PHOTO IT LIKE PEANUT BUTTER (3 Stars)
The gif (above) is a recurring image of the Killing of the Governor in The Walking Dead Season 4.
BEFORE AND AFTER THE END (3 Stars)
The image (above) is a juxtaposed photo of me just prior to the apocalypse and me three weeks into the apocalypse… things have changed to say the least.
I did the visual assignment “Photo It Like Peanut Butter,” which is worth 3 stars. To do this assignment, I checked out a DSLR camera from DTLT (just to experiment with) and I set it to “continuous shot” mode that way I would be able to kind of recreate the process the process of getting video frames. I held it down after I poured the hot water in the glass, and captured 16 images of the tea brewing. Next, I imported those images into Photoshop as a “stack,” meaning they imported in as layers. Then I clicked the drop down menu above the Timeline in Photoshop to make all of my layers frames in the Timeline. Next, I selected all of my 16 frames and cropped down the image of the glass to focus in on the tea bag and on the brewing tea swirls. After that, I resized the image width from around 3,000 pixels to 800 pixels. Then, I adjusted the delay speed of all of the frames to 0.1 seconds. Finally, I “saved to web” and saved my project as a GIF.
I really need to get a tripod to put cameras on…that would have definitely made the photo shoot easier and it would have made the gif sequence smoother. It’s also weird to make a GIF from pictures only instead of a video, mostly because in my limited GIFfing experience I’ve only used videos to convert into GIFs. Nevertheless, I am happy with the way it turned out. I really wanted to depict the subtle movement within tea brewing and I think I accomplished that.
Here you can see a Gif of an origami crane circling around its string and I like that my settings have caused a motion blur, that was not intended in first place.
Photo It Like Peanut Butter. is the assignment idea, that made me create the Gif.
I am fascinated by this simple movement, which is, because of the motion blur, rather something geometrical moving than a recognizable thing, what makes it very abstract.
I positioned my camera and touched the crane and when its movement has slowed down, took three pictures shortly one after the other. I loaded the three pictures into Photoshop as three different layers by using the place option. In Photoshop’s timeline I added that any picture shall be displayed for half a second. Then I saved the Gif via the “Save for Web” option.
In my day job today I was running a wee holiday course for teachers in digital storytelling. We use the Summerlee Museum of Scottish Industrial Life rather than our usual base for this. It is nice to get folk out and about taking photos and video. (we use ipad 2s as cameras and 3 flavours of the course, editing with mac, ipad and pc).
So I was taking some video which I then though would make a reasonable Cinemagram I didn’t think it turned out very well, it is hard to get the looping smooth so I decide to try and make it a wee bit smoother. I think these, done with quicktime pro 7 (which still works in os x10.8) and fireworks are a lot better.
these tick the ds106 Assignments: Photo It Like Peanut Butter boxes. I am going to make a quick screencast tutorial on this as I think fireworks is under appreciated in ds1o6.
For reasons I fail to devise, on my trip I’ve had an eye for making GIFs, maybe it is traveling be train in that motion that is repeated. I’ve been collecting photos that seem like they might work. sometimes I try to adjust the angle to make a pair that might work well as a ds106 Wiggle Spectroscopy. In a few cases I just have snapped photos in succession that end pairing well.
Heart and Spike Fence, Wooster OH
This fence on one of the Old Founder’s Row homes on Bever Street in Wooster caught my eye, for the contrast of the heart shape topped by a spike. And what is a fence but something that says “Do not enter”? I did not get an optimum angle (and in fact did a bit of PhotoShop brushing in the upper left corner because one photo had more of a white patch). The two frame repeat, also feels like a heart beat (emphasized by having a frame rathe of 0.1 s on one and 0.2 on the other).
My method for most of these is to import into PhotoShop (I have CS5 version) using File -> Scripts -> Load Files into Stack. This lets you take a series of images and have them put into different layers. If it is a motion GIF, I will check the box for “Attempt to Align Objects” which does a nice job of fixing images that do not match up 100%. But for a wiggler, like above, I leave that box unchecked.
In PhotoShop, I see these as separate layers, fine. To animated, I open the Animation palette (Window->Animation). On the right side is a subtle menu, I use “Make Frames From Layers” which puts each layer as an animation frame, in which te other layers are not visible.
If I need to do some masking, I can activate the bottom layer to be visible, and so I can crop things out from higher layers.
Free as in FREE! What part of that do you not understand? When has such a simple word been more mis-understood?
This one was technically two photos imported; it is of Oldenburg’s that giant stamp near Cleveland’s City Hall with FREE on it (more irony in that it was commissioned by an oil company). I tried a bunch of angles thinking a Wiggle Spectroscopy would work, but my camera angle seemed to change the size disproportionately- the idea than of the size change mimic-ing the action of a stamp seemed right. There was a bit more trees in the background than I liked, so I cropped it in more. Then I thought of duplicating one of the layer/frames, and changing up the text of te letters in “Free”. This was done by using the magic wand and the shift key to select the red letters, using Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation to make it a pale green. Thw Smudge Stick filer gave it a grittier look.
