Week 5, Visual Storytelling, was a fun week for me. I enjoy taking pictures of random things and then sharing them and explaining how I view what I see. I think that is the greatest thing about pictures, and art in general; You can interpret it ANY way you wish, and you will never be wrong. I learned from a freshman art history class, your opinion is strongly valued and can bring ideas to others. As for camera use this week, I wanted to take some higher-quality pictures, and unfortunately my iPhone 4 didn’t make the cut. Instead I borrowed my girlfriend’s Canon Powershot(or something like that) and went downtown Fredericksburg to take most of my pictures.

We had to do a “Photoblitz” assignment this week. The assignment required us to take as many photos as possible in 20 minutes and tag 5 of your best. If you click the link, you can find out more, and ALL of the pictures I took are found there in a slideshow. Fortunately for you, I’ll post the slideshow here too!

I updated my flickr a little, and created my “Best of” set. The post can be found here. There isn’t many on my set, but I promise to start filling it up! Just like I promised to add more pictures to my entire flickr this week…Mission Accomplished!

Another assignment we had to complete this week was completing 10 stars of Visual Assignments. What that means, each assignment has a “star rating” 1-5. The harder the assignment, the more stars awarded. I did 5 assignments totaling 11/10 stars!

Assignment#1 was fun for me. It was to create a photo with a gesture and make a speech bubble. It earned me 2 stars and put a smile on my face.
Assignment#2 was to transform a picture into a “drawing” I think I did a good job, and I was going to write a tutorial on how to do it, but I didn’t have time this week…LOOK FOR IT IN A FUTURE POST! Add 2 more stars!
Assignment#3 was cool for me because it brought back childhood memories. It was to find your name in the environment, and I found just the right place! Another 2 stars!
Assignment#4 was very interesting. It involved going to random pages and using a subject/quote/photo and combining them to create an album cover for a new band. I think GIMP limited me on my creation(as it has been for the whole week =( ) but I think it still turned out well. 2 more stars and 2 more to go!
Assignment#5 I think the best part of this assignment was the title I gave for the post! It asked us to make a collage of photos starting with A and ending with Z with a theme. I decided to theme it off of things I enjoy. This was the most time consuming of all, but it also brought me 3 stars and finished my assignments for the week!

THE DAILY CREATE
This week we had a requirement to do 3, and here they are:

TDC262 states “Bald is beautiful! Photograph the egghead in your life!”. I was going to use a picture of my dad, but I couldn’t find a good one of him so I used this:

This is a picture of my friend Justin and I. We shaved stars into our hair (and attempted to dye them purple) for our Relay For Life team, The Shining Stars.

TDC263 is to “Draw an abstract picture of your favorite animal”. My favorite animal is a husky. I love most dogs in general, but a husky with a beautiful mask REALLY hits home with me.

It may not exactly be an “abstract”, but I used GIMP to help me airbrush the husky and then I put some blue wind/snow in the background so it wasn’t all white!

TDC264 was the last one this week and asked us to, “Take a photo of advertising that has been painted onto a building. The older the better.” Here’s one of the few that I found…pretty sure it was the oldest too!

This was on an abandoned building down near the river in Fredericksburg, VA. Need I say more why I love this historic city?!

The last thing on the list this week was to start developing a radio show. I sent a message to the group on Canvas, but with no reply. I didn’t know what was going on and was praying I didn’t get stuck with a slacking group. I emailed @cogdog and told him the situation, and he replied with great news; He emailed the other group members and they in turn, emailed me! Turns out they have been working a bit on the radio show and met on Tuesday. So I saw a GoogleDoc of a start of our radio show and can’t wait to meet up with them so I can catch up with them and put my ideas with theirs into the show!