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:

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.

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!