American in Spain

Just this year, as far as I’m aware, a new sort of digital photography art form has emerged, called cinemagraphy. It’s so new that there’s still no Wikipedia page for it! The general idea is that you create a photograph with some bit of it that is not exactly still. It’s published in the infamous “animated gif” format that plagued “world wide web” pages back in the 1990′s. The trick is to get the file size down below a megabyte so that it can be downloaded more or less as instantaneously as a regular jpeg photograph. As I have discovered, this is not easy.
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As much as I’ve been trying to avoid it, I’ve been unable to avoid seeing pictures of these two British faces around the news. There was something about this one photograph that struck me as being perfect for a Photoshop trick I’ve been wanting to try, called face switching. Sure, enough, their faces were angled just right such that it was really quite a trivial operation for someone with a rudimentary understanding of layer masks. If the royal wedding coverage gets too annoying, just imagine it’s this lovely couple instead.
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For a while now, I’ve had a photoshop project in mind to take historical photographs and add a three dimensional effect to them by providing camera movement. I’ve hinted at the idea before. Using historical photos of, say, dead people, is just a gimmick to show that there was no intention of the effect at the time the photo was taken. So far, I’ve only been able to find the time to make one attempt, but I’d like to do more. After googling “iconic photograph”, and searching for one with a clear foreground and background, I settled on this famous photograph of Bobby Fischer.
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Nora’s vocabulary continues to advance. She’s big into repeating whatever you say, particularly the last part, so if you say, “Do you want some yogurt?”, and she says, “Yogurt!”, that doesn’t necessarily qualify as an affirmative response. The problem is, however, that she’s not very good about open ended questions. “What do you want?” still isn’t likely to result in any meaningful communication, although if she’s been asking for something, she will repeat what she wants (hint: it’s usually a cookie).
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Thanks to the little “One Year Ago” widget on my left sidebar, I was reminded about this photography/photoshoppery project I endeavored to embark on last year. Unfortunately, I seem to have dropped the ball in March for the “12 months” photo, so I’ve decided, retrospectively, that doing it every six months was a stupid idea and it’s really better to do it at 12 month intervals. Remind me next September, if you would…

Actually I was also reminded by the “Previous 12 months” smart album I have that keeps recent photos on my phone, which sorts, annoyingly, in chronological order, so I’m often aware of the photos I took a year ago, as I have to scroll by them a lot.
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Recently the iPad has been a source of inspiration for my photoshop creativity. Since it functions so well as a photoframe, it seemed only natural to use it as a frame for frame breaking. I also must admit to being astonished that I seem to be the first person to see its pristine reflective glass as a place to put an ice skater. It seems so natural to me. Here are my first two attempts at iPad photoshoppery.
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Nora left on Thursday afternoon to spend the weekend with her grandparents. She’s still a little too young to appreciate Father’s Day, and she already celebrated Spanish Father’s Day with me this year, so her absence on Sunday didn’t hurt too much. She’s coming home this evening to watch the Spain – Honduras World Cup match with her old man.

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President Obama really likes this recent video of Nora.

I’d be more than happy to send the smart-object-enabled Photoshop file for this to anyone who requests it.

On a recent walk I snapped a photograph of the local postman’s scooter. The mail in Colindres is delivered mostly by foot, with mailmen and mail-women walking around town pulling a little pull-cart, like the ones housewives pull to and from the grocery store. There’s one mailman who zips around on a scooter, parking it in the middle of a neighborhood and delivering letters from it to the nearby houses. I really liked my photo of his scooter and decided to play with it in photoshop, adding a pseudo-tilt-shift focusing effect to the scooter, with some desaturation of the background. I liked it so much that when a mailbox caught my eye, sitting alone with a tree, the following day, I snapped a photograph. After some similar photoshopping, the mailbox and tree really look to be keeping each other company. With these two made, I decided to go, yesterday, and snap the other mailbox (there are only two in town that I know of). Lo and behold it, too, was accompanied by some inanimate friends. And thus, I present to you, Correos Still Life.
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I took Nora to the doctor today to get weighed and measured. In her first six months she more than doubled in weight, ending up and around 7.4 kg. In her second six months she hasn’t gained any weight at all, remaining consistently around 7.5 kg when we weigh her at bath time (before her dinner). Today, after eating 260 mL of breakfast milk and cereal (which is more dense than water, so that’s more than 0.26 kg right there), she weighed 7.85 kg and measured 75 cm, a full three quarters of a meter. This gives her a body mass index of 14.0, which is literally off the chart. The doctor say she’s just fine, which we knew already. Tall and skinny, but fine.

In the same spirit as last year’s ridiculous linear comparison of food consumption rate, I’ve decided to see what I would be like if my height and weight were at the same ratio as Nora’s (104 g/cm).
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