This is a further experiment on the Ugly to Beautiful theme. This is my favorite topic. Doesn’t tell as much of a story as the previous one, but I like it better. Again, there is no editing on these photos. They’re exactly as they are from the camera, except I haven’t cropped any this time […]

  I decided that I wanted to take the photo topic and do something without any people. Part of this is it’s hard to coordinate with people, and part of is that I wanted a challenge. I wanted to actually make something that held up to the idea of the class as “storytelling.” The last […]

Our assignment was to portray the same conflict in three totally different ways. I’m mostly keeping to my goal of not manipulating images aside from resize. The only non-resize manipulation on this set was perking up the color on the yellow image.

I’m trying to go an unconventional route for my photo essay. It’ll still fit the theme of “my people”, but i don’t want to spoil what I’m doing quite yet. The calculator will be important.

How did the week go? Pretty well. Despite some technical issues, I tried some news things and cranked out some content. But first, the bad part. I had a trial of Flash CS6 installed on my computer. I was pumped up and ready to animate. After trying to plan out animation sync for a comic […]

Like Diane Arbus‘ work, many memes rely on odd-looking individuals to create attention-grabbing content. After watching a documentary about her, I think she had  a better understanding of what she was doing and how it worked than many internet users do of the memes they make. Meme All The Different Looking People! Visually outstanding individuals […]

Extreme close-up assignment for a digital storytelling class.

Portrait Assignment for a Digital Storytelling class at the University of Michigan.

Taken in the Michigan League at the University of Michigan for a Digital Storytelling class.

Taken grudgingly for a digital storytelling class at the university of michigan

Taken for the “universal themes” assignment of a digital storytelling class at the U of M.

Rice dried to a spoon resting on a towel. Taken for the “take something ugly and make it beautiful” assignment in a digital storytelling class at the U of M.

Taken for a “something’s shadow” assignment in a digital storytelling class.

I found an image that caught my interest this week. After finding his gallery, I did some more googling and found out that these things are known as “paper children” or “paper child” on DeviantArt and a few other sites. I found the idea of game characters interacting with a real-world environment, so I decided ...

I found collection of stunning light painting photos and decided to try my hand at it for my experimental assignment. What is light painting? The short version is “drawing with a light source while a photo is being taken very slowly.” There’s a tutorial on youtube if you’d like some more in-depth instructions. The end ...

It was previously heavily back-lit. I put a black and white adjustment layer over the base image. I pushed the blue and cyan sliders up to boost the reflectivity and brightness of the foreground surface (your interface might be different from the one I was using since I’m using CS6).

  This is an assignment for my Digital Storytelling class at the University of Michigan. I tried to crop the image down to place the lower 1/3 grid points on the knees and the middle of the torso. The upper grid points fall on the edges of the cl...

The tower in the photo is St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Map of Location)

Repeating pattern submission for my digital storytelling class.

I’m not sure how I feel about this story. It’s hard to follow, but that’s intentional as far as I can gather given the theme of distraction from genuine human communication. The theme of genuine human interaction makes it read like Vonnegut updating A Brave New World for modern times. It also managed to turn ...

This is entirely unexpected. GIMP was just easier to use than Photoshop. Was it for some obscure and arcane task that someone had written a GIMP feature for? No. I was just making a GIF for an assignment. I tried to import  a scene ripped from handbrake into photoshop, but it didn’t recognize the format. ...

My assignment was to make an album cover without sound. This is what I made: Although it’s definitely possible to make a better looking neon effect, that wasn’t the point of this project for me. I wanted a quick way to do neon that gets the point across but still lets me quickly change the ...

Whipped up with a public domain texture and photoshop.

I did not do anything classy for this assignment. Instead, I decided to do a take on an old meme that refuses to die. “Eminem knew he had one shot to make himself relevant again. It clearly had him nervous after his absence from the lime light. He needed to be taken seriously, but his ...

One of the past assignment options we had was to create a comicbook effect. There’s a video tutorial for GIMP (via Brian Short’s blog). However, I didn’t use GIMP for this assignment because it’s lacking some useful features that will let me get things done faster for this effect. Instead, I tried to see what ...

I hate GIMP. Every single version of GIMP I have used in the past was frustrating. Tasks I found easy in photoshop seemed to have no equivalent in GIMP. However, I was willing to give the program a second chance.  I used the latest version to complete an assignment for my Digital Storytelling class: “Pick A ...

I just read the introduction and first chapter of of How Images Think. I’m impressed for a variety of reasons. Because of how much it got right. Because of how much it got wrong. First off, this it’s a book from 2004. The internet was still somewhat of a secret clubhouse. At the time of ...

This is not a good week. Like the Starks, I’m navigating a treacherous landscape. Exams. Two other big projects. A show at the end of the week. And I made a big, big mistake: I trusted my equipment not fail. So naturally, it did. Between the rush and the deadlines, I got this done: I’m ...

I have extremely mixed feelings about Living with Cancer. From a technical perspective, it was pretty good. It handled cancer tastefully. It told touching stories. It used music to set mood and transition between segments. And the use of comedy in the last act was very good as a finisher. It was touching, yet angry ...

Well. This was interesting. I’ve learned that Audio isn’t exactly something I’m comfortable working with. To be more precise, I really don’t know what I’md doing with it. So far I’ve learned that Audacity’s noise removal yields results of…variable quality. I tried using it while putting together my submission for the Vox Pop assignment, but ...