Double exposure with newspaper by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Double exposure with newspaper by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
This is an example of my love for double exposures. Back in 1994, I was in a photography class, and perhaps my best image was one of my friend Geoff Kremer double exposed with a scene in an abandoned warehouse that I was exploring with my friend Roch Pisarek. They were interesting images on their own, but together, there was a kind of spark. In the GIMP, I achieved this by importing both images, resizing them to be the same size, then placing the selfie layer on top of the newspaper layer, then setting the layer mode to Darken Only which gave the effect I was looking for. I also duplicated the selfie layer and lowered the opacity of the newspaper layer to enhance the effect.
Advanced rotation in Inkscape by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Advanced rotation in Inkscape by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Let’s say you want to create a visual effect in which you have objects floating with regularity around another object, such as creating tick marks around the center of a clock. In this post, I’ll explain how you can do this easily in Inkscape. The key is in moving your center-point for the outer objects.
See the video below for a clearer explanation of these instructions. Open Inkscape. Using the text tool, create an ‘o’. Create a line with the bezier tool as your first tick mark. Put it in the perfect topmost position, aligned with the ‘o’ vertically. Click the tick mark with the selector tool until it is in rotation mode. Take the plus mark for the selected tick mark, and move it to the center of the o. This centers rotation at the center of the o. then, select the tick mark in rotation mode, and while dragging the rotation handle, hit your space bar at each place you want a tick mark. In 12 clicks of the space bar, you will be done.
I really love design play that takes the expected and twists it. This is a prime example. By starting with a photo of an original game cartridge for the atari 2600, and replacing and repainting the firefox logo into it, then adding the title in the Atari 2600 font (Mumbai.ttf) it’s fairly easy to pull off this kind of substitution. In retrospect, I should have used ALL CAPS for the title, as they did for their cartridges, but still, a fun project.
I used to believe by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
I used to believe by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
I decided to illustrate a meditative thought I’ve had recently. There is a change emerging in my point of view, and I thought that I would express it in Inkscape. I added the text in two pieces, one for each line. I used Bebas Neue, one of my favorite title fonts. I tightened the kerning on an already very tightly kerned font, by breaking the text into individual letters and moving them horizontally towards each other until they had a certain flow. I spaced them on the non-repro grid on Inkscape that is set to 100 pixel squares. I added a texture in the background from an acid stained, coffee drenched sheet of ledger paper. I then re-aligned the lines of text to the blue ledger lines, and reduced the opacity of the letters to let the texture show through, as though they were printed as a ghost print in red ink. I think the text speaks to the treatment and the treatment speaks to the text.
I was inspired by a recent clip I saw of Ray Park practicing martial arts to do a split screen of him with perhaps his most famous role as Darth Maul in Star Wars Episode 1. The clip shows exactly how integral Park’s physical appearance and performance were in the creation of the character. I tend to do a lot of this kind of facial alignment work in the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) because it offers all the right tools for photo manipulation in the perfect price of free.
How I made the image in GIMP
I started by gathering the two images, one of Ray in makeup/character and out. They were of a similar size, and of a reasonable size for my piece. The glossy of Ray was angled, where the image of Darth Maul was horizontally aligned, and so my first task was to drop horizontal and vertical gridlines at Darth Maul’s eyes, nose, and mouth. Then I dropped the opacity of Ray’s face and used the rotation, scaling, and move tools to align his face with the gridlines. I returned opacity to 100%. I added a layer mask to Maul in full opacity, then added a selection that took up exactly half of the face and filled it with the opposite color. In the GIMP, Black and White are the degrees of opacity in layer masks. Finally, I needed to repair the angled edges of Ray’s picture that were created in rotation, so I painted with the color of his shirt and the color of the background to fix those, and used the Stamp tool to repair his hair, which had highlights and texture that would have been difficult to recreate from scratch. It’s not perfect, as the angle of the head in the two shots is slightly out of alignment, but I think the illusion works. Apologies to Ray Park and Lucasfilm (Disney, now) for the unauthorized use of their images for the purpose of education and commentary here.
