Recently the iPad has been a source of inspiration for my photoshop creativity. Since it functions so well as a photoframe, it seemed only natural to use it as a frame for frame breaking. I also must admit to being astonished that I seem to be the first person to see its pristine reflective glass as a place to put an ice skater. It seems so natural to me. Here are my first two attempts at iPad photoshoppery.
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Nora left on Thursday afternoon to spend the weekend with her grandparents. She’s still a little too young to appreciate Father’s Day, and she already celebrated Spanish Father’s Day with me this year, so her absence on Sunday didn’t hurt too much. She’s coming home this evening to watch the Spain – Honduras World Cup match with her old man.
President Obama really likes this recent video of Nora.
I’d be more than happy to send the smart-object-enabled Photoshop file for this to anyone who requests it.
On a recent walk I snapped a photograph of the local postman’s scooter. The mail in Colindres is delivered mostly by foot, with mailmen and mail-women walking around town pulling a little pull-cart, like the ones housewives pull to and from the grocery store. There’s one mailman who zips around on a scooter, parking it in the middle of a neighborhood and delivering letters from it to the nearby houses. I really liked my photo of his scooter and decided to play with it in photoshop, adding a pseudo-tilt-shift focusing effect to the scooter, with some desaturation of the background. I liked it so much that when a mailbox caught my eye, sitting alone with a tree, the following day, I snapped a photograph. After some similar photoshopping, the mailbox and tree really look to be keeping each other company. With these two made, I decided to go, yesterday, and snap the other mailbox (there are only two in town that I know of). Lo and behold it, too, was accompanied by some inanimate friends. And thus, I present to you, Correos Still Life.
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I took Nora to the doctor today to get weighed and measured. In her first six months she more than doubled in weight, ending up and around 7.4 kg. In her second six months she hasn’t gained any weight at all, remaining consistently around 7.5 kg when we weigh her at bath time (before her dinner). Today, after eating 260 mL of breakfast milk and cereal (which is more dense than water, so that’s more than 0.26 kg right there), she weighed 7.85 kg and measured 75 cm, a full three quarters of a meter. This gives her a body mass index of 14.0, which is literally off the chart. The doctor say she’s just fine, which we knew already. Tall and skinny, but fine.
In the same spirit as last year’s ridiculous linear comparison of food consumption rate, I’ve decided to see what I would be like if my height and weight were at the same ratio as Nora’s (104 g/cm).
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A couple days ago the weather was nice, so I decided to walk across the iron bridge into the neighboring town of Treto. Partly because I don’t think I’ve ever crossed the bridge on foot and partly because I was curious about the nearest train station. The bridge is a well-known landmark, designed by some French guy named Eiffel. It was a very pleasant walk.
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After my recent splash back into the tilt-shifting pool, my Photoshop muse has been working on ways to focus a photograph viewer’s attention to a particular part of the photograph using, well, focus. While what follows are technically fake tilt-shift effects, the aim in choosing the photographs and choosing the focal depth of each image was not only to make the subjects look miniature, but to draw your attention. All the photographs are mine, plucked from my photo library. I highly recommend viewing them all larger than they appear here, as they are much more impressive large.
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My little town has two photographer shops and two framing shops. In both, the shop windows are filled with examples of their work that has recently been finished and is waiting to be picked up. The main frame (computer joke) shop is right downtown and I walk by there every day. Usually they have certificates, caricatures, cross-stitched scenes, puzzles, and occasionally a painting or two. Yesterday, as I was glancing at what my fellow townspeople were having framed that day, my brain registered that there was something very wrong about one particular certificate. The text reads, “Second prize, shop window competition, 2009″. See if you can spot what’s wrong.
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I’ve always been fond of photographs of the space shuttle. There’s something truly magnificent about a space-bound rocket sitting on the launch pad. It saddens me that the shuttle era will come to and end this year. I just hope its successor doesn’t take too long to get off the ground, so to speak. When I saw some photos of the roll-out of STS-130 yesterday, I selected a couple as good tilt-shifting candidates. Below I present to you the results.
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While I’m certainly not the first to think of this particular play-on-words, I do think that my book cover is better than the other parodies I’ve seen already floating around. The font, in case you’re wondering, is called Didot.
For those of you that don’t know who David Pogue is, he’s a technology columnist for the New York Times, and general internet geek celebrity who gets to test new gadgets before they are released.
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