American in Spain

This afternoon I was succumbing to a risky vice of mine, surfing the product pages over at ThinkGeek, when I came across this t-shirt where they had used chemical symbols for elements to write a dirty word. Silly, yes, but also kind of fun as a tool to separate people who know a lot of science from those that don’t, which seems to be the primary goal of the t-shirts at ThinkGeek. For instance, I always get a chuckle out of the one that says, “There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don’t.” Is that kind of elitist behavior rude? Yes, but it’s a social defense mechanism, creating an “us vs. them” mentality that is ubiquitous in our species.
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Today I finally got around to attempting a bit of Photoshop trickery I’ve been wanting to try, creating a photo of me dancing with my two-year-old daughter where our sizes are adjusted, either me down to her height, or her up to mine. It turns out that this is very, very hard to do well. The principal difficulty is aligning the hands, in space and with the proper angles, so that they appear to touch. Of the five or so photos I took to work with, I chose the best two to merge together. The result is a photo where the viewer is never really fooled into thinking that the two people are actually interacting physically.
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Recently I noticed a minor bump on my left hand, in the center of the palm. It itched a little, but I thought little of it. But then it kept growing, almost until it looked like a little human nose. I made a doctor’s appointment and went in to see my physician. She nodded and asked, “I don’t suppose you spend a lot of time on the internet spewing sarcasm on social networking sites, do you?” Startled by her insight, I relied, “Well, maybe a little, yeah.” “And do you use puns and wordplay excessively,” she continued, “sometimes with an awkward narrative for the sole purpose of a not-that-funny punchline?” “Yep, that’s me,” I admitted. She said, “I thought so. You’ve got a textbook case of Facepalm. I’m afraid it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
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A notable change in the weather has taken place this past week. The days of sleeping with the windows open and wearing sandals about town is coming to a close. It’s time to break out the sweaters and long trousers. There’s something about the beginning of autumn that makes me want to go outside and throw an American football around. It surprises me every year, since it’s not one of my top five favorite sports, I’ve never worn a football helmet, and I don’t have a favorite team, but there’s some deep bit of Americanism in me that I can neither control nor explain. Curious, that.
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I realized that it was about time to revisit my temporal compositing Photoshop project, placing Nora on the couch with younger versions of herself. It’s no surprise that she has changed much less in her second year than in her first. What follows are three Noras, one at 6 months, one at 18 months, and another at 30 months. To take the 6-month-old’s picture, I had to prop her up and run to press the shutter before she fell over. The 18-month-old could sit there just fine, but the 30-month-old could actually be told to keep her legs straight and put her hands on her knees to conserve horizontal space.
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Every kid has done it and loved it. What could be better than walking on top of a wall, holding your parent’s hand, up at grownup eye level, carefully placing each step, enjoying the illusion of danger. Last Sunday, we took a stroll up to Colindres de Arriba, the picturesque village within a town just up a hill past the town hall. We spent about thirty minutes picking blackberries and then continued on to the medieval church. If I had been planning on it before we left, I’d have taken a better camera, but it occurred to me while we were up there that I could take a series of photographs and photoshop them together into a motion composite. I’m fairly pleased with the result.
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In general, I am very much against knickknacks, a.k.a. crap you have to clean the dust off every once in a while. So perhaps you can imagine my dismay when my daughter and mother-in-law bring home one of those horribly gaudy asian waving cat things. Apparently it had caught my daughter’s toddler eye (and why wouldn’t it?) in the local chinos shop, and her grandmother had bought it for her. “Mimi mimi mimi”, they said to each other mimicking the not-entirely-unlike-the-Nazi-salute gesture. I facepalmed and sighed.
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Recently, when I was with my family at a swimming pool, I had the opportunity to use the fast shutter rate of my DSLR camera to take some quick photographs of them. I took the photographs specifically with the intention of practicing a Photoshop technique called motion composition or motion multiplication. The idea is that you make a composite photograph of a subject that is in motion by combining various copies of the subject in different positions.
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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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