Fungible Convictions

This past week was a complete wash at work, what with one supervisor away, the other supervisor just having left MIT, and everyone else still recovering from the Future of News and Civic Media conference that we hosted the week before. But a week like that was needed, desperately. And it leads, after a few more days, into my first real vacation since my trip to Ireland in the spring of 2007.

With Lindsay and me trying to save for a house, vacations for the foreseeable future will always be to Easthampton, NY, where her family has a lovingly unpretentious second home. We’ve been looking forward to it for months. We’ll take Gatsby, we’ll see Lindsay’s parents, and we’ll even get to see a couple of friends on the last weekend there (starting their own well-deserved vacation as we end ours). We’ll sleep a lot. We’ll walk Gatsby a lot. We’ll barbecue. It’ll be great.

Meanwhile, mostly Gatsby-centric, the latest photos to share…

Gatsby’s was in her shedding season a couple weeks ago. This was the result, after having swept the week before:

Around the same time, my mom was in town, meeting Gatsby for the first time:

Lindsay’s friend/coworker Courtney just got a Boston Terrier/Pug mix named Cagney, who visited us today and was tough keep still:

Not that Gatsby is any better:

And mysteriously, despite loving to chase squirrels, we bought Gats a stuffed squirrel at Petsmart this afternoon, and this is how we found them soon after:

Lastly, completely unrelated but just because I’m proud of it, a Photoshop/Illustrator job I did showing MIT’s most famous building partially underwater:

(Click photo to see it without blog’s frame style)

Digital photograph made to look hand-developed from film

Film grain effect on photo = slight. 2 grain; 0 highlight area; 1 intensity

Black rectangle one layer down, used for border

Paper = one shade darker than white. 0.2% noise, gaussian, monocromatic

Drop shadow = 40% opacity; 1px distance; 25% spread; 4px size

Photo itself and frame both rotated -0.2% and set off-center

Tested roughing up the edges of the paper but was a little distracting

It’s also incredibly easy to swap in other photos:

It’s been relatively quiet at work this week (with the exception of helping put together two conferences). But one of the things that seeps into your bones at MIT is an impatience with quiet.

As I’ve mentioned before, something I need to work on is my proficiency with design programs, so often my way of dealing with that impatience is to do Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials.

Here are two I conducted today and yesterday.

Disco Ball

Papercraft Text Effect

To keep things in line with work, I almost always use the letters “CMS” for Comparative Media Studies when a logo is involved. Even in sillier examples like this.

Though I can’t speak for the students taking advantage of the Independent Activities Period at MIT, it’s been a quiet week for everyone in the Comparative Media Studies department.

When things are slow, I turn to two profoundly dorky pastimes: picking out books from the library during lunch and working through programming or design tutorials.

These week I did both, and in one case they overlapped.

My all-time favorite musician is jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, so I stopped by the MIT music library (conveniently down the stairs from my office) and picked up the Thelonious Monk Reader, a well-curated collection of writings by critics, fans, and contemporaries. The book helped me track down some early photos I’d never seen of him:

So for the first tutorial, I used that photo in Photoshop to try some pop art stuff (warning that I’m not good with colors):

Then I practiced some of those same skills—namely, using the pen tool A LOT–some more. I took the Facebook profile picture of my wife’s friend Annemarie, who’s a huge Yankees fan, such a big fan that she work a Yankees jersey at a wedding reception, and put her in left field of Fenway Park with a Red Sox hat on (the hat was originally a Buffalo Bills hat):

It was fun to play with the texture of the Sox logo for that one, though you can see I had trouble with the cloning tool while trying to clean up the gray part of her hat—so now it looks like she was beat up and has a lump on the side of her forehead.

When I try tutorials, though the skills are good for work, I usually try to do something explicitly that can help my office too. So I attempted a “slow shutter effect” tutorial that used my office’s acronym. This came out good but showed why I need to bring my drawing tablet into the office because using the pen tool for lettering looks pretty rough:

Lastly there’s the glowing light painting effect, achieved by using the pen tool to outline a figure and then using a blurred stroke to make that outline glow. For this one I outlined the image of my wife in a moose hat. You heard me. Then I made it glow and placed it in a darkened photo of a river in Juneau. I also added some smoke:

And that about covers my slow day!