I made this photo for the Colorize It Assignment
I used a picture that I took in London this summer while crossing the street to get to the changing of the guard ceremony at Buckingham Palace. I used photoshop, created a duplicate layer. I then used the quick select tool to select the parts of the photo that I wanted to still have color (the flags) and deleted them from the top layer. I then made the top layer black and white, so that the color left on the bottom layer show through. I think it went well, and it was really fun to make.

For my second visual assignment, I decided to do Classic Album Makeover.

While, it’s hard to say whether The Starting Line’s album Say It Like You Mean It  counts as “classic,” it was released in 2002 and could use some updating.

The jeans and phone really says early 2000s here. And so does the music. A lot of the songs talk about calling a girl. Texting isn’t how it is today; phone calls are how you keep in contact, make plans, etc.

That being said, I was happy that I owned a green tank top and dark wash jeans (sans buttons) and that the case on my iPhone is a similar color to the phone. There’s also a brown/tan couch in my house. So I was able to replicate the picture pretty closely.

My good friend, Ginny, took the picture for me (under my guidance) and then I worked some not-too-bad magic in GIMP. In GIMP, I pasted in the band logo and the title of the album from the picture of the original album color. In hopes of giving the new album cover a similar neutral background, I erased everything. Of course, I didn’t get it all, but I about went insane doing what I did. So. Much. White.

I’m really proud of what I created, even if it isn’t perfect. I think it’s a really cool update to an awesome, simple album cover and it really highlights how technology has changed and the role technology plays in music.

Here’s my favorite song from The Starting Line’s Say It Like You Mean It:

For my third visual assignment for the week, I decided to do the Imaginary Places assignment, so I made my version of Cair Paravel from the Chronicles of Narnia.

I used my own pictures from some traveling I did this summer, and used photoshop to put them together. I used a picture of Neuschwanstein Castle that I took in Germany, and a picture of The Lizard that I took in England for the landscape. Cair Paravel is described as being a beautiful castle on the sea, and since C.S. Lewis was writing in England, I thought that he might have been picturing something close to The Lizard.

I used photoshop to open both pictures. I used the Quick Selection tool to grab Neuschwanstein Castle, and cut and pasted onto The Lizard. I then resized the castle to match the landscape and moved it so it was sitting on the cliff.

For my second visual assignment for the week, I decided to do the Rainbow Showcase assignment. I was originally planning on using one of the episodes of The Wire that we have to watch, but the assignment said that I should use my favorite show, so I decided that Doctor Who would be more fun. I watched an episode from season 7 of Doctor Who called “Journey to the Center of the Tardis” and took screen shots while I watched it as appropriate colors came up.

This assignment was a lot of fun, but it also made me pay a lot of attention to different colored lighting used for different emotions and scenes, and what the colors in general were trying to convey.

“Don’t ever get into a space ship with a mad man. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that?”

I really liked the idea of mirroring scenes in the Wire because so many aspects of the show are paralleled and many elements keep showing up, and so for my last assignment I did the “wiring mirror scenes” visual assignment where I had to find two parallel scenes from different episodes and loop them together.

I am really interested by the lives the characters have outside of the job and decided to parallel two scenes from two separate episodes where McNulty and Morland drink at their parking lot hot spot.

The first scene is from episode 1 from the first season, while the second is a snapshot from episode 6 of season 2. Morland’s and McNulty’s relationship is really interesting and the amount of drinking they do/how they act off of the job is crazy to me. We see McNulty’s loneliness because of his separation from his wife and children, but we do not hear too much about Morland’s home life.

In the first scene, McNulty gets absolutely trashed and flirts with death when the train comes, while we get a total switch in the scene from season two. In that scene it is Morland instead over drinking and he pulls out his gun for fun. The total change in the responsibility of each of these men is interesting to note, as well as how much has changed in their home lives and jobs, yet they still continue to return to this same parking lot to drink and talk.

To make this wired screenshot, I took a screenshot from each episode discussed and then put them into a photo editing website called canva.com, which allowed me to put text over each photo. I then saved it back to my computer and uploaded through Known.

For my first visual assignment this week, I did the Triple Troll Wire Epigraph (2 stars).

I took a screenshot from the episode, found the epigraph I wanted (here‘s a list of all of them), and then did the editing in GIMP.

