pics – One Day at a Time

Yeah, Im not feeling it today

I have no idea what I even want to say. I’m in such a wonderful mood, but there are so many thoughts and feelings swirling in my mind. So I am just going to list all of the positive things about today because sometimes you just need to do that.

It started snowing this morning. Cue me dancing and jumping up and down on camera in the middle of rush. It was cute I swear.
There has been so little light pollution and clouds at night that every time I look I can instantly see my little dipper. It’s like my eyes are drawn to that one spot regardless of everything else going on up there or the time of night.
I had my thoughts and feelings validated.
My dog cooperated long enough for me to get a picture of her in cat ears
I realized how valuable of a human I am
I found many memories that I thought had long since been lost
I have an amazing family and extended support system
I found hope
I found excitement and joy
I reconnected with another long-lost friend
It’s finally cold outside
I have 4 days off this week, FOUR DAYS OFF-what ever will I do?
There is something to be said for a lettuce wrap that only contains cheddar cheese and pepperoni, good strawberries and a crab salsa–MIND BLOWN
I am loved
I am still alive;

I have another piece that I will be posting sometime either tonight or Wednesday. It won’t be as fun of a piece, but its healing and well sometimes growth and to get better it’s often painful. Until then, sleep soundly, have kind dreams and don’t let the bed bugs bite.

1.4.15

Let’s be real, it was a blast

And you totally wish you could have experienced the circus coming to town

Atop of old Pisa

The Baptistry and Domo in Pisa,Italy

A Simple Invasion

Minimalist TV/ Movie Poster

Create a tv/movie poster that captures the essence of the story through the use of minimalist design/iconography.

For this assignment i thought it would be the perfect way to get the image of Agnes Moorhead completely butchering the aircraft out of my mind. Even though the invaders were a large part of the story and probably could have worked for this poster, i honed in on the word minimalist and focused on the minimal design that the invaders craft used. With the exception of the US logo located on the craft, it can be broken down to be two circles and a long rectangle. Fitting very well into the minimalist frame. I was lucky that the template i used offered a text that was similar to the Twilight Zone text so that i could add a few key word elements to the poster.

In order to create this poster I used a Poster template in microsoft word. Once i picked out my template (movie poster) i changed the color scheme to Grayscale so that it remained within the framework of the black and white time period that the episode was produced in. The template came preloaded with text and a picture so i had to delete all of that and add in my own text. On the bottom i chose to include the air date for the episode to allow for it to seem more like a movie poster with the release date listed. In the top left hand corner I added the Episode title and TV series. The font used is called Mistral (heading). In order to make the picture of the air craft, I used the shapes feature and made one large circle, placed it on the bottom and filled it in with the darkest grey to try and stay as close to the color used in the actual episode, i then drew a smaller circle and made it one shade lighter than the base circle. I then changed my shape to be a rectangle, made it equal in length to the diameter of the circle and filled it in black. Once that was complete and the rectangle did not extend past the larger circle, i filled it in using the darkest grey shade offered. Because of its dark nature, it could not blend in with overlapping the smaller circle, i had to format the smaller circle to bring it to the front of all of the images so that the rectangle was not sitting on top of the small circle.

Word does not allow for the exporting of actual documents to a JPEG file, instead i had to save the picture to my desktop, then save another version as a PDF, from the PDF file I was able to export the poster to be a JPEG file, then upload it to Flickr and to the this post.

A Squished Head is not a Happy Head

Optical Illusion

Take a photo that manipulates distance to create an optical illusion. For example, I created an image of me holding the Washington Monument in my hand.

For this assignment i took a secret picture from my desk and was squishing my friends head. There isnt much reason behind it other than to mess with her by taking secret pictures and then posting them on social media sites. Taking secret pictures is an ongoing media war, the most famous secret picture however is getting caught napping. Those can be some embarrassing pictures. Im not speaking from experience or anything. Oh and feel free to ignore my old art work that plagues the walls in the picture.

For this picture i just used my basic webcam in Mac’s photo booth. I adjusted the angle of my camera to include both me and her in the frame, i was able to adjust my hand accordingly and then I just shrunk my fingers down enough to get it to seem as if I was about to squish her head. The actual process of taking the picture and setting it up was quite simple, it was just a matter of my friend not knowing what was going on so that i could actually take the picture. After i took the picture, photo booth automatically saves pictures your desktop, so i just had to find it and upload it to both my flickr and to this post.

How Do We Know

Mocking Up a Newsweek Post

Make up a Newsweek cover. You may design this in such a way as to satirize the topic, or Newsweek, or both.
You must select a powerful image and a pithy title.
Optional: add titles for other stories. The juxtaposition with your main one should be purposeful.
For inspiration look to older Newsweek covers. TIME is also suggestive

For this assignment I wasnt really sure what i wanted to do with a Newsweek title, Newsweek is very misguiding with its titles and a lot of other things. I generally try to stay away from reading it to be honest, but i still choose to do the assignment and put my own little twists to it. See the bottom left and if you don’t get it do some research on the Twilight Zone.

