Learning about typologies and Pixlr.

For this adventure on Pixlr we upgraded from Pixlr express to the main Pixlr app. This app functions similar to Photoshop with some abilites cut out.

The entire process was simple enough, however it was incredibly tedious. To create the typology I chose to use a collection of old matchbooks from my now deceased grandparents. As far as I could tell they didn't smoke, but many of these matchbooks were collected in the time where smoking was more common and allowed in public spaces. After taking the images from my Iphone I adjusted their levels so the color of each matchbook was more vibrant. Then cropped the images so that they were all the exact same size, as well as to the ratio of 1:1. After doing that I opened a new blank image on Pixlr with the max size of 4000x4000 pixles, copy/pasted the images onto this new image, and placed them together. The very tedious part about this process was aligning the match books as uniform as possible. The issue with Pixlr compared to Photoshop is that there is no grid. To match these up I had to create a new image 100x100 pixels to use as a spacer. Even while using this I feel like my images are not as unifrom as I would like them to be, but after doing this for so long I gave up and headed over to Photoshop. I tried this same procress on photoshop, but my spacing was still a bit off on the edges (but with white on white it is hard to see). Overall I think this turned out alright, my background colors vary a little bit but I dont think it is very distracting, I kind of like the different colors in the wood.

Learning about Animoto

Today I learned about how to use the Animoto application, which is a photo presenter, similar to smaller applications such as photogrid, and slide lab. Animoto has more themes than either of those applications, and allows you to edit different features that those apps do not. The only downside that this application has is that in order for your video to be free it has to be under 30 seconds long. Overall I would say this was pretty simple to use, it only took me about 10 minutes or so to finish the video. It didn't take very long to finalize either.

For my video I used some of my more successful images from my unedited and edited urban landscape album. I placed the unedited first, followed by my edited. I think this was a pretty good idea because it was difficult looking at other students edited and unedited albums side by side, this just made it easier for comparison. The song I used was from when we ripped the CD music. The only CD I had available at the time was Sufjan Stevens "Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lake State" which turned out to be pretty fitting, as the images I took were from Michigan. The song title is "For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti".

Learning more about things you think you don't like is a-okay.

Its funny how we say we don't like things that we really don't know that much about. Or maybe I am the only one who does this, but I doubt it. I have never been a huge fan of photography. It doesn't mean I dont appreciate the photography of others, I would just rather work with other mediums. When I use a camera, its usually to just take silly pictures of things I see out and about, and I don't see the purpose of editing the pictures. After editing some of the photos in this lesson I can see how editing helped a lot of my pictures look much better. 

The original image is of a pile of sticks, glass, bottle caps, and string that was in a driveway of a grain elevator. The bar is across the street to that may be the origin of the bottles. I took the picture with my iphone 6. According to Apple the camera has 8 megapixels. The top picture, which is the origninal, is 2,448 x 3,264 pixels. By multiplying this we get this massive number of 7,990,272 pixels. This number is the image resolution which we round up to make it simpler to 8 megapixels.

I really like all the texture that is visible in the original image, and while editing I wanted to make the texture more visible. For editing we used Pixlr express. The application was simple to use and free. The first thing that I did when editing all my photos was rotate, and adjust using AutoFix. The autofix seemed to adjust the saturation and contrast in a lot of my pictures, sometimes it would do too much, but most of the time the autofix started the editing out pretty nicely. The original image was pretty dull, so to give it some color I raised the vibrancy quite a bit. By doing this it brought out the richness of the soil and the rust of the bottle caps. There was still some other colors in the image that I thought would look interesting to bring more foreward, so I adjusted the color. This consisted of changing the hue, which I went down to a more blue hue, and raising the saturation. While doing this I think it enhanced and altered the glass color to a greenish hue, which showed the reflection of light more. The only thing I am really unsure if I like in this edit is the color of the string switching to the blue hue. If I could change one thing about Pixlr it would be that I could isolate an area in which I did not wish to edit. Overall I don't think that the blue string isn't really that distracting, I'm just being a bit nit-picky.