Category Archives: DS106

First took this class my final semester senior year at UMW and I can say that it has definitely changed my life! I feel I am much more inspired to make art #ds1064life

Reflection on Daily Shoots thus far

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As of tonight I have uploaded  81 photos for 53 daily shoots to Flickr. This does not count the other photos I have uploaded to flickr or all the other photos I have taken but not uploaded.

I have officially accomplished 14% of my 365 photo goal. Wow! I am surprised my motivation has lasted this long. 🙂

Sometimes I get really cool photos in seconds and have to do little editing work, and other times I have spent an hour or so doing photo shoots with friends (such as people in this class like Megan, Colleen, Aliyah and my friends outside the class who might as well be in it.) Some days I don’t have a lot of time to take a photo which means the one I do end up uploading is ok but could have been better.

I really love doing crazy photoshoots with friends because they turn out really entertaining (e.g. Rainbow Brite Photo shoots, The Masks, Water Water Everywhere).

I’m also slightly obsessed with Picnik which is an awesome/quick way to edit photos for free online and then download to your computer

I love the comments I get on Flickr because they are generally very encouraging/ entertaining. Thanks ds106sers and all the randoms that have commented.

So now I leave you with all the awesome photos I have thus far. You have any favorites?

 

 

 

 

A Day in the life of Zach Whalen

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This is a twitter stream explaining a day in the life of Dr. Zach Whalen when he has to advise two students, Carah Counts and Alaina Sur, on their independent study. Jim Groom also makes an appearance as somewhat of devil’s advocate.

Here is the web version of the story. (Special thanks to Martha Burtis who helped me figure out how to post it online!)

And here is the screenshot version of it. (I recommend reading it from bottom to top)

 

 

 

Creation Process:
This idea came about because my roomie Elena South and I are actually doing an independent study with Dr. Whalen this semester and sometimes given our topic we are studying, we discuss very odd things. This twitter feed is an alternate reality version of some of our conversations taken to the extreme. However in real life Elena and I are not creepy stalkers, I promise!

The story was written by Elena and I on typewithme.com so we could edit it together in real time. Once we had the story, it was up to me to change the twitter feed using Firebug. Let me tell you, this took forever. For some reason I kept  accidentally screwing up the code when I tried to edit it in notepad++. There’s a lot of information I needed to change on this story in order for it to work and it definitely wasn’t easy. I ended up having over 40 saved html files as backups for everytime I would change stuff and save it. But, even thought it took a long time, I am really happy with the results.

Oh and if you click/type  the link in the tweet when Jim Groom talks about Carah’s Flickr feed it will take you to a real picture of a snake with it’s fangs out.

Special thanks to Martha Burtis’s great tutorial!

Visual Assignment: Normal to Extraordinary

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#2 Assignment for #ds106 is up:

Normal to Extraordinary:

Take a friend and turn him/her from a normal looking person to an extraordinary looking one. Put the shots side by side for comparison.

 

For my example I used two photos that I’ve taken of my suitemate Karen (she is a #ds106 superstar now, haha):

Creation Process:

Okay so I didn’t actually take these photos consecutively. I took the photo on the right first in a random photoshoot that happened with Karen and Elena( my suitemates) because we were bored. The crazy makeup, hair and wardrobe was done by Elena. Don’t quite remember why we decided to put crazy makeup on Karen, but we got some really good photos out of it! (I may post some of them up later, depends on when I have the time). I really like this photo even though she looks kind of sad and tragic (Karen isn’t the biggest fan because she thinks she looks too “clownish”.) I messed with the colors in photoshop then ran it through the Poladroid maker to get the final effect.

Then the photo on the left was from another photoshoot, this time taken from when it was flurrying/slushy outside. It was cold and we didn’t have a lot of time to take photos although Karen did have time to throw on some more glam clothes that what she was originally wearing. I enhanced the color a bit on this one, but the lighting outside was so good I didn’t have to do much.

I like both of these photos together because I think it expresses the idea of how with a little work (i.e. clothing, makeup, hair) someone can completely be transformed into someone else entirely. Side by side, obviously it’s the same girl in the photos, but in each photo she is a different character. This holds true with most of the other photos I’ve taken of Karen who has a great range of expressions. I like exploring the different personas people can have, which explains why I end up with photos like Karen’s or the Rainbow Brite set.

