#4Life

Creations not speciic to a ds106 theme session.
Writing, reflections, how ds106 creations fit into my life.

Story Toaster – What Pops Up?

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Daily Create #1583

http://konarheim.tumblr.com/post/144124736065/you-never-know-what-story-will-pop-up

This is a fun one – I missed it the last time it came up. And with trying to get back into daily creates- it was one to try.

Even though the traditional sections have wound down and summer is still in question about any organized activity the #ds106 community is active and keeps going #4life. It doesn’t need semesters or direction, it bubbles from individual self direction of connection and collaboration – and story building. Always taking an idea and building on it to give back to the original creator or group. I kinda think of it a Amish Friendship Bread – once you have the starter it keeps growing!!

Stories of socks and hedgehogs and the dailies are circulating. @NanaLou is on the way back to the trailer in Bovine and calling out to Sophos, Ron, and the other family to begin to plan for the Burgeron106  summer retreat. @mdvfunes post that has many talking and remembering it is about the story and freedom – not pre-determined checklists. So this daily seemed just right to continue to build upon the threads.

I decided to do a GIF – well, just because I like doing GIFs, and toast popping up seemed it had to move. I used the selfie, a sock, and a hedgehog as the burnt images. You NEVER know what story will pop up in ds106! And you just jump in and continue a thread. If some of the original creators saw something different – they will jump back in and try to re-define and build in a different direction – that is how it grows and gets better and finds new life.

I finally made a mask layer in PS!!! Not sure how the heck I did it – but I did and it worked!!! YEAH!! Now to see if I can do it again. All I did was go to Layer – Make Mask and it joined two layers that stayed in place and allowed the toast to pop up between. I still need to figure out what and how…. For the burnt images I used B&W and decreased opacity. For the sock and hedgehog I used a filter of charcoal and colored pencil and then B&W followed by diminishing opacity. I also choose the animated toaster on purpose – to remind me this is fun work and creative work. It is meaningful and has purpose and definitely takes serious commitment – but it is to feed the soul and create connections – not build walls or boundaries – keep smiling! Keep creating! Keep your mind open to others ideas. And if something is not for you – just let it go by and get on on the next bus – it comes around again with new tires and plenty of open seats.

and of course once you start a daily and it gets longer you have to quit – but even with stopping and calling it done – I now see how I would want a frame between of no toast between slices and some lines to clean up…..always something to tweak!

So keep using the ds106 toaster! Stories pop up just like that!

 

Fairy Gardens to DS106 Hedgehog?

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Sam Checking out the Fairies. :-)

Sam checking out my Fairy bowl

It is Mother’s Day 2016 in the USA. When my girls were young they would send me off to the garden center to look at flowers and buy myself a hanging pot for the front entrance of the house. They knew I could take hours looking for that one hanging plant and enjoyed it.

Now that they are grown women and on their own – and one celebrating her own first Mother’s day this year – there really was no reason to go off on my own and savor the plants. I can do that on any given day now.

This year I decided to create some Fairy Garden pots for the deck. Last summer I had visions of creating video tours of Fairy Gardens for the Bovine County Fairy Tale Festival. I could see GIFs and tours along with story narration. Things turned out differently. I spent more time on Goldilocks and the 3 Bears as well as other activities and the Prisioner106 creations filled in as well. Looking back I am not sure how I got so much done!

Yippee!

The Fairy Garden theme stuck with me. I don’t think I will go crazy with it – but wanted just a touch. I had found some figurines at a garden store sale in March and have had them tucked away. With the weather warming, and plant sales a few more supplies. I also had sea shells and gravel, some old Christmas village ceramics that I don’t use anymore for the holiday and found objects. Today was the day to put it together. A beautiful sunny day to be on the deck and play.

It also gave me a chance of some new subject to work on with photography. I am now shooting RAW and developing in Light Room. I get totally confused by ISO, FStop, and shutter speed. Light Room is also a challenge as I try to decide photo organization. I am getting closer – but with LR, Photos, GooglePhotos, and external drives – downloads, camera shots, phone shots – Yikes! It is till a beast to tame.

