Color, lighting, saturation, contrast, and many other factors all play in to taking a decent photo and making it fabulous. This assignment is to change the mood or tone of a photograph by altering the contrast, brightness, hue, saturation, exposure, etc. You do not have to change all of those things about the photo, but you can if you would like to. Experiment. Don’t be afraid to take it to the extremes, and don’t be afraid to be subtle. Familiarize yourself with your editing software, whether it’s Photoshop, GIMP, Picnik, or any number of other editing platforms. Most of all, enjoy what you are doing!

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/

“The latest bizarre trend blowing up Facebook mini-feeds everywhere? Cat Breading. (Think LOLcats, but with a trippy twist—each adorable kitten has been adorned with a slice of bread, which encases their little feline face.)”

From this article in Complex’s Pop Culture section

So, what do you have to do? Simple: frame a cat’s face with a piece of bread and take a picture of it.

Take a picture and experiment with the “Halftone Effect” in some photo editing software to create a comic book effect. There are lots of tutorials on Youtube and Google.

Using this site: http://fatcatart.ru/category/klassy-ka/ as a platform for ideas, and using Photoshop (or something like it) as your tool, place a fat cat into a photo of a classic art piece. The goal is to make it convincing: make the art become on with the cat.

Most of all, enjoy! :0) And remember, fat cats make art better.

Make a set of ten photos which take something familiar to you–a town, building, object, etc.–and defamiliarize it, make it seem foreign. Use a mix of extreme closeups, weird lighting, foreground/background focusing and odd angles and other effects to make something that you know very well seem like something you’ve never seen before, something spooky and/or luminous and/or magical.

See an example at http://www.andessurvivor.com/2012/01/23/mission-defamiliarize/

Demonstrate that “a picture is worth a thousand words” by superimposing a famous quotation over a “Creative Commons” licensed image.

Make certain to include the author’s name and the licensed image web address in your visual remix to provide proper credit and acknowledgement.

Detailed lesson steps, together with supporting web sites, samples, and activity handouts are available on my blog at: http://life-long-learners.com/image-with-a-message/

Take care & keep smiling :-)