In order to complete this assignment i used a few different pictures and layered them together to complete a Newsweek cover. I got a Newsweek template on google and i used one of the image layers from when i created my Twilight Invaders Gif to capture a picture of Agnes Moorhead. In order to layer these pictures together i used Splashup to manipulate the images together as well as add text and to change the colors through out the images so that it became an appropriate black and white image. In Splashup I used the Newsweek template as my base layer, i then uploaded the image of Agnes Moorhead as a second layer to the image. I adjusted the center of the picture, changed the Newsweek header from its typical read and white to the Grey scale. I added the Article title and a follow up line as well as did some extra research on the Twilight Zone and incorporated another episode into the cover as well as one of the Writers (Richard Matheson) as he is referenced in an old X-Files episode. In the year 1961, the same year that the Invaders episode aired, the Russians sent their first man to space, which i found appropriate to this episode of the Twilight Zone. once finished i saved the finished picture to my desktop and then uploaded the image to Flickr.

A Unique Name is Overrated

Find Yourself

Find your name in the environment around you. Look for your first name, parts of your first name, or even the individual letters that make up your name in the environment around you. Take photos and crop them together. Share. Enjoy!

There is a funny story behind this picture, one that involves a cat, 3 ex friends and a friend that i cant live with out. I would tell you the story but thats besides the point. The assignment was to find a place or letters that make up your name, well for me I live 2 blocks from a street with my name. Double whammy its me in the picture too. Two Charlotte’s for the price of one picture, you’re a lucky duck. Im sure i could actually walk around downtown right now and find all the letters in my name, actually just sitting in Hyperion I could spell out my name, but there is just something about having a street with the same name as you that not a large amount of people can have. So i chose to stick with this picture of me and my name.

I didnt really have to do anything special to get this picture, but i guess i could do some background. In order to take this picture i had to choose to go out that night, i had to get dressed and be social, not just hide behind my computer or live my entire life on a soccer field. No instead i got to explore Fredericksburg in the dark. A cat actually lead us to this street and it just so happened that we had a camera, no not one on a phone. I went ahead and climbed on up and click click flash a picture was taken that you now see above.

A Flower to Brighten Your Day?

Splash The Color

Color splash is a technique to emphasize details- you remove all color from a photo, and then restore original color to a single object, e.g. a green apple on a table. Think of the Girl in the red dress from Schindler’s List.

You can do this in a number of ways with photo editing software or using mobile apps. The answer lies in the Google

For this assignment I used a picture that I took while walking around my Nana’s garden. Picking the picture was probably the most difficult task of the entire assignment ( I have over 300 pictures from the day that I was taking pictures there.) This picture stood out the most though, it was this bush of flowers overlapping one another so that no one flower could stand out over the other. I chose to change that with a color splash, making one flower that was not overly covered by another flower and having i pop out and away from all the rest on the bush. The colors of the flower are surprisingly not manipulated in anyway by the photoshop, the vibrance and blending of colors is just mother nature making her way into the world one flower at a time.

In order to create the color splash in this assignment i tried using many different types of photo editing software from the internet, including photoshop, fotor, and i finally settled on pixlr express. Pixlr allowed me manually pick which parts of the photo were colored, and allowed for it to be shaded in to its original color away from the black and white aspect of the photo. To use Pixlr express I uploaded the photo that i wanted to manipulate, selected the color splash feature, which automatically turned the photo into black and white. I was given a range of brush and eraser sizes which because of the details and size of the flower was very important. I then began to trace over the flower and erased where necessary in order to avoid shading in parts of other flowers. Once satisfied with how the splash looked I saved a new version of the picture to my desktop and uploaded it to flickr.

Oh na-na whats my name?

Make an acrostic poem collage. Use each letter from your name and go onto flickr and search for a picture that represents you. Then use any photo editing to make it a collage.

Visual assignments 946

I chose this Acrostic Poem Collage visual assignment because to me working on spelling your name or anything with an acrostic reminds me of elementary school and how basic yet complex something as simple as spelling your name can be. Acrostic’s bring a meaning that may otherwise not have been seen by everyone else. The assignment for this acrostic was to use pictures to spell out your name and also describe yourself at the same time. I am a big proponent in words not being the best way to express not only feelings, but they often do not adequately portray who you see yourself to be. For me each of the letters of my name is representative of something about me that you may or may not know about me already or you might never know.

In order to complete this assignment i needed to use a two different websites before i could take my final result and publish it to my blog. I used flickr in order to find my pictures (as required by the assignment) and as a place to publish my collage to, and i used fotor to edit and create my collage. Within flickr i searched for my favorite things that started with a letter in my name. Originally i intended on using on the URL to get my pictures into fotor, that did not work so instead I quickly downloaded each onto my laptop and then was able to do a mass upload onto fotor. When all of my images were present on the right hand side of the page, i navigated the left hand bar and found a collage image that held 9 image slots for each letter of my name. I organized each picture to match out the spelling of my name, clicked on the T to insert text on to each picture that illustrated a letter of my name. For example I wrote Holtby for the letter H in my name. I adjusted the colors of the text so that it was visible against the background of each image, saved the image and exported to flickr. Once the image was on flickr i embedded it into my blog and tagged it with “visual assignments” and “visualassignments946”