It took some time to find the perfect childhood photo to bomb, but I found one. Pictured are myself and my Aunt Beverly, apparently singing or something. My picture was from when I bombed my cousin’s “look what I got for Christmas” picture. It goes without saying that I’m ki
Dorothy seems timeless even looking back at the Wizard of Oz from maybe 80 years past its time. But her statue I saw on the streets of Liberal Kansas seemed kind of old, maybe it was just the texture of the metal, but I speculated she might get nostalgic for her own youth (or at least mobility):
I made this for my story project as a response to the Then-Now-Together ds106 assignment:
Edit a childhood photo of yourself to include a more recent photo of you in a pose that makes it look like you were part of the original scene. Pay attention to matching pose, detail, and color values to match the original. You can go back to your past, at least in your own edited photo!
Okay, it was not “me” but my character. And Dorothy is young and innocent enough in Oz to qualify for childhood.
I cropped the photo of her status I took:
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
and overlaid it in Photoshop in a sepia toned screen capture of the Kansas set of the movie. I had to stretch the status to make it close to the proportion of the screen capture of young Dorothy. I had to flip that one horizontally and do some clone brush of the fence to leave enough room for the pasted statue photo.
I dropped the saturation on the statue and used the Image – > Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation tool to try and make the statue less glossy and match the tones in the mage. Its far from perfect, but the idea is to mae them look like they are singing a duet across time.
I thought this assignment had a really neat concept, and I had never seen anything like it before. I used Pixlr to merge the two pictures together. In the younger picture I’m about 4 or 5 yrs old and in the older one I am 20 (my age now). I’m happy with the end result!
Last week I saw Who’s That Cute Kid on The Beach? – CogDogBlog, started in on it. This that and a MechanicalMooc got in the way of finishing and I am glad they did.
Today I came home from work to find my #DS106 t-shirt had arrived. A no brainer:
I grabbed the original photo from flickr scanned from my mum’s shoe box and got my daughter to take a quick pic.
On the iPad I used Superimpose to take out the background from the now picture. Then in Photoshop touch I made a triple layer images with me sandwiched between two layers of the old one. A bit of rubbing out, export to camera+ for cropping, Snapseed for a bit of grunge and finally Diptc for a while border.
By no means a great job, but quick and fun. I could have done a bit of a better job with the cropping and rubbing out and there is an obvious disparity in the tone (or grain or something) between the photos, perhaps more grunge would help.
Update 3 Nov 2012
Alan called me out ds106 stype in the comments and on twitter to tell the story behind this photo. I must say I didn’t really think of the story. I’ve very few photos of myself at a young age and just grabbed one I though would work visually from twitter. I am not sure if I can actually remember the event or just the photo. Anyway:
The photo was taken, I’d guess, at the end of the 60s or perhaps at the start of the 70s. I was born in 1958 my brother 3 years later and I am guessing on appearance.
This would have been a Saturday when we went to Helensburgh for the weekly shopping. I do remember feeling aggrieved that my brother got to hold the monkey. I was the one with the interest in wildlife.
I wish I could recall my feelings about the monkey, other than fascination and delight at getting close to one. I’ve had a life long interest in animals and the way we treat them and have gone back and forth on many issues: I spent my teenage years with wildlife as a main interest that veered into shooting rabbits and duck, before stopping eating meat at 21 (still don’t). I disapproved of animals in captivity but worked as a zookeeper for most of my 20s. nicely conflicted.
So I wonder how I felt about the monkey did I feel sorry for it, disapprove of it being dressed up. I can imagine being quite angry about this at certain periods of my life.
That is the story, but the ds106 story will continue in the next post…
I was on the beach recently and found a cute kid to take a photo of:
I got the push to make it seeing Before and After Pictures with a Twist on Buzzfeed where some dude inserted modern photos of himself into photos of him as a kid- but its more than cut and paste, he carefully considered the pose and details like shadow.
My first reflex- “This would be a cool ds106 assignment”
I am thinking of creating a twitter auto responder then when anyone tweets a message like that it responds with something like:
So this is now an assignment Then-Now-Together:
Edit a childhood photo of yourself to include a more recent photo of you in a pose that makes it look like you were part of the original scene. Pay attention to matching pose, detail, and color values to match the original. You can go back to your past, at least in your own edited photo!
Based an example of Before and After Pictures with a Twist spotted in Buzzfeed
And now my example- the source image is of me at a beach in Ocean City maryland, digging one of my improbable and unsafe holes:
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
Combined with a photo taken of me last week by @windsordi on your trip to Point Pelee, Ontario:
cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by windsordi
It was a matter of cropping out the background. To make it match the color tone, I mucked with the levels and come color correct, and added a Fim Grain Effect to try and match the original. The trickier part was creating a shadow – I found some clues in a tutorial from PhotoShop Essentials. MOre or less you make a selection of the original figure, create new layer below the original, fill with black, use distorts and rotates to move the shadow, add some Gaussian blur, and lighten the opacity.
And there it is- me on a beach taking a photo of me on a beach, then, now, together.
How about you?
Edit a childhood photo of yourself to include a more recent photo of you in a pose that makes it look like you were part of the original scene. Pay attention to matching pose, detail, shadows, and color values to match the original. You can go back to your past, at least in your own edited photo!
Based an example of Before and After Pictures with a Twist spotted in Buzzfeed. See also more exquisite examples in Woman Photoshops Present-Day Self into Childhood Photos.