So thanks to Karen who let’s me create art for fun 🙂

 

The Many Faces of Karen:

 

Design Assignment: Nickname/Catchphrase Poster

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I just submitted my first assignment to DS106!

It’s a Nickname/Catchphrase poster: “Make a poster for any one of your friends using a catchphrase that is associated with them. Bonus points if you get them to look super badass!”

This is a poster for my suitemate Karen whose nickname on the UMW  Women’s rugby team is Karnage. I made this poster in honor of her awesome rugby skillz! (Although she currently can’t play since she broke her leg during a rugby game a month ago :/ )

 

Krn!

The Creation Process:

Last semester my suitemate  Elena and I were really bored one night and decided to do a crazy photoshoot with our other suitemate Karen (this happens a lot to Karen actually where we make her put on a ridiculously crazy outfit and I take photos). Then after the shoot, I was playing around with the photos in Photoshop and decided to add wings to make her look even cooler.

I decided to add a background to make Karen pop out of the photo because the original background was just a white wall. It looked rather plain just with the black and white and so I decided to make Karen her own poster complete with a catchphrase that makes her seem totally bad-ass.

This debuted as Karen’s profile pic for a while before she decided to change it back to something slightly more professional.

Webstory: Taking over Twitter

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So I decided for my firebug webstory project that I am going to take over twitter. I don’t want to reveal too much of the story, but basically it’s going to involve a day in Dr. Zach Whalen’s life when he has to advise two people, “Alaina and Carah”, for their independent study. For those of you who don’t know him, Dr. Whalen is a professor of New Media studies in the English Dept at UMW.

Jim Groom is also going to be involved in this story as well.

Already have written the script with the help of my roommate Elena and so for tonight all I got to do is put it in action! I’m excited. 😀

Rainbow Brite Color Shoots

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I’m on a quest. That’s right, a quest.

Ever since Daily Shoot decided to make the shoot of the day the color yellow, I’ve decided to make Megan Mc my Rainbow Brite Model child.

What does this mean exactly? Well, I want to re-imagine Rainbow Brite as Megan and take photos of her and all her Color Kids Friends.

So far I’ve gotten Yellow (although no Yellow sidekick so I might have to re-do that one unless I count the Croc in the photo as her sidekick), Red and Green.

Now I’m on quest

 

 

Conclusion: Freedom’s 30 Minute Radio

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I feel that my previous post and Aliyah’s post about our radio show covered a good deal about our project, but I just wanted to do a few wrap up points:

1) Audio projects are very much solitary work.

  • Obviously we recorded the voices together and discussed what kind of sound effects to use. But then when it came down to it, we each took an equal amount of audio and spent hours on it ALONE, constantly listening to the same clips of audio over and over again until we got it to sound perfect.
  • Part of why I like the Daily Shoot assignments so much is that I can use my friends in them. This way, not only am I creating awesome art, but I get to hang out with my friends in the meantime. With Audacity, I turned into a little hermit hiding out in my bathroom because it was the quietest place in my apartment. I don’t really enjoy turning into a total hermit. It’s just not healthy.  O.o

2) Aliyah is a kickass partner!

  • Seriously, this girl was always ready to work on the assignment and do what it took to get it to be as awesome as it is. She has a very relaxed and calm personality, so even during the stressful times she was like “We can get our stuff done!” I can see how this project would have been a total pain in the ass if you had a crappy partner/ group, so I feel lucky  that we ended up together. 😀

3) Audio projects are super intense

  • More power to the people who do audio things for a living. It is crazy intense and I know that in the long run I wouldn’t have the patience or ear to stick with it.  Major Props to all the people who do the sound mixing on TV shows and movies, like these people who won Oscars for their work.

Overall, a really great experience, but you would have to pay me a lot of money to do this again!

And now my radio show for those of you too lazy to click to Aliyah’s blog post:

[audio:https://imlikesoblonde.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ds106showfinal_freedom.mp3|titles=ds106showfinal_freedom]