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: