An Old Army-Trained Combat Photographer
I learned to take photographs in the Army using the then standard, Model 1912 Speed Graphic 4x5" camera. Yes that's right: 4x5 sheet-film holder, flash bulbs, separate rangefinder and viewfinders. My fist assignment was to shoot a series of "grip and grins" as a general pinned medals on a row of solders. Between sliding in the sheet film holder, replacing the flash bulb, removing the shutter, focusing the camera and then switching to the viewfinder to frame the shot, my pictures came out a little crooked. So the grizzled Chief Warrant officer who ran the Class 1 Photo Lab at Ft. Benning learned me real quick how to take level pictures. He issued me a sturdy, heavy, solid oak, 35-mm movie camera tripod to tote around with me in addition to the camera kit. I have not taken a crooked picture since. Not wanting to give any money to the loathsome Adobe Software Co, I have been using The GIMP, the Open Source pixel-base photo manipulation program to retouch product shots for clients, for personal fun, and to annoy all my friends.
In addition to the product shots in my recent portfolio, since we names our Chihuahua "Simba" in a PC effort to boost his self-esteem. So I got a publicity still from the Disney web site and retouched out all the pesky lettering and copyright notices and stuff.
In addition to the product shots in my recent portfolio, since we names our Chihuahua "Simba" in a PC effort to boost his self-esteem. So I got a publicity still from the Disney web site and retouched out all the pesky lettering and copyright notices and stuff.
Then I had my fiancee hold Simba (the dog) up in the same pose and GIMPed into the shot.
A young friend of mine said that this inexplicably popular girl at school was making her life miserable.
So I told her that if she could be a picture of this person (and everyone has a camera these days), I would turn the little witch into a TOON. then my little friend could plaster the TOON picture all over the web, ruin her enemy's, live and make her not popular.
With the aid of some gilt-edge templates I found for free on the web plus some impressive looking, but free typefaces I found on the web too, I now have a nice little sideline doing awards, diplomas, and certificates of appreciation. The nice thing about doing them in the free, Open Source, OpenOffice Writer word processor is that I can export them as PDFs for free, attach them to blast e-mails, and annoy all my friends with very little effort.
As usual for a Tim Burton movie, Danny Elfman's music was great, the special effects and makeup were astounding, and the story-line was stupid, stupid, stupid. Someone composited this cool graphic but I wanted it in the the 4:3 (1028x764 pixels) proportions so I could use it as a monitor wallpaper without "bars." I hate, bars, don't you?
Because the original could not be cropped to 4:3 proportions without loosing characters, I had to fake a bunch of stuff, like trees and aky and mushrooms and the Oriental rug (or is :"Asian Rug" more PC theses days?). And I thought a nice picture of author Lewis Carrol would be nicer than the Disney blurb.
"Why so serious?" Why indeed. I liked the lettering but not the picture. It was not easy, but I cut the lettering out of this shot and pasted it into the one below, which I liked better.
First I had to make this shot into 4:3 proportions, which involved faking some hair and some purple coat and tie.
