http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/splash-the-color/

This assignment was a hell of a lot of fun. I had never tried to do this type of editing before but had seen finished products countless times, and really appreciate the effect that it gives. In selecting an image to use, I wanted to emphasize an emotion as well as a visual image from my life that is warm and welcoming. Over the years, I have always been away from my parents and childhood home. It is one of the hardest aspects of life when having a career in the Marine Corps. Having said that, going home for the holidays was made that much sweeter. Not having seen my Mom and Dad for a year, I would pile gifts skis and of course my buddy Jake into my Jeep, and away we’d go. Over the river, through the woods, snow covered roads in the middle of the night trying to get home to enjoy time with family. No matter what time I would arrive in Upstate NY, my Mom would always have the front porch sconces burning bright through the snowy darkness, letting me know that when I saw them, I was home.

I used Gimp to produce the effect, and it was surprisingly easy to do accomplish. I used a YouTube tutorial assist me along the way.

As you can see, the tutorial video is only 3:16 long, and that’s how long it took me to make the effect. I first selected my image and opened it in Gimp. I then added an alpha channel and duplicated the image. I then clicked desaturation to remove all of the color from the original image. The next step was to choose my eraser and erase the area where the color of the light once was. This brought the color through from the other layer of the image. I adjusted the hue, brightness and contrast, to get the effect you see here.  bright burning welcome home light shining through the snow storm.

I loved this assignment! It ended up correlating really well with my summary of episode 13. The colors the characters wear are very strategically thought out. In the scene I picked from episode 13 was right after Avon and Stringer were looking for a new place to set up shop. Both Stringer and Avon were in a white color which symbolizes they are ‘innocent’ but Avon sister, also D’Angelo’s mom, is wearing bright red. I noticed that the red matched the stop sign, which I kept thinking that she was going to do something to stop D’Angelo from snitching. She ended up going to talk to D’Angelo and tried to get him back in the game.

Process…

This process was fairly straightforward, all I add to do was search how to colorize a black and white photo. When I searched it, I saw that you could do this process through GIMP, which was already installed from earlier. I found a website that was so helpful in doing it. Once I read that, it took me a few minutes to create it. I am pretty impressed with how it turned out (:

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
- Nelson Mandela

The beginning of this year I went on my third trip to El Progreso, Honduras.  If you don’t know already, Honduras for the third year in a row has been on the list of most dangerous places in the world.  While I mainly stay in El Progreso, it is San Pedro Sula that actually makes this country so dangerous.  Here you will find dilapidated homes, buildings, and fields.  Take one short road trip and you will surely pass by starving animals, horses and dogs barely holding on while their ribs are the most prominent feature they are sporting.  Starving children roam the streets during the day while gangs, filled with these same children, run the streets at night.

No one is safe in the streets of honduras, that is except for volunteers as myself.

I have been a member of Students Helping Honduras since the beginning of my college career, so for about 3 years now.  Students Helping Honduras is a non-profit organization that began at the University of Mary Washington in 2007 by its very own student, Shin Fujiyama.  As of today, SHH has clubs in many universities and high schools all over the east coast.

Each year as a group, we take a trip to El Progreso, Honduras where we help build schools and children homes all the while insuring children stay in the classroom and the soccer field while staying out of the streets.

For my second visual assignment I chose to color splash a picture I took while on site building classrooms.

I took this picture while taking a break from building an additional classroom along this one.  Many students like myself spend as much time as we can fundraising money to support these projects in many villages across El Progreso.  We fundraise money during school and then come together in Honduras to put all the money to work.

George Washington Carver once said that “education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.”  These kids deserve to be free from their dangerous environments.  Each year that I volunteer here I realize how good I have it here in America and this makes me work harder to give these kids the same opportunities I have.  Besides, it only takes one person to save the world, who’s to say it can’t be one of these kids?

For more information on Students Helping Honduras click here.

Here are more pictures from past trips of mine to Honduras.  I hope you enjoy
 

Volunteers hard at work building the next project
 

Here are other classrooms built and funded by SHH
 

I took this picture with my regular Canon camera and used GIMP 2 to edit it and have only the dandelion’s colors showing. I think that by doing this, it is showing how beautiful and alove the dandelion is even though we pass by them every day because they are a wild flower and very common. I want to show that though surrounded by not pretty things such as the dead grass and leaves, the life and beauty prevailed with the dandelion. Its it a symbol of a person going through life. There may be unsightly things around a person but you never know where beauty may turn up, or where life is in the world where so much is dead.

So for my first attempt at a visual assignment I decided to do the “Splash the Color” assignment. I couldn’t decide on what I wanted to splash so I looked around my apartment to find some colorful objects. I also looked at all the previous submissions from others and noticed a lot of the same material (cough…flowers) and I wanted to do something a little different.

I first noticed two vibrant towels hanging from the bathroom, one being green and the other orange. I took a picture with my handy dandy picture taker and did some editing in photoshop and….

However, I was not completely satisfied and I was also hungry, so I decided to make some food and take another picture. Bacon and eggs being my favorite breakfast, I took a picture of them while I was cooking and came up with the following image….

Ehhh its ok for what it is…an egg. I personally like the towel, but the more I look at the egg the better it gets. I don’t know you decide.

My inspiration behind choosing this photo was simply picking a cute photo of my baby brother. I took this photo about three years ago and I wanted to see what I could do with it. When I chose this assignment I thought that it would be simple. It was not! I started out with a very complicated photo of some flowers I received. Once I figured out the process to remove color from a photo that dream quickly faded. Although my photo idea changed, this photo still means alot to me. About three years ago, I got a surprise phone call from my dad saying that my step mom was pregnant. I thought that it would be weird being so old and having a baby brother so young but when we met I fell in love with this little guy.

My process started with downloading the photo editing program GIMP. That was the simple part. I opened the program and played with it for about thirty minutes. After that I got down to business. I imported my photo and used the layering feature on GIMP. With the layers process combined with the selection tool, I created a small area to work with. I then used the bucket and paint brush tool to finish up.

The small descriptive paragraph of my steps makes it seem easy, but it is not. It took me two hours to remove color from this photo. With the help of a Youtube tutorial I pushed through it. Although hard and tedious, this was a very fun assignment for me. It is helping me in my personal quest to constantly learn new things.

For my first visual assignment, I chose “splash that color.” I was brainstorming ideas when I realized the 4th of July is only a little over a week away, and what better way to use that theme for my assignment than a picture with man’s best friend? My family has a beautiful, crazy 2-year-old lab that was extremely uncooperative in helping me with this assignment, but I managed to get one good picture!

I chose to emphasize the color of the flag because of the upcoming holiday, just as we will emphasize the celebration of our independence on July 4th. Hopefully everyone will be celebrating with fireworks, cookouts, parades, and other events (with their dogs of course), but while also considering the true meaning of the holiday – our independence as the United States of America.

I used the “Brush Color Pro” app on my Macbook to restore the color back to the image. The app washes out the color for you, and then you use a brush over the part where you want the original color to come back. It was very easy!