Photo Fridays

Postcards from Mars

Photo Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and University of Arizona

Photo Fridays

I'm tired of cold and snow and ice.

Photo Fridays

Winter Scene

Millennium Park, Chicago, IL

Photo Fridays

Gears under Chicago Avenue Bridge

Chicago, IL

The Chicago River has 38 movable bridges of several different types, one of which is a bascule bridge. From Wikipedia: "A bascule bridge is a moveable bridge with a counterweight that continuously balances the span, or "leaf," throughout the entire upward swing in providing clearance for boat traffic." The gears are part of the mechanism used to give controlled movement once the span starts swinging up or down. Pretty impressive!

Photo Friday

December 12th is National Poinsettia Day

Joel Roberts Poinsett was the first United States Ambassador to Mexico being appointed by President John Quincy Adams in the 1820's. At the time of his appointment, Mexico was involved in a civil war. Because of his interest in botany he introduced the American elm into Mexico. During his stay in Mexico he wandered the countryside looking for new plant species. In 1828 he found a beautiful shrub with large red flowers growing next to a road. He took cuttings from the plant and brought them back to his greenhouse in South Carolina. Even though Poinsett had an outstanding career as a United States Congressman and as an ambassador he will always be remembered for introducing the poinsettia into the United States.

The Poinsettia Pages
University of Illinois Extension

The Big Picture

The Boston Globe's online edition, boston.com, has a section called The Big Picture, which is found under the News tab and is a photo blog run by their web developer Alan Taylor. To paraphrase Mr. Taylor, inspiration for The Big Picture comes from the rich imagery found in such publications as the old Life Magazine and National Geographic and the stories those photo essays would underscore. Its intent is to highlight high-quality and amazing photos with a focus on current events.

Their recent photo essay is on space, courtesy of the Hubble Telescope. From Mr. Taylor:

As we head into the traditional western Holiday Season, I'd like to present this Hubble Space Telescope imagery Advent Calendar. Every day, for the next 25 days, a new photo will be revealed here from the amazing Hubble Space Telescope. As I take this chance to share these images of our amazing Universe with you, I wish for a Happy Holiday to all those who will celebrate, and for Peace on Earth to everyone.

Here's the view from December 5th along with a partial description:

"... the sharpest view ever taken of the Orion Nebula - a picture book of star formation with massive young stars that are shaping the nebula and pillars of dense gas that may be the homes of budding stars ..."

And if you want to see how the image fits into the universe, The Big Picture provides us with a link to Google Sky.

Bookmark The Big Picture to see some
amazing photos.

Photo Friday

Changing Weather

Chicago, Illinois
Watching the clouds build up over Lake Michigan

Photo Fridays

Biltmore Estate, Asheville, N.C.

Photo Fridays

Adaptive Reuse

Look closely at the railing -- bowling pins and billiard balls

Photo Fridays

Reflected Sunset

Chicago, IL

Photo Fridays

Biltmore Estate

Asheville, N.C.

Photo Fridays

Chicago Sunrise

hello world

Photo Fridays

Chicago Air & Water Show 2008

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings ...

High Flight
~ John Gillespie Magee, Jr

How We Create Photo Fridays

Digital Photography -- one of the many activities in the Fall Session

This activity is where you'll learn to create fabulous photos to post on MySpace, Facebook, online albums or even Photo Friday's feature on Tech Club's blog.

Volunteers and Alumni - interested in learning Photoshop? We welcome your participation.

Fall session starts on September 30th; call Cabrini Connections at 312-492-9614 to sign-up for Tech Club.

Photo Fridays

Ice Sculpture - Zoo Lights '07

here's some cool ice for a hot weekend

Why Adjustment Layers Rock!

Have a digital photo that you want to manipulate but don't want to destroy the original? You could accomplish this by making a copy of the original and working on that. Or, you can use Adjustment Layers in Photoshop.

Adjustment Layers allow you to apply various types of adjustments to the original photo sitting on a layer below your new Adjustment Layer without directly changing the original photo. It's kind of like looking at the world through a pair of sunglasses. The world takes on the hue of your sunglasses (green, brown, blue, gray) but the original world itself hasn't changed -- only how you're seeing it. Same thing with Adjustment Layers.

For example, let's take a photo

And add an Adjustment Layer of Hue/Saturation and set Saturation to -100 (remove all the color) -- I now have a black and white photo.

But I do miss the color and here's where I stepped away from Adjustment Layer and added in some other cool tricks. First I copied the original photo onto another layer *above* the Adjustment Layers. I then reduced the Opacity for that layer (made it see-through) so the black and white photo is also visible:


The color is subtle; maybe too subtle. So I again copied the original photo onto another layer, placed that layer above all other and deleted everything in the photo *except* the pink flowers:


I think I may have ended up close to the beginning, but it's a start. :) Here's my layer palette showing the different layers mentioned above:


Now, flowers may not be your thing, but this will give you a taste of the cool stuff we'll be doing with digital photos this fall.

Photo Fridays

Blue Ridge Mountains at Sunrise
(Asheville, North Carolina)

Fall Session Preview

Thinking of signing up for Tech Club? Well, here's a sneak peak at what we're offering for the Fall '08 Session:

Fall Session:

1. If you don't already know, learn how to use a digital camera and take a photo tour of the area


2. Learn what makes a good photograph; then, retake area photos using your new knowledge about photography


3. Digitally edit your photos. We'll get into:
   
   
   
   • Photoshop tools (magic wand, marquee, cloning tool, etc.) and how they're used
     
   
   
   • applying filters, such as distort, sketch, artistic, noise and seeing how they change your photo
     
   
   
   • using adjustments to experiment with color balance, brightness, contrast, etc.
   
   
   • changing your photo from color to black and white and how to create an old-fashioned brown-tinted photo


4. If time allows, we'll start learning about animation or we may save that for the spring session

Photo Fridays

Chicago Full Moon

It's All About the Tools

We started playing around with manipulating our digital photos via Photoshop. First stop, a discussion about the various tools at our disposal, what they do and how they can be used.

As you can see from the toolbar at the left, there's a lot of stuff to learn: magic wands to select areas; cloning tools that act just like a stamp; cropping, dodging, burning; adding text. Oh and then we also threw in a bit about layer and the history list. Phew! That's a lot, but this is just the start.

Next up will be taking some of the knowledge we just learned and see what we can do to one of our photos -- the good, the bad and yes, even the ugly. I have a feeling both CTL + Z and the history list will be our friends.