I spotted many a grain elevator in my cross country travels, but this one in Lawndale Illinois caught my attention the most, for the faint “Faultless Feed” on the side of the grain elevator, plus as a bonus it was right on Old Route 66.

While snapping my photos, I saw the lights down the track. I had to book it and run under the dropping barriers to get a series of photos of a passing Amtrak train.

What could be more suited for doing animated GIFs than trains?

We need something like this for the upcoming ds016 GIFfest (what is that) (it’s a secret) (shh). So we have the new All Aboard The GIF Train assignment hoisted in a new corner of ds106

“Train kept a rollin’ all night long…” “Down around the corner half a mile from here, see them long trains run and you watch them disappear…” Trains. They are in songs, movies, and a metaphor for steady movement. And they are ripe for GIFing- given their regular repeated motion.

Capture the essence of train movement in a GIF, and do what you can to keep it under 1 Mb (much of the train passing is repeated and you can delete frames and not lose the motion). Step it up a notch and match your train gif to a song using http://gifsound.com.

I had originally 20 photos of the train in motion, from it entering on the right, and passing out on the left in the last one. I would add as a continuity suggestion to get one more of the scene without the train.

I imported these into PhotoShop like most of the other ones I have done – see the steps outlined for my GIFing the Streets of Liberal. After trimming/cropping, and resizing to 500px, it was still too fat, 3.5 Mb. I realized that most of the middle frames were repetitive, so I carefully examined and was able to delete 10 frames that were more or less the same motion.

Without an empty frame, it seemed awkward on the loop, so I did a little Photoshop hijinks (quite easy). The first frame as the train just nosing in on the right, so I made a copy of that frame (using the little menu top right of Animation palette) and pasting it after the last frame. That has most of the “trainless” scene, I got the rest by copy pasting from the last frame, where the train is passing out of the left side of the scene.

I set the frame rate of all the “train” frames to 0.1 second, but I made this last one 2 seconds so it lingers. The end effect is it looks like the train keeps going by on by. It’s a bit fast. Kind of a crazy train.

Forever.

Here is a little play of rolling the GIF with some Hendrix via gifsounds

And woah, completely by curious clicking, I got myself to ImgOps- a fantastic tool that lets you take an image bu URL and have at your hands a whole suite of tools you can use to edit, change, or do more with the image. This is amazing. Really.

Can you see any use for THAT? Are you crazy?

On my trek home earlier this month, I picked off of the map a route in Kansas that would take me through the near Texas border town of “Liberal” – which I read on a plaque has nothing to do with politics– it was in reference to the sharing of water liberally by the first settler.

It’s created draw of interest is being where Dorothy’s house (a replica thereof) sits so there is a lot of Oz-ification

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

There are a number of Dorothy statues on the streets. I was intrigued of some over the shoulder photos as maybe she gazed wistfully at a fun shriner convention across the street:

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

This lead me to do a series of rapid shots in succession to get the blur of traffic going by Dorothy, which I molded into animated gifs.

This is the ds106 Photo It Like Peanut Butter Assignment (created by yours truly):

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/

And this became the seed of an idea I wanted to do as an extended story that spans multiple assignments, the task I am asking my students to do for their final project.

These were all done the same way. The photos were taken in the camera mode on my Canon 7D that does sequential shots as long as I hold the shutter. The idea is to get a lot and not move the camera much (a tripod would be a smart way to go).

I bring them into PhotoShop via File -> Scripts -> Load Files into Stack. I select all of the images in the sequence, and let PhotoShop do its work. For most of these I check the box to “Automatically Attempt to Align Source Images” which minimizes the differences between photos from slight camera shifts. I import images that are 640 pixels wide since I plan to downsize them to 500 wide.

When done, I go to the animation window. In the past I would go to the timeline layout and nudge the tracks around, but I found a simpler way- From the menu in the top right of the Animation palette, I select make Frames from Layers so ti converts each layer to a different animation frame:

This now sets up my frames, and I can do things like adjust the timing of all frames (selecting all and then use the time menu) or make different frames have different durations:

I can delete un-necessary frames, ones that do not show enough change, since this reduced my file size. I also go frame by frame and crop them because the image alignment can leave blank spots on the periphery.

then its a matter of exporting for the web as an animated GIF. I usually go for 128 colors dithered to try and save file size.

One more truck goes by:

I have a bunch more of these assignment posts to make as I get my story together. It has something to do with Dorothy getting bored…

Gotta feed the animated GIF bacteria that lives in my gut. I had a few sets of photos I have taken over the travel span that I took series of things in motion for the express purpose of making them animated. I did these in PhotoShop via the method blogged earlier – essentially importing files as a stack, setting frame sequences in he animation palette, and sometimes masking out to reduce the elements being animated. These will be tagged to end up in the Photo it Like Peanut Butter ds106 assignment.

First up, from the great state of New York, at the small town where I crossed the Hudspn River, I had just hopped out of the truck to take a photo of the bridge when the sound of a train grabbed my attention (I literally ran across the tracks to get the angle) – this one is 549k.

Next up, an animation from a single image. I had stopped to take a picture of Yet Another Crumbling Down Home. I really liked the look of this window and its composition, but it also looked good in black and white (same image, just converted). In this one, I masked just the inside of the frame to isolate a color change, and made the time it spent on the black and white frame about twice as long (and it is only 111k):

And for number three– this past weekend I stood on the place that is the southernmost point in Canada, a few hairs farther south than the California/Oregon border. As far south as Rome. While at Point Pelee, I was intrigued by the difference between the rough surf of the west side and the calmness of the East, but all of which is Lake Erie. I took a series of belly in the sandy photos of waves crashing over the rocks (the waves were about 12 inches high). This one has more frames than I usually like to use, but they work well, it comes in at 741k (I dropped the colors from 128 to 64 to help there).

Hmmm its a bit fast, might have to tweak the frame rate.

Those are Erie waves (not eerie ones).

Fun stuff them there GIFs.