I was on the beach recently and found a cute kid to take a photo of:

I got the push to make it seeing Before and After Pictures with a Twist on Buzzfeed where some dude inserted modern photos of himself into photos of him as a kid- but its more than cut and paste, he carefully considered the pose and details like shadow.

My first reflex- “This would be a cool ds106 assignment”

I am thinking of creating a twitter auto responder then when anyone tweets a message like that it responds with something like:

So this is now an assignment Then-Now-Together:

Edit a childhood photo of yourself to include a more recent photo of you in a pose that makes it look like you were part of the original scene. Pay attention to matching pose, detail, and color values to match the original. You can go back to your past, at least in your own edited photo!

Based an example of Before and After Pictures with a Twist spotted in Buzzfeed

And now my example- the source image is of me at a beach in Ocean City maryland, digging one of my improbable and unsafe holes:

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Combined with a photo taken of me last week by @windsordi on your trip to Point Pelee, Ontario:

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by windsordi

It was a matter of cropping out the background. To make it match the color tone, I mucked with the levels and come color correct, and added a Fim Grain Effect to try and match the original. The trickier part was creating a shadow – I found some clues in a tutorial from PhotoShop Essentials. MOre or less you make a selection of the original figure, create new layer below the original, fill with black, use distorts and rotates to move the shadow, add some Gaussian blur, and lighten the opacity.

And there it is- me on a beach taking a photo of me on a beach, then, now, together.

How about you?

Gotta feed the animated GIF bacteria that lives in my gut. I had a few sets of photos I have taken over the travel span that I took series of things in motion for the express purpose of making them animated. I did these in PhotoShop via the method blogged earlier – essentially importing files as a stack, setting frame sequences in he animation palette, and sometimes masking out to reduce the elements being animated. These will be tagged to end up in the Photo it Like Peanut Butter ds106 assignment.

First up, from the great state of New York, at the small town where I crossed the Hudspn River, I had just hopped out of the truck to take a photo of the bridge when the sound of a train grabbed my attention (I literally ran across the tracks to get the angle) – this one is 549k.

Next up, an animation from a single image. I had stopped to take a picture of Yet Another Crumbling Down Home. I really liked the look of this window and its composition, but it also looked good in black and white (same image, just converted). In this one, I masked just the inside of the frame to isolate a color change, and made the time it spent on the black and white frame about twice as long (and it is only 111k):

And for number three– this past weekend I stood on the place that is the southernmost point in Canada, a few hairs farther south than the California/Oregon border. As far south as Rome. While at Point Pelee, I was intrigued by the difference between the rough surf of the west side and the calmness of the East, but all of which is Lake Erie. I took a series of belly in the sandy photos of waves crashing over the rocks (the waves were about 12 inches high). This one has more frames than I usually like to use, but they work well, it comes in at 741k (I dropped the colors from 128 to 64 to help there).

Hmmm its a bit fast, might have to tweak the frame rate.

Those are Erie waves (not eerie ones).

Fun stuff them there GIFs.

(click to see a wee bit larger)

It was time tonight to do some ds106 design assignment, this time a Triple Troll Quote. the classic ds106 assignment game of mixup and mis-attribution:

Find an image of a well known figure, add to it a famous quote by someone related in some way to the figure in the image and then attribute the quote to a third, related figure. From the official site: How It Works 1) Get a picture of someone people idolize. Obi Wan Kenobi, Barack Obama, Captain Kirk — any beloved public figure will do. 2) Slap on a famous quotation from a similar character from a different book or movie. Pick something close enough that a non-fan might legitimately confuse them. If you’re using Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, you’ll probably want to grab a quote from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica. 3) Attribute the quotation to a third character, from yet a third universe. This way, nothing about your image is correct, and you’re trolling fans of all three characters at once.

So what the bleep is my image? I snuck in a Quadruple! This all started with a tweet by Audrey Watters following some twitter banter about Mitt Romney’s debate remark about pawning of Sesame Street to China:

.@kinlane and I are now debating if I can attribute Ed Abbey quotes to Oscar the Grouch. He’s right… Oscar is more urban

— Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) October 4, 2012

The mention of Edward Abbey got me thinking about one of my favorite quotes of the irascible desert rat urban curmudgeon (I miss the words he wrote so much):

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

or a later iteration

They cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix and Albuquerque will not be better cities to live in when their populations are doubled again and again. They would never understand that an economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

And this lead me to thinking about the hysteria of Massive Online Open Courses and it all came together.

So for anyone who actually might still be reading here, the mixups are:

• The quote is from Edward Abbey, who would have given a rats fart about MOOCs
• The photo is of Coursera founders Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng
• The quote is mis-attributed to the guy who got like 300,000,000 gazillion people to sign up for an A1 course, and for all major newspapers, magazines, is the founder of MOOCs much to the chagrin of our friends in Canada.
• And just for a fourth leg to this troll, I put an edX logo on Ng’s laptop.

