Pixel Overlays

The other day I posted a bunch of pictures reduced to pixels. While messing with one of the photos I did a simple overlay of the pixelated photo over the top of the original. I thought it turned out pretty cool, so I tried it on more photos. Yeah, I'm a genius. Be jelly of my skills.

Word of the Day: Xenophobia

Merriam-Webster defines "xenophobia" as "fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign." This word holds a special place in my heart. Based on the definition, that probably sounds really strange. I assure you it is not from personal experience with the phobia. My relation to the word must be explained by going back to my senior year of high school. Most senior English classes were given a project known as the "ABC book." This book was required to have a word describing the student starting with each letter of the alphabet. They would generally be nice things like "Artistic" or "Youthful" or "Sporty." My sisters and I got the oh so intelligent idea to create a "ZYX book" of words that were not as nice like "Cannibal" or "Rabid" or, yes, "Xenophobic." This post is for the illustration of this word and to make you giggle. I took no new photos, and the one of me I did not take at all. However, I put the page together, and I think it looks pretty darn spiffy. Now I know it's the adjective and not the noun, but I know you will forgive me. You're a nice person.

Outdoor Room

Paradoxes are fun, aren't they? I think so. It's something you wouldn't think could be true, but somehow it is. This applies to the term "outdoor room." What do you think of when someone says "room?" Four (ish) walls, a ceiling, a floor, and furniture, right? Living room, dining room, bedroom, bathroom...these are the things we think of. That's why outdoor rooms are so paradoxical. There aren't four (ish) walls, there's no ceiling (though sometimes an overhead covering is involved), and there is no barrier between you and the outside weather. Typically people use the term "outdoor room" in reference to a backyard kitchen or deck or other sectioned off area, but I decided to scatter furniture randomly throughout the yard and take pictures. The concept becomes that much more of a contrasting statement. I also took pictures at our closest disc golf course where the groundskeepers set up chairs for those awaiting their turn. Those are the junky looking colorful ones.

Photoshop Experiment #1

I decided to experiment with my own effects in Photoshop. This one kinda makes pictures look like paintings. I used a combination of cutout, high pass, and overlay to create the look, but those words may sound a bit like gibberish to you if you aren't familiar with Photoshop. Basically I simplified the colors and shapes in the picture, made the photo sharper and a bit gritty, and placed a translucent copy of the original photo over the top so the subject would still be clear. Fun times.

Fun with Barcodes

I was passing some of my time on Pinterest the other day and saw someone had posted a picture of a barcode. This was not your everyday barcode. It had been altered in a fun way with a cartoon addition. I decided to have some fun of my own. Each of these images was originally a photograph, and I added in a barcode in somewhere. It's really easy to spot them as I am sure you will find out. Barcodes don't hide easily. They'd make terrible ninjas.

Selective Desaturation

Sometimes it's fun to mess with the saturation of pictures. For those of you who have no clue what I'm talking about, saturation is the amount of color in a picture. If it is desaturated, there is no color. It is "black and white." I'm thinking this isn't a new concept for most of y'all though. I chose certain areas of these pictures to desaturate, hence "selective." My favorites are the ones with reflections in water. I just think it's fun to think that the desaturation is an historical photograph and the colored portions are from current day, so it's like the passage of time occurs in one photograph. It's like Ansel Adams' work on steroids, if that's even possible.

Pixelated

I was messing around in Photoshop the other day and decided to reduce some of my photos to pixels. I don't know why, but it sounded like fun. Some of them look like themselves from far away, but when you get close up, all you see is a bunch of colorful squares. I probably didn't need to tell you that though. You're smart. We all (hopefully) remember those early video games when all software designers had to use were pixels. Now the games look real, and it's creepy. I miss Pong and Space Invaders and that gorillas throwing bananas game and the original Mario. Here's a nod to those games using pixelated photographs.