Sliding Down Rocks

This weekend I visited the Middlesex Fells Reservation, which has a number of great hiking trails. We wandered onto the Rock Circuit Trail which has many fantastic rocks to climb sans climbing gear and view the park (or at least the tree-line, none of them were actually high enough to see the entire park). When I read the description of the Slide Guy! visual assignment, I thought immediately of those rocks. Wouldn’t he look great sliding down one of them? Sadly, in going through my pictures, I only had one that showed a slide-appropriate profile of a rock formation, and it had my friend in it:

To fix this I used the clone stamp tool in Photoshop to replace my friend with trees and sky, and then dragged slide guy into the image and increased his size to make sure he was having extra fun:

But the composition felt off. Slide guy was too small, there was too much sky, the image just didn’t quite work. So I cropped it. And I’m pretty happy with the result. Slide guy will never fit perfectly into any image (unless it’s an actual slide), but he always looks like he’s having fun. Even if he’s sliding down a pile of rocks.

Slide Guy at Camp Magic MacGuffin

So the Slide Guy took a bit of a visit to the MineCraft incarnation of Camp Magic MacGuffin this week, looking for appropriate places to practice his sliding skills.

He was captured trying out the stairs at the Bunk Five Archery Range

"SlideGuy at CMM Archery Stairs" by aforgrave, on Flickr

“SlideGuy at CMM Archery Stairs” by aforgrave, on Flickr

… checking out the Bava lava at the camp centre, …

"SlideGuy at CMM Bava Lava" by aforgrave, on Flickr

“SlideGuy at CMM Bava Lava” by aforgrave, on Flickr

and giving a good ol’ head-first go at the Fall Out The World Fun Ride.

"SlideGuy at CMM FallOut The World Fun Ride by aforgrave, on Flickr

“SlideGuy at CMM Fall Out The World Fun Ride by aforgrave, on Flickr

As it would turn out, however, he seemed to spend the most time at the Waterslide over at CampX.   Here is Slide Guy enjoying the waterside. Over and over!

SlideGuy at CMM Camp X Waterslide

SlideGuy at CMM Camp X Waterslide

UPDATE:  I took a close look at all of the Slide Guy images to see if anyone had done the waterslide — and somehow missed Martha’s. When I saw the work of Noise Professor Maybe Next Time D’Arcy and Tim Wins, I decided to go with an animated GIF. So clearly Slide Guy was on that waterside during the day, AND still at sunset. Or maybe at sunset, and STILL the next day.  At any rate, he must love sliding.

Slide on, Slide Guy. Slide on!

ds106 Visual Assignments 595

Slide Guy’s Mean Machine

So I was on campus today and spotted what at a distance looked like a cool, big sculpture in happy colors. So I spun around the traffic circle again and headed that way.

The closer I got, the weirder this sculpture looked. It was really some kind of huge machine, a cross between a catapult and an earth-moving machine. And it was armed with a serious-looking ray gun.

Needless to say, I was getting a little worried until I saw that Slide Guy was on the machine, checking things out.

I’ll sleep better tonight knowing Slide Guy 106 is on the case.

Slide Guy image on interesting machine

GIMP is not yet my friend but we’re getting along better. Could not figure out how to scale Slide Guy to fit, but I was happy that I took several shots from all angles to be sure I had one that would work.

Visual Assignment 595: Slide Guy loves to slide down things! Find a photo of something to slide down and make your own Slide Guy! two stars