Cause as we all know, massive has nothing to do with growth.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

On my last day in Fredericksburg, I went to the bank to close out an account, and came across the spectacle above. There was a crowd watching, one person filming with an iPad (that still makes me laugh like a 12 year-old), plus other gawkers like me snapping photos. There is nothing like a little destruction to attract attention, and of course I started hearing music in my head

No, no I never was a sinner-tell me what else can I do
Second best is what you get-till you learn to bend this rules
Time respects no person-what you lift up must fall
They’re waiting outside-to claim my crumblin’ walls

(lyrics from John Cougar Mellencamp)

I’m not saying any of my walls are crumblin down, but it was fun to watch that digger knock away the bricks.

So much I made it my Daily Create, which was supposed to be a 36 second video showing a 360 degree panorama.

But the pics I got really lent themselves to some Animated GIF action

This one shows the full effect, with dust blowing around

I only had two to work with here, but like the combination of the guy hosing off the pile and the machine in motion.

The shadow here reminds me of the poster for Jurassic Park

No big major stuff here. Just a chance to go back to doing it the import file stack into PhotoShop method. There’s always some tweaking, and I spent a little more time doing some copy/paste to clear distracting single frame clutter. I have a basic tutorial done for one of the first photo GIFs I did plus a collection of others, and a detailed walk through of one I did using just subtle eye motion — and all of this is a ds106 assignment Photo it Like Peanut Butter

I also did one with Cinemagram app on the iphone- it has a more fluid feel

It’s just too much fun giffin’

I thought it was time to try the ds106 Wiggler Spectroscopy assignment:

Take two photos of the same subject from slightly different angles. Merge the two photos into a single looped, animated gif to create a wiggle stereoscopic image that simulates 3-D.

I decided to use my pal Spike, the metal dog in my front yard, taking about 4 pairs of photos. As ti turned out, my angle of different between each pair was a bit too much, but some of the ones that were similar in angle had enough different to make it interesting:

and from the other side…

I made mine in Photoshop by using the File -> Scripts -> Import into Stacks command, using the option to align objects- this has the effect of keeping Spike mostly motionless but animating the background.

Usually I have to do some futzing back and forth from the timeline view to the frames view in the Animation window. I select all the icons and set the animation speed to the quickest option (0.1s), Keeping the size at 500pixels wide, and 64 colors for the GIF options kept the files small (under 300k each).

Wiggling is fun! Spike is just happy to wiggle all day because…. what else is there to do?

Just one more Slide Guy. Because who would not want to slide on a voyage with Raquel Welch.

Another slide guy attempt and damn, Martha got to Timmmmy in space first. Oh well….

NASA SCIENTISTS IDENTIFY SOURCE OF MARTIAN LANDSLIDES
In a press announcement today, NASA scientist Marvin M. Artian released startling photographic evidence of the cause of the mysterious recent landslide deposits spotted in the Burns Hill region of the Endurance crater. Using a pirated copy of Photoshop 4 and unreleased photos found in the deleted files director of the Opportunity rover, we know have a cause for this recent geologic event:

Stay tuned for more on how those faces got built.

How can we resist Martha’s new assignment, Slide Guy aka Make a Timmmmmy Meme:

Slide Guy loves to slide down things! Find a photo of something to slide down and make your own Slide Guy! (You can find Slide Guy! to download and use at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22064153/SlideGuy.png)

At first I was looking for the perfect picture of a tacky dinosaur statue but then remembered my trips recently to Niagra Falls, a perfect slide for Tim:

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Getting something with the right angle was key, and the horseshoe rim of the falls fit well. I imported both into GIMP using Import as Layers, and just had to resize Tim and scott him around to make it fit. The falls are big, but Timmmmmy is bigger.

What happens when he hits bottom?

Another ride!

Ok, Jim asked me to up the game, so I am going to get more particular about frame selection for my animated GIFs. We are working on the ds106 kickstarter awards for people who requested an animated GIF in their honor. I’ve got the task to do the one for Boone Gorges, who requested something “bad ass”.

