Updates and whatnot

So I was sitting here, writing an email to someone, then I looked and realized I wrote the same email back on the 2nd. I suppose when I have something to say, it sticks with me, even if I have already taken care of it. Maybe my brain is full.
Of course I'd write an email to someone, who else would I write to? A plant? A vegetable? Marek? Well, he does have an email account (yes, I know) and I haven't checked it since 2007... so yeah, not even going there.

I also wondered why I was so freaking tired, then it occurred to me, I just finished up 8 hours of classes in about a month and a half. That is a lot, almost, in fact, full time for summer, which is 9 hours. I'm finishing my last 3 hours this month, which will make it a grand total of 11 hours in about 2 and a half months. So yeah, I'm a bit braindead, just a smidge.

I'm glad I didn't hit send, I've gotten really good at not doing that, it saves me feeling like an idiot, and there's no real need to repeat myself if I've said things once. Plus yeah, it's the department of redundancy departmental department of departments. Need I say moar?

Marek is currently roosting on the scene of his last barf. Not pleasant yeah, but at least I was up way too late/early piddling around listening to Deep Purple stuff on Youtube because I'm lazy and didn't want to plug in my external hard drive... blerh.

Oh well. I think I've bantered on enough, yerrrf. Here are some of the montages I worked on for my summer digital imaging class. Basically I used a lot of layer masks, extended exposures within the camera and other stuff like that. During the process I also had a handy dandy staph infection in my ear, my computer got a major virus, and all I wanted to do was sit in front of the TV and watch Doctor Who or World Cup stuff. Luckily for me, I still prevailed and was able to pull off some pretty awesome work :D





The Pictorial Evidence:

































































I think they're pretty self-explanatory. I hit some creative roadblocks in the middle bit, where I basically doubted my entire idea and couldn't see the whole 'metal documentary' stuff as a collage. I looked at tarot cards and got some ideas there that really helped me out, and I'm very happy I took that detour. Talk about strange, it ended up being exactly what I wanted. Life definitely is a wheel... but not with chains made of steel.

XD

More new images

Ok, here are a few more new ones. I'm not too happy about how this inserts photos, but eh, I'll live.

Some of them might be a bit large, so click on them to get the full effect. This blog program cuts things off at a certain point and it's a bit of a pain... I'm thinking of switching to Wordpress, but I don't really have time at the moment to go through all of that.

First, this is another of the Marie Antoinette series, I'm pretty happy with it. I've been trying to figure out how to get the mottled effect for a while and I think I finally have my own version of something I really like.










After that, I decided to do some messing around on the scanner, just with very simple self-portraits. This is one I did a while after the usual 'smush your face into the glass' type stuff, and I really like the ghostlike effect.








This was the next one, which started out as a face scan, and I messed around with levels and color balance, then remembered some photos that I didn't use in Spring of 2009, so I put one to good use from an iced over pond at Loose Park.










This one is a closer section of the same image, but with different color balancing.









I'm pretty excited about this last one. It started off with a scan where I thought, why not do a rolling scan of my face, sort of like I've seen on some Discovery Channel show about mapping faces. I just rolled my head with the movement of the light bar, which was a lot trickier than I thought it would be, and it turned out insanely weird looking. I messed with the levels and color balance, did some overlapping of the same image in different opacities and blending methods, and then used a photo of a crazy tree trunk to get the wood effect... this kind of reminds me of something like mutant Treebeard, or even The Fountain... which was quite a weird movie...

And as always, thanks for looking, and please leave comments if you have any ideas or suggestions :)