I used a screenshot of Bird at the end of his trial in Season 2, Episode 6 and the epigraph is from Season 2, Episode 8. Ziggy is talking about the birds, so I thought it was appropriate to make it about the now incarcerated Bird and attribute it to Omar, since he was baiting and aggravating Bird when he was called up as a witness.

For my first visual assignment for the week, I chose to make an album cover.

I was given this lovely picture for my cover, which I inverted and changed in Photoshop. The name of my band in “Roman Catholicism in Kenya” and the name of our newest album is “States and all their Clans are Preserved” (which is from this quote by Confucius) .

I had a lot of fun working on this visual assignment because it was very random, a lot of fun, and pretty easy.

I decided to do the “Wire everywhere” visual assignment where I had to capture a visual from the real world that is recurring in the Wire. At the beginning of episode 7 we see an angel in the flower shop and in that same episode there is D’Angelo’s funeral. I think the angel represents the reminder that this crime world is so dangerous and death is constantly around the corner. It also represents the idea of innocence in a chaotic world, which we have seen over and over again with children’s voices and characters such as Wallace.

I found the angel in this episode particularly poignant and I paralleled it with a trinket of an angel that I happen to keep in my room. They in no means look the same but both are female protection figures with angelic wings and drapery, the typical depiction of the angel.

I took a screenshot from the show and took a photo of my trinket and linked them together. I wanted to point out something that meant something in the show and represents a deeper theme.

I decided to use the Rainbow visual assignment to highlight the colors in the Wire. The point was to take clips from a show or movie that highlights the colors of the rainbow and string them together. This has been done before with the “Rainbow Port” post, but I decided to focus on episode 7 because it had a lot of color all over it. Many colors were discussed at the beginning of the episode in the flower shop when figuring out what flowers to buy for D’Angelo’s funeral. The docks have a ton of color, which is where I pulled the orange and red from, but I also wanted to get some colors from the street, which is where I found the green tennis ball and yellow signage. The blue represents the dock workers who always seem to be wearing some shade of blue and I actually had a photo of Nick wearing blue before I saw the scene with all of the dock workers at the house of the injured man.

The coloring in this episode was also juxtaposed with the darkness of the cops clothing, as well as the funeral and graveyard scenes where everyone is wearing black.

Colors are so telling in this show and seem to designate certain aspects to groups or settings and they are definitely something to pay attention to. With how dark the show is, the colors are important as a contrast and would not be provided by Simon if they were not important.

I took screenshots of episode 7 when I found a striking color and eventually had the whole rainbow. I took screenshots and looped them together by taking one large screenshot on my computer screen. I simply uploaded to flickr, twitter and the hub through Known and was ready to go! It’s definitely a new style rainbow with a disturbing twist, but it is nice to pay attention to color in such a dark show.

Over the weekend I went to Georgetown and visited the National Arboretum, a very expansive garden in D.C. I thought this would be perfect for the backyard safari photos assignment as my backyard is not interesting and the Arboretum had so much to offer. There were many different sections to the vast park: a bonsai garden and Asian gardens, a Dogwood garden, the National Herb Garden and my favorite, some of the original Capital building columns.

The entire place was just a sublime experience, but seeing the columns set up as they were, almost as if outlining the remnants of a Roman ruin, reminded me of Italy and put me in a different place. Likewise, the herb garden moved me with its various scents and innumerable flowers, the last of the season. The entire place told the story that there is a different world placed on the outskirts of a large city, that there is life in a city of concrete.

I showed both the dark and light of the columns, and then from farther away, where I thought they looked like one of those ruins upon an Italian hillside. Then I move into the herb garden where i traipsed around smelling lavender and rosemary, the same plants Michelle Obama gets in her home, the White House. I ended my sequence the same way I ended my day, by staring at a groundhog, a life feeding off of the life around it. I named him Herbert and watched while he lazily ate grass and plants laying down.

There was too much beauty in this place not to share and there was more of a story to tell than my backyard. In fact, this place is the backyard to all of D.C. and is therefore more fulfilling in its story because it is shared by so many.

I took these photos with my iPhone and uploaded them to iMovie. It was a simple enough movie to make, but I wanted to make the photos move to zoom in on what should be looked at most deeply, as well as give the viewer more time to soak up what they are seeing. I hope everyone can see my story and the beauty that the small outings in life can bring.