VisualAssignments48 – Assignment Bank

ds 106: buddy photo (2 stars)

View Assignment Details

To start with, I cannot figure out why this image is as small as it is. The picture is of me barely holding up my giant teddy bear Toast, who I’ve had for years now and gives wonderful hugs. I went out with Toast to my friend’s work at a school to surprise her and the kids she helps to teach. I couldn’t carry him around with me too much he’s taller than me and is a bit heavy for me, but everyone who got to meet him seemed to have a great time interacting with him. After we left, I took him back to my old home where my parents live and we all got to spend some time together. In hindsight I really should’ve picked a much smaller toy to bring around, as taking pictures and setting up compositions was a nightmare in and of itself. I love him but I won’t be doing this again anytime soon.

View Assignment Details

My Buddy Benjamin

View Assignment Details

My teddy bear Benjamin (née Sebastian) is over thirty years old. My mom got him when she was younger, and then she handed him down to me when I was born. Happily, I haven’t lost him, and I can’t wait to give him to my future child. But, in the meantime, he’s still mine, and that meant I could take him on an adventure for the Buddy Photo Assignment (2 stars)!

Today I took him to Giant. Not that exciting. We went to go get some powdered sugar (for my failed latte mug cake attempt) but we inevitably got distracted by the ice cream. It’s just so tempting–our sweet tooths can’t handle it!

I’m sure it’s incredibly unsafe/unsanitary/downright crazy to put your old stuffed animal in a public ice cream freezer. Nobody saw us, except maybe some cameras…and my roommate… but even if they had, could they really throw out a couple of cuties like me and Benjamin?

Process:

Well…hm….to do a process for this seems so odd, really. The main part was just carrying my teddy bear across campus, putting him in a giant freezer, and taking the picture with my phone.

Okay, I mean, angling and paying attention to the lighting (which, to my surprise, is not that great as I originally thought it would be) is also important.

Most of the work came from the editing. And…most of that work was just me fiddling around in GIMP. I just fiddled with the “curves”, saturation, contrast, brightness, hues, etc for a long time. Then I selected everything except Benjamin, the ice cream, and the foreground rack, and used Gaussian blur on everything else until it looked good.

I do everything willy-nilly when it comes to editing photos in GIMP. It’s just playing around with sliders and colors until I come to a satisfactory end. If you plan on using GIMP, I’d recommend also just….fiddling with things. Choose different options, play around with stuff, have fun.

View Assignment Details

Little Buddy (2 stars)

View Assignment Details

This just seemed really fun to do at first glance! Carry around a figurine or stuffed animal and document the day together. It was a lot of fun and gave me extra practice on my bettering photography techniques! I probably took way too many pictures, but it was a lot of fun!

First me and mini Mickey spent some time on the couch just to wake up fully and enjoy some morning tv!

Next we played some Mario Brothers Wii with my brother and his friend.

After a bit everyone wanted to walk to the lake, including mini Mickey!

We looked out at the water trying to see if we could find a boat of any kind,

After we got bored with that, we decided to get a better view point, so we climbed a tree!

Mini Mickey got pretty high up in the tree before he chickened out and wanted to get down.

We went to check on the boat and mini Mickey decided he wanted me to teach him how to tie the rope that keeps the boat in the slip.

Once it got up to 80 degrees, mini Mickey decided to get in the water, but was waiting for the waves to calm down (they may look small to you, but if you were his size you would think you were at the ocean!

Finally we decided to take a road trip to the state fair! Too bad I couldn’t take my camera into the fair and my phone camera was wanting to reset all day! Overall I’d say it was a great day with mini Mickey!

View Assignment Details

Lego Gandalf, My Buddy

View Assignment Details

Another visual assignment this week was to carry along an action figure or something along those lines and snap pictures of it with you on your everyday outings. I carried this Lego version of Gandalf from LoTR with me for a few days. We shared good times and bad. We laughed, we cried, yada yada yada. When I went to upload all of the glorious pictures of me and Lego Gandalf to Flickr, only one would successfully upload. I am still working on the solution although it may take a day or two. Here is the one that would upload:

This is Gandalf sharing my wine and dessert after eating some sushi with me. I am pretty bummed that probably the lamest of my “buddy” photos is the only one I got to work. C’est la vie.

View Assignment Details

AJ William’s Buddy Photo

View Assignment Details

FUN TIMES WITH MY BOB!!!

