue and saturation of different areas of the sky using the quick selection tool, but wanted something a bit more drastic...and I got it. I played with the hue and saturation of different areas of the beach to make the red-white color a bit less monotone, then called it a day. I really like how the lady walking on the beach is much more noticeable in my final work. Maybe I should call it "Nighttime on Extraterrestrial Beach".

My Very First Manipulated Image




Before ^



After ^

 Look at me go! Though the picture of my sweet Icelandic is cute and adorable and all, the background is pretty uninteresting. So I took another picture of mine, one that I thought would make a nice background without taking away from the subject, and put them together. I used the brush tool to uncover the new background - the only really tricky part was making sure that it blended in enough. I had to zoom in to make sure I didn't chop off any of the pony in the process. I ended up giving him a bit of a haircut, but to be honest he kinda needed it anyway.

Composition Assignment

This picture of Bjorn, a little Icelandic pony, captures his personality quite well. Though he was not much over 14 hands, "legal" pony height, he always acted twice his size. The viewpoint of this image is deceptive - he could be a pony, or he could be a giant. And if you asked Bjorn himself, he would definitely be the latter. Bjorn's left eye (looking at him, it's the right eye) was blue, which is typical of Icelandics. From this viewpoint, however, it seems like the whites of his eyes are showing, making him look either scared or, well, crazy. Which he kinda was.

I wish I could remember her name. Something Romance, I believe it was. Endearing Romance? Yes, that's it! We called her Ramona. I remember her being spirited, sweet, and thoughtful, though I never saw much of her spirit under saddle. The heart, however, is the essence of this photo. I tried for so long to capture her famous heart - though never to my satisfaction- until one perfect day birthed one perfect photo. I couldn't believe how her mark was framed nearly in the exact center of the image. In addition, the background of the photo adds a story without getting in the way of the main subject. 

Though this shot is fairly simple, it would probably be pretty aesthetically pleasing under a different lighting. A shot of horses grazing during winter in the middle of the day, for example, would still be nice to look at. The sunset, however, creates a distinct mood for the photo. It makes the scene seem calmer, as the color of the trees and the horses' coats are dimmed under the yellow ring of the setting sun. It also creates more of a contrast between the horses and the frost on the ground, emphasizing the wintry setting.

Chad, a 22 year old thoroughbred, was always one of my favorite horses. I leased him for a while, and during that time we formed a pretty special bond. When I first started to ride Chad, he would always run circles around me for at least twenty minutes every time I would venture out to the pasture to bring him in. Though it was frustrating, I never hated him for it because I figured that if I were a horse I would probably do the same thing. Over time, however, we became so close that all I had to do was walk into the pasture and whistle, and he would stop what he was doing and walk straight to me. This photo captures one of those moments - he always perked his ears and stared straight at me with that intent look in his eyes. I used the rule of thirds, placing his head and body in the two left thirds of the photo. This utilizes the rest of the space in the image to make his eyes, ears, and markings the point of interest in the photo.

Two things make this photo interesting to me - the space and the color. The subject, my horse trainer Catherine, is placed slightly outside the center of the photo and is surrounded by a simple, spacious setting. There is nothing distracting about the background, and since it was about midday there are no shadows that disrupt the image. In addition, the entire photo consists of only a few different colors, all of the same basic tone. Catherine's jeans almost blend in with the tree trunks - her sweater is the only object that sticks out, and it is really just a few shades darker than the leaves. In that sense, it both sticks out and blends in at the same time, creating a new dynamic while keeping in with the color theme of the photo.