Honor the Famous with Breakfast

Friend of mine recently commented that the school cafeteria offered Green Eggs and Ham in honor of Dr. Suess's birthday. She was grossed out. I got to thinking it could have been worse, they could have been honoring H.R. Giger, the guy who designed the creepy monster for Alien. My imagination took over and the following four breakfast dishes flowed out of me before I could stop.

There may be a lesson in here somewhere....just not sure where?

(3/4/2010)

Update:  Had a friend ask, "What about Warhol?"  So one more breakfast dish.

[Images all mashed up from bits and pieces of other pictures. Use them as you will]

Worth 1000

Worth 1000 is a website where folks compete in photography and photo manipulation.  I haven't been here for a while, and it looks like they've redesigned the site.  It also looks like they are more closely associated with the Aviary online tools. 

I often come here when I am trying to come up with ideas for my Multimedia classes.  I've adapted some of the contests I've seen here into classroom lessons.  I don't usually visit the site live during class, as there can be inappropriate for school content.  They've also added a multimedia section that I don't remember seeing before that includes other media such as sound.  Use your judgment on using in the classroom based on the level of your students.


Here is a recent illustration contest: Literary Scenes - Worth1000 Contests.  The scene above was taken from this slide show and is called "The House of Usher" by bajazet.

Most Recent Image

I usually use Google Image search when I am in a hurry to find a picture.  This post over at digital inspiration, The Problem with Google Image Search, basically says that Google isn't the best at bringing you the most recent photos out there.  Pictures of "Real Time Events".  He compared Google, Bing and Yahoo and Yahoo won in terms of bringing the most recent pictures.

I tried a couple of different searches on breaking news stories and got similar results. Interesting.  I don't often need the most recent picture on the web, but this might be handy to know on those times I do.

[Image: "Binoculars"; Uploaded on February 14, 2010 by tunnelarmr; http://www.flickr.com/photos/tunnelarmr/4356244277/ (CC: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic)

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Hybrid Images

My students have been spending lots of time looking at this picture of Einstein/Monroe. Up close, it looks like Einstein. Back up and it looks like Monroe.

Here is a short piece on Botjunkie that describes why this happens and how it's important in designing robots to see.

Also, here is a whole gallery of these images, including a few movies demonstrating the effect. I fear that if I show these to my students, they will be lost to me for hours.






[Image: Captured from Botjunkie: http://www.botjunkie.com/2009/05/01/albert-einstein-marylin-monroe-hybrid-may-help-robots-see-like-humans/

Images in the Public Domain

Stumbled on this site maintained by the Springfield Township Highschool while I was searching for some copyright free clip art.

It has links to a variety of different sources for images of all sorts. The links I checked all worked and I was able to find several that I'll be sending my students to check out.

It's worth bookmarking.





[Image:"Spinosaurus": WiseGorilla clip art: http://www.wisegorilla.com/images/dinosaurs/1-spinosaurus.GIF]

Picnik: Online photo editor

I was looking for an easy, convienient and free way for my students to do some simple photo editing. We have Photoshop available in my lab but it isn't loaded on every computer in the school. Not a lot of kids have it at home as it's pretty expensive. So, I went and looked at Adobe's online editing site thinking it might be an alternative. I liked it. It let you do more online than I expected but you have to create a login and register before you can get started. It didn't take much time but it was one extra step. Plus, one more login and password for my students to forget.

I remembered reading about a free online editing site and after a little searching, I found the one reviewed. It's called picnik and it doesn't require any pre-registration before getting started.

When you enter the site you click the Get Started Now! button. This will take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds depending on the speed of your connection. Only time it's taken longer to start it up for me is when I've been at home and running several programs at once, checking my mail and singing along to a Bob Dylan song. In my lab, with all my kids logging in at the same time, it took about 15 seconds.

You'll be prompted to sign in or create account. You can if you want or you if you just want to get in and edit a picture look a little further down the page and you'll see an Upload Photo button. Click this and you can then navigate to the photo you want to edit and upload it from your computer. It even has a little progress widget to show you that it is working. Once again, this has always taken less than a minute to finish. Once it's done you'll see your picture and this toolbar.




I uploaded an image of a lilly from my backyard.


















I clicked on the auto-fix tab to see how well the program could fix simple exposure flaws.


















Not a huge change but it did lighten the picture a bit. I've used this feature on other photos and have seen a big difference. Other times, I like the original better or I ignore this button and tweak the settings in Exposure. I shot a picture of that control bar so you could see your options.

























I picked the Crop tab next and got a nice surprise. The crop screen is divided into thirds. In my multimedia class this led to a good discussion of the Rule of Thirds. (Nice explanation here if your not familiar with this term.)

Before leaving the editing section, I wanted to test the red eye tool so I found a picture with a bad case of "demon eyes" and used the tool on that image. I felt the results were perfectly acceptable. Here is a close-up of before and after.







Next I went into the Create section of Picnik and here's a random selection of a few of the effects available applied to my lilly.





















Drop Shadow






















Focal Soften





















Heat Map





















Pencil Sketch























Polaroid Frame

I like this program. I've had kids in my building using this for a couple of weeks now and haven't had any complaints. It's easy to use. It's easy to upload and download your picture. It's free.

[Images: All pictures and graphics created by Al Gunn and he gives up all rights to these photos. Use them as you will.]

Royalty Free Photos

Discovered this source royalty free stock photos, Public Domain Pictures. After a quick look, I found several photos I thought I could use in presentations or for the blog. The authors only ask that you credit them.

Month or so ago I was searching for a free picture of a gravestone. This image from their collection would have met my needs perfectly. There is a wide variety of pictures. Weakest selection seems to be of people but still worth keeping the link. They have a nice selection of shots with a white background. Perfect for those Photoshop composites.



[Image: Petr Kratochvil; "Painting with light on cemetery"; Public Domain Pictures.net; http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=122]

World Images

WorldImages is a collection of over 60,000 pictures that are free to use for educational purposes. There are lots of photos of famous paintings, cities, monuments, wildlife and lots more. I spent a pleasant hour cruising through all the categories.

Worthwhile if you want to spice up those PowerPoints or give your students a nice site to find images for their own projects. There is a fair amount of classical art represented so check here if you need a jpeg of a famous painting for that lecture on Art History.


[Rubens, Peter. "Daniel in the Lions Den." World Images. California State University. 9 Oct 2007 .]