I also made the last frame a tad longer to it breaks up the pace a little
Last is a series of photos that worked just because I left my finger on the shutter and snapped two photos, during the wonderful lunch yesterday at Barbara Ganley’s home in Vermont- Bryan Alexander visited and I liked his gesturing motion in both photos; his hand moved slightly.
He is almost conducting, and there is a little bit of headbob. The original pair had a lot of tree motion in the background, so the second frame, I made the bottom layer visible, and cropped out the background of the first. This did not work because his hand showed through, so I went back and subtracted out the appearance of his hand below. So the lower layer appears first, in the second frame, the upper layer is superimposed, and has enough removed that we see through it to the background of the lower layer.
These two framers are fun to do.
I did a bunch of train ones using the Cinemagram app on my iPhone. The biggest challenge is holding the phone steady to avoid mismatched motion. It also helps to look for examples where you can mask the animation parts and leave the rest as non moving.
Sadly Cinemagram follows Instagram formula so much I cannot navigate my Cines via the web, the only way to embed them is to email them to myself, follow the links and grab the code from there (ugh the embeds seem flaky too).
This seemed like a novel idea, to animate just the portions within a plastic cop of unspecified beverage-it does show the weird artifacts you get sometimes if you try to use the mask tools twice — http://cinemagr.am/show/151894725
In Buffalo, the freight trains were constant, here I caught two of them going in opposite direction. The iverlap is fairly clean http://cinemagr.am/show/151894725
And not only trains, this one of Giulia’s wave really works well for me, she just waves and waves and waves and waves http://cinemagr.am/show/152753470
So no, the love of GIFfing (hard g) never stops. It’s more than the result, its the process of capturing motion, a place, in a minimalistic media, and one cannot get too much more minimal than just 2 frames.
For more info on the method, see Photo it Like Peanut Butter and my first efforts of Animating GIFs from Your Own Photos
The Evolution of ManyMe
Inspired by my recent DS106 assignments I decided to take two of the projects I had completed this week, ManyMe and Go Daddy_Wheee, and use the skills and final products I created to visually illustrate the evolution of my ManyMe photograph. (Assignments: Multiply Yourself, Animated GIF) The objective of the Multiply Yourself assignment was to take two or more photos of yourself in the same location and combine them into one photo. I’m going to go one step further here and label this GIF project a completion of the “Photo It Like Peanut Butter” visual assignment 347 where we’re instructed to:
Use a GIF to illustrate the generation of a real world object/place by using your own series of photographs as the source material.
Phase I: The original images to work from were pulled as still frames from a 4min video taken walking in and out of the frame and placing myself at different locations. (See earlier post for more background.) When making one of these photographs it’s important to have your camera on a tripod and that you get your shots as quickly as possible so that the lighting doesn’t change drastically. If you have a controlled lighting environment you don’t have to worry about it. Just make sure your background isn’t changing. )
Phase II: Using Photoshop Elements I cropped the single image shots. I had strategically planned my placement in the photographs so that I could do a simple rectangle crop by making sure I hadn’t crossed over into another shot’s field. The guitar, iPad and chairs were my boundary markers. No messing around with a tedious Lasso Tool.
Phase III: Next came the adjustment and fine-tuning of the cropped images for alignment and lighting. Yes, even though I took the video in under 4min on a very overcast day, the center image of me was brighter than the two outside images. Go figure! I also didn’t like the diminished resolution quality of my images since they were taken from video footage in rather poor lighting. Fiddling around with a few filters I found a combination that brightened and slightly blurred the entire photo that I found appealing. (Although my daughter later confessed she didn’t like the effect. She thought it made me look like an alien and the image had lost its warmth.) As a final touch I cropped the entire merged image (attempting to improve the photo composition) and then created a fuzzy yellow border that complemented the yellow jacket I’m wearing in the right side image.
Phase IV: Creating the GIF… I gathered and organized the needed photoshop layers from earlier in the project into one new file. Again, making sure that the alignment between images was spot on took some fine-tuning. I didn’t need to worry about the lighting this time, since I wanted to show those changes if they were there. Once I had it assembled and previewed the first GIF, I noticed that I wanted it to run a bit slower so the viewer could take in each of the image changes more easily. This was to show an evolving process, not just a quick action clip. I increased the overall frame rate to 0.8 seconds and cloned the initial empty frame and final frame to allow for lingering even a little longer on those shots. The addition of the title text at the end capped it off nicely.
Last night, I posted a photo set of images taken every mile for 20 miles.
Today, they’re alive and in color.
Central IL is pretty flat, so you can drive fast.