I was fortunate to be asked by Sophie Brookover and Library Link NJ (visit them at http://librarylinknj.org/ for great Library resources, insight, and help, especially for New Jersey Libraries) to co-host a Facebook Forum on effective Social Media for Libraries, and in the post-show we had a discussion about other topics for future events. We discussed a few things, but one interesting topic that came about was the idea of the ways that we had worked together to plan and collaborate for the Forum. In case you want to see the record of the forum, please visit the status update where that discussion lives.
Facebook logo Español: Logotipo de Facebook Français : Logo de Facebook Tiếng Việt: Logo Facebook (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
At any rate, in planning for the event, we used five communication/collaboration channels, all interesting and useful in their own right. I’m writing this to organize my thoughts for the potential future products we talked about, and to give you some insight into our process. I talk about each of these in increasing order of communication channel richness. In other words, as we progress in this document, the capabilities for more sensory information increases.
Facebook discussion
In Facebook, each status update has a discussion attached to it. There, we can have a social gathering complete with links, pictures, video, text and other media types. If you can digitize it and produce a link to it, it’s fair game, though Facebook does a very good job of presenting the visuals right inline in the discussion. The key reason that we used it was because we wanted it to be open, sharable, publicized, fairly rich, archived for posterity, easy to use and join, and able to join people from all over. One unexpected benefit was that Sophie and I were both kind of sick with colds, coughing and sniffling, but no one had to suffer through our potentially contagious presence!
Since the forum is run on inquiry and discussion, we needed a planning document, and Google Drive provided a perfect platform for us to write our questions, rules, and reminders together both synchronously and asynchronously. Since Sophie and I both have and use our Google accounts, it was no effort or question. Plus, we got to see what each other was writing as we wrote it, discuss the changes by phone, add links, quotes, formatting, and photos. We would have lost the ability to format properly or keep easy track of the document if we used Facebook messaging or statuses, for instance, and the privacy settings of the document are quite flexible.
by-Phone
Car Telephone (Photo credit: bjosefowicz)
Because writing in text makes it very difficult to emote, and writing planning documents and discussions can easily trigger miscommunication, missed messages, and general confusion, we opted to talk by phone as we planned our Forum. Even though our voice based communication was sparse as we typed, it allowed for easy and quick clarification, justification, and suggestion with the added benefit of those temporary notes not being archived and cluttering our documents. We also had the ability to smile, laugh, end our sentences in a question tone, and show other emotions to underline our feelings as we spoke.
Google Hangouts
During the Forum itself on Facebook, Sophie and I used Google Hangouts as a rich backchannel to add all the benefits of phone communication with a video layer on top. Seeing a raised eyebrow, a smile, or a shake of the head during discussion added yet another layer of communicative understanding to our backstage work. I noted that it was a bit strange for us to use such a rich method for our backchannel of two participants while using a relatively thin channel in Facebook for the real event, when typically thin channels like Twitter are used for backchanneling while the main event is fairly rich. In this particular case, though, it was absolutely perfect. She and I were able to note changes to each other, clarify responses before typing, and give insights into the participants’ history and experience without anyone hearing our chatter in the public facing Forum.
In-Person
Before the first planning event, Sophie and I happened to both be presenting at the NJLA Adult Services forum and we got to see each other, greet each other, reinforce our in-person friendship and camaraderie, and have a rich discussion in real space. It was convenient that we both happened to be scheduled to speak and had the time to talk for a few minutes, because although this is by far the richest collaboration and communication channel it also represents the most effort. She and I probably both had to drive for 40 minutes to get there, spending time, gas, money, and planning, and if we hadn’t been going to this event anyway, we likely would not have had the opportunity to meet. In fact, while I list Sophie among my most valuable and respected colleagues, I have probably only been in the same physical space with her a handful of times. This shows the value of our other methods here, for sure.
How about you and your collaborators?
What methods do you use for communication and collaboration, and what benefits do they bring? Are you using email, Facebook messaging, Twitter DMs, or other methods to work together? What has worked best for you and what was the context of that success? What might Sophie and I have done instead of this and still get all the benefits of these various channels? List your answers, feedback and experiences in the discussion below!
