Mosaics!

So I was working on a photomosaic for my portfolio yesterday and after playing around with the size of the tiles and blending, got something I like.

I took this profile picture of my friend and decided to tile it with a picture of a cookie cake we bought over the summer.

So close but yet so far

Here we go.  I have my background right where I want it and I've green-screened the A-10.

I brought out a little of the red in the background in order to make it a "warmer"looking desert.  I also still need to scaleDown the plane and place it in a canvas, etc....... It's the last leg of the race, I can persevere!

Some progress....

So I was messing with the blending tool for the background of my project and these are the two best that I ended up with.

They are ordered from darker flag to lighter flag.  I don't really know which one will work best once I put the plane in.  If ya'll could comment and tell me which one you think would work best I would really appreciate it. Or if you have any other suggestions on color, etc. I would love that as well!

Actual Unplanned Assignment #2

This was quite a lengthy article and honestly very confusing.  I most definitely think it could have been written more concisely especially since the author repeated himself a lot.  I also don't think he should have used an analogy throughout his post.  I believe that an analogy should be used to further explain a point, and not entirely depended on throughout a post.

My first thought after reading was, "Who is this person?" He constantly used the term "we" for lawyers, computer scientists, etc. So which one is he, or none of the above?

His point of view on the way computer scientists look at ownership of ideas and the way lawyers look at it was interesting.  It brought to mind the image of a bunch of computer scientists sitting in a room working on computer science-y things and as soon as they made any sort of breakthrough, emailing this to all the others so it might help them.  A very honorable set up.  But then I see some lawyers slinking in and whispering to one of the cs men about how he should be rewarded for his discovery and then the once collaborative group spirals downward into a now stagnant idea room.

Catch-up Day!

Okay so I realized that knowing how to do a photomosaic and actually making it look good are two things separated by a wide, wide river (with lots of alligators)!  So with that understanding I will be posting "catch-up" pictures that I have edited and not previously posted (plus I remembered this was a portfolio and it needed muchas picturas).

These are my Johns that I am loving!  The Duke is probably one of my favorite people of all time.

This is an A-10 Warthog.  Super great plane and as you can see I do love the tri-color effect.

Hopefully I'll be able to put up a decent photomosaic here in the next couple of days...but don't hold your breath.

Unplanned Assignment Response

Looking at the situation my initial response is that Silvers should have gotten some sort of patent on just his code but not claimed to have invented photomosaics.  The work and strife that goes into creating a code that works without error of some sort would make me want to patent my own work.  However, inventor of the photomosaic as his title on his website states is just not true.  Photomosaics were being used long before he wrote a code for them.

But he did make it past the "patent jury" twice so maybe there is some truth in his inventorship.  Maybe his code approached it from such a new way that it is sufficiently "nonobvious."  I did read that his code not only analyzes the color of each photo but also the "texture" (visual texture) associated with it in order to create the mosaic.

Honestly though, I really don't like the arrogant Robert Silvers so I would take the patent away from him in a heartbeat.

El Plano del Projecto

So I'm going to stick with the idea that I most recently blogged about with the desert scene.  I'm going to use the blendIn code to combine the flag and desert pictures.  I'm probably going to mess with the saturation of the colors depending on how they look when I blend them together.  Once I have the background made then I will take the picture of the A-10 and use photoshop to place it in a green screen.  Also it's possible I might need to mess with the color of this picture as well.  Then I will combine the two pictures with the swapbg code.  There will most likely need to be some altering of the code to make sure I get rid of the green haze that may surround the A-10.  But really that's about the gist of it! I am quite excited :D

ProjectProjectProject

Okay so as I said in my first post I think, I'd like to do a military desert scene focusing on the A-10 Warthog.  I'd like to do a transparent blending look with the desert scene and a flag in the background.  The A-10 would probably be located in the foreground but I would have to do some green screen trials...

Here are idea of what kind of photos I would use.

Not too much...

Yesterday I was messing with some of the blending and separation of colors of a photo that I took and never knew what to use it for.  Nothing too spectacular came out of it, but it's still a work in progress.

this is the original

this is a blend of the separated red and blue

this is sepia3, thought the result was interesting

this is the sepia2 blended with the blue layer. turned out strange 

Response to Carr

The idea of “testing out” a book’s characters or plot line after it has already been published and then going back and changing the story completely contradicts my idea of what a book should be and should accomplish.  While I am sure that some of the thinking that goes into a book considers what people will want to read, a book should be about something the author wants to teach to the reader.  If the readers constantly dictated what should be written there would be much less creativity and variety in published works.  The idea of an author going back and tampering with a book’s storyline after it has been published is very much like an artist walking up to his painting in an art gallery and altering the subject of his painting.

The ease with which things can be published and widely viewed means that we as readers have a responsibility to take everything we read with a grain of salt.  Now this caution ought to begin to extend to even textbooks and documented history.  Events can that we believed to be permanent facts can be neatly altered with niceties added.

I was also thinking that as easily as e-books can be published and spread, they can probably be eliminated in the same way.  When a book is published under normal circumstances, it would be next to impossible to gather up all the copies (or even a majority of the copies).  Once distributed, those books are permanently out in society.

Comments on Oldham's Comments:
I'm usually quite a cynical person so that's where the "grain of salt" comment probably came from.  I guess that I was just thinking that people who don't have any skepticism most definitely ought to get some.  And somehow I reasoned that because everything electronically published is somehow connected and also relies on internet and technology so it seems more unstable to me than distributing physical copies of a book. But I can definitely see that once things get on the internet they seem to be ineradicable. My idea would probably only exist with extreme circumstances or advances in technology.

First Post

There's a lot of procrastination that goes into the first post.  That being said it goes without saying that the time I've been sitting in the library has been spent completing everything on my "to do" list until this is the only thing left to work on.  But I believe that not only long nights come out of ample amounts of procrastination but also ideas!

One idea I would eventually like to try is creating filters that would allow me to separate the red, green, and blue components of the photo and being able to look at each of the layers.  With no cs background this ought to be interesting.  Hannah already has a good start on a code that I think would be really helpful for this idea so I will have to consult her.

I would also like to try to combine three photos and make a sort of military desert scene.  I would prefer to use my own photos so since I have already taken pictures of my dad's plane, I was trying to think of a photo I might have taken that could be a good substitute for a desert.  And lo and behold procrastination paid off! The song Badlands by Bruce Springsteen came on my iPod and it was pure inspiration! I have taken pictures at the Badland National Park in South Dakota and it not only looks like a desert but a completely different planet. I'll fool around with this idea a bit and see where it gets me.