Month: September 2012

Photoblitzin

20 Minute Photo Challenge: ds106 Photoblitz – CogDogBlog

So this is how we set it up:

Here is an exercise we did in class as a fun way to try out your visual interpretation skills. We give you a series of things to capture in photos you must capture within a 20 minute window of time. In this case, it is less about capturing artistic images, but just doing what you can to be inventive. Before you do this, pick a place that is likely to have a lot of variety of subjects (middle of town ro campus, your basement, whatever).

I’ve had this is mind as a short piece of fun since Alan posted this. I didn’t do much thinking about pick a place that is likely to have a lot of variety of subjects as my surroundings were quite monotonous(not in a bad way).

When I was on a walk to Loch Humphrey and Duncolm yesterday I decided to try this out. I did think about which stretch of the walk would be good, but was stuck for some pictures, I didn’t see anyone else to get a picture of their feet or paws in that particular 20 minutes although it is a popular walk and I passed a dozen or so folk in the 3 or so hours I was walking. I failed to make a supernatural photo too.

The exercise was good fun and would be an interesting one to do with a class of pupils. I will be repeating it myself. Perhaps using different sets of photo ideas.

Here is my set: ds106photoblitz – a set on Flickr, I didn’t pict the best 5, just piled them in.

To embed them here I decided to use Haiku Deck on my iPad. With the photos appeared in my photo stream as soon as I came home. I had hoped to search for and use the ones in flickr, but Haiku Deck didn’t find all of my pictures even after I gave them a unique tag. So I uploaded them from the iPad when I saved the Deck.

The PhotoBlitzer

When I read Alan’s post I copied the photo idea to my dropbox so I could find them whenever I decided to give the challenge a go. This had me thinking a bit. I though I could make a webpage that would supply a random set of photo ideas. I took Alan’s list, mixed in some from the, now discontinued, Daily Shoot site, and made a webpage that shows a random set of 7. photoblitzer.

I spent a wee bit of time shorting the challenges so that 7 would fit on an iPhone screen (iPhone 4). The page also show the current time to act as a start clock picture which will give the list of challenges. It might even be useful.

Update: photoblitzer is now updated with >160 photo tasks to draw from thanks to Alan Levine sending the whole of the DS106 Daily create photography section. I’ve also added a button to let you copy the html for the list as I though that might be useful for sharing a random set of tasks.

Update  9 Oct: I just added a toggle to the colours of the items listed, you can use the webpage, on your phone, to keep track of the pictures you take. NB don’t refresh the page.

homebrewing gifsicle

gifsicle is a commandline tool for animating gifs. I’ve blogged about it before, and created a simple gui for it to grab animated gifs from a movie. I checked the site for updates today and noticed that there is now a Mac OS X homebrew package.

For folk like myself who do not spend much time on the commandline this is a simpler way to install (as compared to downloading the source and compiling). You do need to install homebrew but you do that by copying a line of code from the homebrew site and pasting it into the terminal. Wait a while as a lot of text scrolls by and it is done.

you can then install gifsicle by typing:

brew install  gifsicle and pressing return.

You are then ready to convert a bunch of gif files into an animated gif.

A couple of examples:

Using a set of gifs created from these photos (and a few more), first set converted to B & W in FireWorks:

gifsicle –resize-width 500 –delay=60 –loop *.gif > eagle.gif

Using a set of coloured gifs exportedfrom the jpegs:

gifsicle –resize-width 500 –delay=60 –loop –colors 256 *.gif > eagle256.gif

If you are a ds106er who likes playing with animating gifs, gifsicle is a very useful addition to your toolkit.

 

Say it like Tequila

I see another round of DS106 has started, I have too many balls in the air at the moment to do more than watch it flow through my reader. Then I saw Week 2: Bootcamping It:

This week, we’re also going to ask you to do your very first digital storytelling assignment from the ds106 Assignment Repository. The Repository is a Web site filled with new media assignments that we’ll be using extensively this semester. Your first assignment is “Say it Like the Peanut Butter,” in which you’ll be creating an animated gif of a clip from your favorite (or least favorite) movie. You must also follow the instructions on the assignment page to ensure that your contribution shows up on the Assignment Repository site.

So I though I’d do a wee gif just for fun.

This is from Betty Blue, when this movie came out (1986) I just loved it, didn’t like the 2005 directors cut which added far too much nonsense.
I’ve not dared watch the movie again in case my old brain doesn’t like it so much.
In this scene Zorg and a friend are making and drinking tequila slammers, tequila rapido, and laughing like manics. As I remember the movie, this went on for quite a while.
I downloaded the flv from youtube, opened in in Quicktime and copied a wee section. Opened this saved movie in Fireworks 8 and deleted some frames. I also auto levelled the images as it is a fairly dark scene. I am guessing I’ve added something to a plain QuickTime install to allow it to open flv files.