First off thanks Timmmmyboy for creating this assignment and the tutorial to go with it. It was great to be walked through a tool I had  never used before in Photoshop. And second thanks to ds106 for always finding ways to exercise your creative side!

I deviated a little from Tim’s assignment by selecting 30-50 photos from the top 100 when searching for the terms: red, yellow, and blue. I also spent a little time resizing photos in each layer so that they filled the entire layer as well as allowing me to make a some choice about which part of the image I wanted to use. Finally I played around with the various Stack Modes. In the end I chose to use the “Median” for each smart object.

It’s kind of humorous to me how Photoshop basically has created an “Abstract Expressionist” filter for a bunch of images. I wonder what Mark Rothko would have thought about this process. His “multiforms” feel eerily similar – here are a red, yellow and blue.

My deliberation was a mixture of search, selection, and reframing combined with an algorithm. Actually sounds quite “Modernist.”

Last semester maybe one or two ds106 participants did Timmmmyboy’s Averaging Flickr Concepts assignment, but this semester it seems to be one of the most popular. One of the reason may very well be Tim Owen’s awesome tutorial. Interesting how the assignment bank will in many ways start to reflect those changes of interest and focus over time, very cool. A whole host of folks did the Averaging Flickr Concepts assignment.

I think creating a tutorial for all these assignments would be a cool cool for going at ds106 into the future, and I would love to see more from the good folks out there. I’ll pitch in my part as well. Needless to say, I also did the Averaging Flickr Concepts assignment which forced me to download a trial version of Photoshop—which would be a layup for anyone in ds106. And Tim’s tutorial was brilliant and the assignment was easy. I averaged the keyword blue, and inspired by Lou McGill I tried to do something with the final image as a background—and not having the Photoshop skills she obviously does for cut out complex images I took a silhouette of the recently missing Dr. O’Blivion and made another “Missing Persons” poster.

The image above is the combination of the first 50 images found when searching for the word “Adventure” on Flickr.

This was a very adventurous exercise. I definitely enjoyed the process more than the end result. I feel like the picture is really bland. This reminds me of the time I got excited for the spectroscopy lab in astronomy class, and we got to view the emission spectrum for Krypton. It was very bland. I expected at least some green, but no–none. To me, my collage looks the same as everyone else’s.

But downloading Picasa and watching it superimpose all the images together was very exciting! I originally tried to use GIMP, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it without hacking together some python script, and I’m a bit rusty with my python. But overall it wasn’t that difficult.

From what I’ve seen in others’ collages, the words which make the most distinct collages are those which have explicit visual meanings–color names, like “blue,” made interesting collages.

Also, a word of advice to anyone having a problem blogging to WordPress from Flickr needs to remember to enable XML-RPC remote publishing before Flickr can accurately validate your WordPress account.

The assignment: “Take a concept, one word, and plug it into Flickr and take the first 50 images and average them using Photoshop or similar program.”

The instructions: “Averaging Concepts in Flickr”

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While looking through the Visual & Design assignments over at the ds106 site, I saw this visual assignment, and had to check it out.  The article containing the intructions included the authors use of “averaging concepts” applied to love, communication, anger, and denial.

So, the general idea of this assignment is to choose a (one word) concept, download the first 50 (CC adaptable) images from flickr, and then use a technique in Photoshop to average the pictures together. Thankfully, the author of the article containing the instructions provided some good information on how to complete this task.

1. Download Bulkr
2. Search for your concept
3. Download images
4. Use a few techie options in Photoshop
5. ???
6. Profit

So, after much brainstorming, I had an amazing idea for a concept to use for this task, “amazing”.

The Bulkr app is very easy to use, but I did have a few complaints. I could only download images in their large format (not original), and I could not save the source of the images (so I could give proper credit) to a text file. These were “pro” features. Having to use large images didn’t matter much, but in the spirit of this class, I wanted to make sure the photos were properly credited.

So.. I entered the same search term in flickr, and went about matching up the flickr results to the Bulkr results and copy/pasting the links to the corresponding images.  What a pain. Also weird was that a few of the images in the Bulkr search results didn’t appear when searching in flickr.

In the end, I downloaded 48 images, and then I went about using Photoshop to do the averaging.

Loading all 48 images was quite the task, but after that was complete, it took only one simple command (Layer -> Smart Objects -> Stack Mode -> Mean) to take the mean of the set.

Here’s the result:

I think what’s interesting about taking the average of a concept in this way is that parts of certain images are still visible and recognizable.  In the average of “amazing”, you can still see bits of buildings, and the words “polaroid camera”.  You can be the judge on what that says about being amazing.

Photo credits can be found in the description of the image uploaded to flickr, here.