The day and construction reminded me of having a doll house and creating the story  and scene in your head. Play is really a good thing. We should encourage our children to play and the adults too.

Found a nice place to sit

 

So enter my fairy world – Leave me your story of who they are and what they are doing….

and somehow ds106 enters again—-there is something with hedgehogs – not sure what the story is – but they show up now and again and cause some conversation…kinda like socks….you don’t need to know the original story – just jump on and weave the next chapter…. I see @mdvfunes drawing hedge hogs and @annycow tweeting about them and even @mburtis in this snuggle with one…has to be stories here somewhere!

so here are my hedgehogs – appropriately Mom and little one for today. 🙂

A rich day to be in the garden

See more pictures in my Flickr Album.

Logos TDC1581

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The daily create of checking out Maker Mark and creating a logo.

I didn’t know I needed a logo! Naming the blog was one thing – it took a while and so man choices. Trying to decide who I am – who I want to be – what I want others to see or remember. “Chamaeleon”, would have been better – I love change and diversity – but also am a collector.

First you had to name your company. I decided to use Digital Mustard. Until I went through the generator I hadn’t realized that the D or DM could be part of it. That didn’t play out well in my mind. D was not right. I looked for DM or just the full title.

Then there was color, font, uppercase, lowercase, squeeze, stretch, y-axis, x-axis and so on! Too many variables and all dependent on what order.

Others seemed to figure out how to come up with symbols – I may need to go back and try those out.

I settled on two variations. I like them both – but will need to live with each for a while to decide which is right – or go contrary to marketing advice and use both. 🙂

It also pushed me to figure out how to use my theme and still include an image in the header. I didn’t want to create an image that had the logo embedded – but use them independently. About 30 minutes of futzing and I got a reasonable presentation. My next image update will need to include new dimensions and strategy  which is a good thing.

Which logo do you like better?

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Cinemagraph Learning step 1

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Earlier this week

I wasn’t sure why they are called cinemagraph other than having the same observation as

In some ways it took me back to Oct2015 and trying to step up into the Gifitup challenge. Taking time to make a GIF art over just an animated reply or statement. I am of the camp that they all have a place and purpose. The snarky fast GIF can say more than a full blog post at times and a really great art GIF can mesmerize for hours.

So the next conversations were….

The #ds106 club jumped right in with suggestions, resources and encouragement.

So as I am waiting for the arrival of grand baby #1 – whom at this time seems to be teasing us with a later than expected arrival and some false starts and my body is sore from spring garden clean up – I decided to try and focus on the challenge. I have to admit – my focus ability is very short now – so this is going to take a few iterations. To keep it in scope and to keep building – I started with the inspiration. Well -Cristopher Benitah spent a year collecting photographs and is at more of a professional level than I am -but that should not be a show stopper.

Subject and planning are key here. Not wanting to get to invested or too far from home in a video shoot if “the call” comes,  I found his example of hands, sky and water.  I thought this would be a reasonable goal and would use the subject as a way to deconstruct the process and decide what I need to do. Hopefully this will then help make a video set up more productive when I get to that point. I have visions of baby cinemagraphs floating thru my brain. 🙂

Started with a photo of my husbands hands to be able to crop out back ground and make my still. I used his because it was a quick shoot instead of setting up a tripod and remote to take a shot of my own hands. Nice to have a model around at times.

Pulled into PS – standard stuff. Lasso and magic wand and eliminated the background. Adjusted the photo to B&W and saved it.

