After review slide shows on slideshare.net, I had to choose The Death of the Newspaper since it hits close to home for me. It was informational (nailed the problem from what I have witnessed) and the slides had a nice flow from one to the next. In terms of the Elements of Art used, the introduction pages was eye catching using texture. The next pages are appealing composition-wise, which I would categorize as shape (I know it's a stretch) and the use of text would be line. Not much color or tonal use.

http://www.slideshare.net/joannageary/the-death-of-newspapers-finding-business-models-in-a-perfect-storm

Here is my link to the set of photos for the composition assignment. Photography is a skill I'm still trying to get a handle on, and I found it difficult to produce photos to my liking in a short period of time, so I dug out a couple of old ones and included those that I felt would represent some of the composition examples.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/40122497@N02/sets/72157621416584450/

The photo of Hogback is an example of framing, with the pine tree and building framing the view.
The road photo is an example of thirds with the subject road leading into the center.
The Strolling photo is an embedded photo of a circle with the exposed flesh of the two faces and the chest.
The fisherman photo is of saturated color. The original photo is taller with more of the sky exposed to balance more. Didn't realize flickr would crop it that way.
Fencing is shooting angles, unusual view.
I used GIMP for cropping these photos.

July 14, 2009 update

Update to my earlier post as I reread my assignment. I already had a flickr account so I added the three photos I posted earlier, placed them in a set under Photo manipulation in GIMP and edited them to be shared in Creative Commons with attribution. I used Greenshot to take a picture of the pages with the photos preferences set to be share with Creative Commons.

July 14, 2009

Creative Commons, a cooperative collection of art media of many forms is a way to share your art while maintaining some control over its use, depending upon the FREE license you choose. I love this. As this site grows and expands it will become as indispensable a tool as google or dictionary.com
For my open source photo manipulation I chose Gimp because it was the one program I hadn't yet played with and was wondering about it. It has a lot of similar features to Photoshop, such as the stamp to add more of scene to a photo such as more grass where there is mud, blue sky instead of a cloud.
In the middlle is my photo of an up and coming hosta garden in my front yard. In the bottom photo I chose the filter to convert it to look like an oil painting. How cool is that?
In the top photo I used the stamp that I referred to before in an attempt to stamp in some green to obliterate the over exposed sunshine in the photo.
I couldn't find find any options to change contrast or brightness or anything similar, so I guess I'll stick with Photoshop, but this is a great option for businesses on a tight budget that need a photo editing program.

July 5, 2009

My assignment was to for the program dia - a free, downloaded program for the purpose of creating diagrams. I was rather impressed with its capabilities because it had a lot of flexibility with changing sizes, shapes and positions to tweak your graphics to look just as you would like them to. There were a lot of preloaded shapes to use, plus tools to create your own. I liked that there were many editing options, and it was pretty clear what was what.
I didn't find any freestyle drawing options though, so there were some limitations there.I also had a little problem getting the text to assign the right size to the text I was working with, perhaps with practice.
I could see this program useful to draw out a demonstration for instance:



http://www.screentoaster.com/watch/stVU9US0BIR11ZSF9VX19ZUVdR/dia_tutorial
I created this screen cast to show how the program functions. I had to use subtitles because it appears as though my microphone does not function.

July 4, 2009

Flickr is free webware used to upload photos to a website as an easy way to share your photos. It has tools to help organize the photos by placing them in sets or batches, and an editing tool to rename the photos as another way to help organize them. With a good naming system it would be quite easy to search for a particular photo. There is a group option, and by joining one, one can view photos by people that share the same interests. There is map where one can pin photos to a location on the map, and I could see it used by a traveler to keep family and friends posted about their adventures, a modern day post card so to speak.
The only draw back here is a 100 mg limit, and with many photos taking 1 to 2 mg, that limit would be reached quickly. I found uploading images a little slow, but I could do it in the background as I opened another browser window to work from. I also found links to order prints for a price which is apparently how flickr can offer this as a free service.
Learned a lesson here when posting images - post the first image you want to be seen last! These here are backwards in order, but here we go - The bottom image is a screen shot of the flikr site where one initially goes to open an account. The next screen shot shows my personal site where I have already uploaded some of my photos, the third screen shot shows the options that are listed in the top menu for organizing your photos, and the last (top) screen shot shows how sets appear after being sorted into batches. Pretty cool. http://www.flickr.com/

June 29, 2009

I have been posting my information on the my site created in google http://sites.google.com/site/cicelyeastmansportfolio/
and I am quite excited about the potential for really getting my information formatted in a neat and orderly way for prospective employers. I'm also mulling over ideas for what other uses google sites could be used for, family site, hobby site, the possibilities are endless.