My first neuron went to maybe something from Mad Max, which I might still do, or maybe Tyler Durden who was the baddest because he wasn’t…. never mind. I went to Samuel J as Jules Winfield, those mutton chop sideburns quoting Ezekiel…

I’m really happy with this one! Jules just keeps ranting, but the little hand/head motion of the scared kid in the foreground make it complete (IMHO). Plus, by doing these by hand, working with your fingers in the mud and not just using some fricking iPhone app, it comes in at 526k, almost svelte, lean, mean…

Jules: [Jules shoots the man on the couch] I’m sorry, did I break your concentration? I didn’t mean to do that. Please, continue, you were saying something about best intentions. What’s the matter? Oh, you were finished! Well, allow me to retort. What does Marsellus Wallace look like?
Brett: What?
Jules: What country are you from?
Brett: What? What? Wh – ?
Jules: “What” ain’t no country I’ve ever heard of. They speak English in What?
Brett: What?
Jules: English, motherfucker, do you speak it?
Brett: Yes! Yes!
Jules: Then you know what I’m sayin’!
Brett: Yes!
Jules: Describe what Marsellus Wallace looks like!
Brett: What?
Jules: Say ‘what’ again. Say ‘what’ again, I dare you, I double dare you motherfucker, say what one more Goddamn time!

This was the scene I plucked from

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czb4jn5y94g

And I tried to zero in on a part where the camer had no movement, of which there were a lot fo short cuts, but of course, waving the gun and mouthing off fit. I grabbed the clip as mp4 (I use PwnYouTube learned it from Tim Owens), and opened it in MPEG Streal Clip. I use the selectors for the in and out point of the small scene I want, clip it, and then slowly move the slider to different scenes and saved them as frames.

In GIMP I use the Open as Layers option, and under the Filters-Animation menu is Playback so you can see how it flips. This one worked well as I saw nothing I needed to nudge. I did convert the image to Indexed (Image-Mode-Indexed) before the saving as a GIF and enabled the dithering option).

The one thing you have to play with as an animation is the time between frames- I first did 190 milliseconds but it was too slow, so I dropped it to 120.

This one worked well as full frames; the next one I want to see if I can isolate things like eye movement. I am not sure how this goes down in GIMP- I imagine I will have to make a regular background layer, and then select just the parts I want to move and merge to copies of this layer.

Yes, but just making the GIF does that Gaiman “Just Make Art” feeling flow.

Now I am hankering for a Royale With Cheese.

This is a story that uses flickr photos to illustrate a playlist poetry story I created more than a year ago. The original assignment, not exactly title aptly, was Stories Written in Windows Media Player– and is one of my favorite stories about stories because it was one of the earlier ones created by a student in the first open ds106 course (Spring 2011).

The neat thing about this was that it sounded kind of ho-hum at first, until we saw other people pick it up and run with it, to date it has been done 29 times. The original assignment was:

Write a sentence (preferably somewhat coherent, yet on the nonsensical side), a poem, or a quick story using the titles of songs you have in your Windows Media Player (iTunes may possibly work as well). Print the screen. Paste it in Microsoft Paint (or some higher-end equivalent). Save it, upload it, and share. If you could even respond to the one I originally created as a challenge (possibly even embed it as a comment on that blog entry), that would be even cooler.

It calls on you to be creative with the titles of songs in your collection. My student last semester Tiffany actually was able to make sentences out of her song titles– my own first version was sort of a weaving of taxes driving someone to robbing banks being on the run, and ending up happy on a beach:

So I was looking for a new visual assignment to do this week, and I took my new random visual assignment picker for a spin- try it at http://assignments.ds106.us/randomvisual, and ended up on Flickr-Ized Playlist Poetry which builds on this earlier assignment. Here is another gold nugget from the bag of ds106 when people riff off of assignments to create new ones,

For this one, I was asked to

Take your Playlist Poetry assignment and find Creative Commons Flickr photos to illustrate your story. Try using a slideshow tool to interweave the song titles and images.

.

And off I went to http://compfight.com to find the 20 images to match the 20 song titles; it took a bit of keyword bingo shuffling, but I never fail to find good images. To make the slideshow, I used one of the 50+ Web Ways to Tell a Story Tools- this one is called PhotoPeach.

In Photopeach, I was able to upload all 20 images (plus the screenshot of the original playlist), and set a speed for the slides. To create the captions, I did a copy of my playlist from iTunes. I put it into Excel, and deleted all columns but the song title and artist, and used a function to string them together to make it in the form of Song Title (Artist)

I was able to paste in the entire list into Photopeach. I wanted to include the creative commons credit as part of the slideshow description, but could not find a way to make it part of the page, so I went back to the editor, and added the text to each slide’s caption.

Photopeach also offers an ability to add a sound track from its library, but you can also search youtube, so I used one of my songs:

It makes for a nice final package, I get the captions scrolling, the music, and a bit of Kens Burns added in for free (well it is not a choice).

The assignment is not too challenging, but a bit more work then the 2 stars it is listed at. The trick of course, is trying to find the right photos, and trying to be metaphorical and not just being literal. Not sure if I got that, but once I was started down this road, I was not going to stop!