Searched for some video footage of rain that was labeled reusable. Wasn’t very obvious in what I found, but then used the GIFIt plugin for YouTube and captured 6 seconds. Imported into PS using tutorial suggested by @mdvfunes at http://photodoto.com/how-to-make-a-cinemagraph/

Brought it into PS via Open after setting my workspace as Motion.  Had to do some problem solving as directions were not for same version of PS and things are in different places…. Set frame rate at 12. Pasted the hands in as a layer and lowered opacity and then that gave me something and I am still not sure what it was or is: Not very long – should probably loop it for better effect…

http://45.media.tumblr.com/0575c3af763611dbb760dc87230ab213/tumblr_o63w5l1n2I1ucblsbo1_400.gif

From there I went back to what I know – imported video as frames. Used Timeline and created frame animation from layers, made sure all new layers visible in all layers was checked and pasted in the hands. I ended up with an 8mb GIF – so went back and got rid of 40 frames and got down to 9. Copied the 9, reversed them and added them to get 18 movement frames. Applied the hands frame but wasn’t able to take the opacity down -still trying to figure that one out. That would make it look like the hands were actually in the water. Scaled down the size to 500 pixels and got a gif at 863k.

http://konarheim.tumblr.com/post/143282501555/trying-for-cinemagraph-far-from-it-yet-need-to

What I wanted was the hands a little more transparent and then a lava lamp bubble horizontal in the palms moving as the rain was moving behind it.

A few tweets and @dogtrax was able to turn on a light bulb.

But for video within a video with a still as a mask and constant will still take many frames being merged – at least in my brain and my level of PS. So I am thinking there are actions and presets to do some of this to be explored to speed things up over merging layer one of vid 1 with layer 1 of vid 2 and so on….don’t cha think?

I may try the long and tedious way with a short clip to try it out when I want the video within video with still.

The real challenge and task ahead is starting with my video and capturing that….seems there is plenty to keep me busy on this.

I am also now thinking I could use the accidental video now as an import as one layer – so again more to think of in creating the parts to get to a whole. Hoping eventually to document more precisely start to finish  – that will help me – but let’s just call this the semi-focused keeping busy so I am not worrying about when “the call” will come for now.

Thanks @dogtrax, @mdvfunes, @twoodwar, and #ds106 club for the diversion and a reasonable challenge  to take on in staying creative each day and between larger projects. Doing the sprints of creating art objects is good practice and spurs the thoughts and visions of ways to use in other things.

#4life 🙂

 

 

Coming up for Air – Baby Here Soon!

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Geesh! Time flies when you are doing lots of different things.

I took on some consulting hours to help an organization write their technology plan and have ended up taking on the clean up of their website. A content management system is used which is great and distributes work. But for the last 3 years there have been many transitions and all of the check points fell off the map. The front end just look tired and had some dead ends, some loops and some things that were conflicting- not too bad, but only because there were no viewers using much of it. The back end – out of control and very tangled. Becuase of their host and set up  – there isn’t a staging or development area. You can not publish things – but it makes the clean up of the back end even more tedious and error prone. So the only way is jump off the cliff and try to fly! So after a week of 12-16 hour days – I was ready for some sleep and a break.

First came my Happy Cow! A local paint and wine studio had a Friday afternoon session- so I signed up. When I got there I found out I was the only one and they didn’t cancel – so it would be me and Fred the instructor. Fred and I painted away and even finished 90 minutes sooner than was scheduled. I could have gone a little more leisurely – but it worked out fine.

Happy Cow!

I would like to do another one and work on a different type of eye, plus make the background a little brighter for some contrast.

Saturday morning – well started with some of the web grunt work – but just was not ready for it. My first grandchild’s due date is within this week- so I decided I needed to get the “Waiting” video done before arrival. Several months ago this had a lot of grand visions in my head – but I couldn’t get all I wanted. The plus was a weekly shot of Mom that shows the journey. We don’t know who the little person is – that will be a surprise for all until entry into the world. So excited!

Here is the video. I do want to get to more than just music and get more audio and narration in the family stories – but that is still evolving. Until then it is trying to find music that goes with the idea of the video. I have also begun to get better at keeping them to under 5 min. Any longer than that – no one wants to watch and they just go on. These are being placed in a flip book so each video created is separate and a reader can view, skip of view multiple times within the  book.

So – my #ds106 #4life friends – I am still creating – still learning from you, still growing my skills. And still tracking what you are all doing. One of you will soon have something that I won’t be able to pass up being a part of even if there are websites to clean up.

 

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