For this 2 star assignment, I had to find a little figurine or a stuffed animal that I can carry around with me. Then I had to use that “buddy” and take photos to document where you have gone together. It’s football season so OFCOURSE i’m going to be enjoying the wonderful football games with my “buddy”. I chose my roommates Eagles pillow pet to be my stuffed animal…then my buddy Bob..(yes I named him)…and I grabbed something to drink…just happens to be a REDSKINS bud light beer…(YES, i’m a redskins fan) …and we were both watching the Giants game. As messed up as this sounds, this is exactly how my household is. We scream..we fight…we cry during football season because we all support different teams and they happen to be in the same division. 0_O

How I created this Image: I took the picture with my phone then uploaded it straight to the Picasa Software. I then cropped out the unnecessary background extras and softened the image because it was too bright. I then played with the brightness and contrast and got this final image.

View Assignment Details

Because Unicorns Make Everything Better

View Assignment Details

Come on. Tell me you’ve never wished you had your very own unicorn. Just try.

You’d be lying, right? And if yo’ mama raised you right, you can’t tell a lie, right? Right.

In case you’re just tuning in here, Saturday of this week was my Sissy’s birthday. Around these parts, that’s *kinda* a big deal. Like a national holiday. (duh) What does my Sissy want? A unicorn.

So do I deliver?

Duh.

So, in honor of my Sissy’s birthday, our unicorn friend accompanied us on our family outings today. So our buddy Unicorn accompanied me while doing two other assignments (Art Comes To Life, and Return to the Scene of the Crime), then went on a hike with us and hit lots of fun points along the C.F. Phelps Wildlife Reserve trail, and then went to Moo-Thru with us (where he tried to steal my mint chocolate chip sundae, but FAILED). But don’t worry, he had plenty of fun with us today, and is quite a happy unicorn. <3

Enjoy, and happy birthday, Sissy. <3 I love you with all my heart.

(and for the boring stuff)

This is the Buddy Photo Visual Assignment, which represents 2 out of my 10 stars for this week.

I uploaded all of my photos to Flickr into a Buddy Photo set that I created just for this project. I then went to the Set page, and clicked on Slideshow. From there, I clicked on Share in the top right corner, and copied the embed code, and pasted it into the HTML tab on my WordPress Dashboard. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy! And fun and oh-so-worth it.

View Assignment Details

Buddy Photo

View Assignment Details

This is my buddy. His named is Doggy. He likes long walks on the beach, horseback riding, watching football, sleepings, and of course climbing trees. My grandma gave him to me when I was a baby. Yes I sleep with him. I DARE YOU TO MAKE FUN OF ME. He has probably more sentimental value to me than anything else I own.

View Assignment Details

Gigi the Giraffe

View Assignment Details

One of the random visual assignments I chose to do was Buddy. For this visual assignment we had to take our buddy some place with us and take a picture of it.

For this assignment I chose to take Gigi out for an adventure! I decided to take her to Target to go shopping with me. I chose to put Gigi in a cart, and put a seatbelt on her to make her look more like a “person.” I thought this would give the picture a more realistic feel to it.

For this picture I actually had to play around with the zoom to get a better quality picture, and also do the auto enhanced to make that picture that much better.

I also like how the red cart really makes Gigi stand out and look really pretty. I actually made this giraffe my first semester at UMW. I stuffed Gigi myself at the winter festival and she wears a shirt that says “Some people just can’t handle the heat.. University of Mary Washington” I thought it was so cute and I decided to leave the shirt on her during this picture because it makes such a huge statement. It’s almost like with anything in life, some people just can’t handle certain situations.

View Assignment Details

Mr. Seal’s Day Out

View Assignment Details

(“AJ William’s Buddy Photo.” An assignment where you Find a little figurine or a stuffed animal that you can carry around with you. Use that “buddy” and take photos to document where you have gone together. ie: going out to lunch, going to the movies, etc. 2-stars/10)

We started off in Centralia (I have a weird list of places to see before I die, and they’re all just really random places I found really neat). It smelled like the kiln shed and the ground was warm. Then we went off to the Bloomsburg Fair. Last year the Bloomsburg Fair was cancelled due to massive flooding. They had a half-fair during UMW‘s fall break. There was not a lot of vendors last year and the fairgrounds were soggy, so this year was a pleasant surprise when the fairgrounds were flooded with people.

Well, since I was excited for the fair and Mr. Seal had been around lately we decided to go to the fair along with some of my human friends. We had a great time bonding because we haven’t really talked and we were really close when I was in preschool. He’s a tiny little thing, but he’s cute. I’m glad we got to spend time together.

View Assignment Details

My Buddy

View Assignment Details

This is my buddy when I went to the courtyard today. He is sitting in the BIG white chair and it is a good things that there is some RED in my buddy because it does not blend in with the chair. Instead the Red makes my buddy stand out!! I got this stuffed animal on valentines day from my best friends Mom. So it is one of the special stuffed animals I have.