This was the hardest GIF I’ve done to date. First, I imported everything into GIMP as layers. Then, I had to figure out how to create a GIF where only a pice of it was animated. After searching, going to Twitter, and searching some more, I came across this tutorial from our very own Jim Groom did on how to animate just a portion of the frame. I had the right idea when I was working on it, but I didn’t know you had to apply the layer mask.
Then, I went through each frame and lined it up with the rear-view mirror on the base image. There is still some wiggle in the top right corner and around the mirror, but I’m happy with how it came out, considering I may or may not have been driving while trying to snap the picture.
If you want to spruce it up or riff on it, here’s the .xcf
Last night, I posted a photo set of images taken every mile for 20 miles.
Today, they’re alive and in color.
Central IL is pretty flat, so you can drive fast.
This was the hardest GIF I’ve done to date. First, I imported everything into GIMP as layers. Then, I had to figure out how to create a GIF where only a pice of it was animated. After searching, going to Twitter, and searching some more, I came across this tutorial from our very own Jim Groom did on how to animate just a portion of the frame. I had the right idea when I was working on it, but I didn’t know you had to apply the layer mask.
Then, I went through each frame and lined it up with the rear-view mirror on the base image. There is still some wiggle in the top right corner and around the mirror, but I’m happy with how it came out, considering I may or may not have been driving while trying to snap the picture.
If you want to spruce it up or riff on it, here’s the .xcf
Two more for the GIF pile of ones made not by downloading video clips, but using my own photos– the ds106 assignment is Photo it Like Peanut Butter:
Rather than making animated GIFs from movie scenes, for this assignment, generate one a real world object/place by using your own series of photographs as the source material. Bonus points for minmal amounts of movement, the subtle stuff. See a bunch of examples at http://cogdogblog.com/2012/02/10/photo-gif-peanut-butter/
I found these in my own backyard, a place I have photographed 1000s of things, yet I find two new ones today. The first was noticing the patterns in water dripping out of one of my conduits that transfers runoff from my roof gutters out to my apple tree. I thought it would make a nice photo, but once I got my belly on the ground, I fired off 5 shots in rapid fire mode in my 7D. The GIF first:
The water really dances a nice loop there.
I use Photoshop, and use the command File -> Scripts -> Load Images into Stack. I select all of the files, and check the box to Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images. This gives me 5 layers, one for each image. In the animation palettes, I select Make Frames from Layers to put them on the time line.
I go through the frames, and crop the photos so there are not see through spots on the edges (a side effect of the alignment) and resize te image to 500px wide, my target size. The animation is good, but the left side has some water splash that ends up looking like noise. Time to mask things out.
I select the bottom frame to activate, and then all frames, and click the “on” radio button in the layer palette- this makes thids layer visible across all others. This is my base/backround. I then go to the second frame, select the active frame, use the lasso to select the portion I want to keep (right side, and the water flow), and click the add vector mask in the layers palette (second from left icon on bottom). This essentially cuts out everything not selected (black on the mask icon).
I then control click on the mask layer, and select “Add Mask to Selection” (this re-selects based on the mask). I click te next frame, and the active layer, and repeat the process for each subsequent layer. What this is doing is removing the left side of the layer and letting it see through to the bottom layer.
When I make this a GIF, the only motion will be on the right side. An added benefit is that my file size is smaller since I have tossed away data. The final GIF is only 360k.
This is a naturally occurring object that I have capture in place as it moves.
The next one is conjured- I noticed the interesting shadows on my outdoor chairs, and snapped a few photos. I noticed as I rotated the chair, that the curvy shadow transformed. I took four images, each time moving the camera to keep the seat edge in the same relative location.
The process here is the same as above, but no masking for this one. The four frame animation was kind of jerky, so I use a trick I learned to make the movement cycle back- I copie2 the 3rd frame and pasted it after te 4th one and copies the second one and pasted it after this new one. This way it cycles back, the frame order becomes:
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 3 - 2
so it loops back to where it starts.
Because of the limited color range in the photo, I was able to save the GIF down to 32 colors, and the file size dropped from 1 Mb of the first one to 483k.
This one almost looks like a cartoon animation, it is more surreal than the first one. It is motion that did not really exist in the world, I am conjuring the movement in this GIF.
Two GIFs from my back yard, one captures the dance of water falling, in an infinite loop; the other fabricates te dance of a shadow, in its own loop. The purpose? It’s a study in motion, a suggestion
And made from just a few static photos.
The Abominable Pine Man was spotted in the vicinity on December 15, 2012. Unlike the Lock news Monster, Sasquatch, the photos of this super natural creature ares sharp, clean, and obvious no fabrication or some buffoon in a fur suit.
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
In time the monster morphed into a floppier version
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
But it was not invincible, in fact, it had pretty much transformed into a sad shell of its former glory:
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
Until today! It’s back, reformed, and now something more of a Squirrel Bear Hybrid:
Just for the sake of the ds106 GIFfest, I call this a sporting event GIF … who’s gonna stop me? When will the GIFfing stop?
NEVER!
