Scalzi for SFWA in 2007!

I couldn’t resist joining in on all the fun, helping to promote Mr. Scalzi’s write-in bid to become the SFWA president. My apologize to Grant Wood for bastardizing his painting but it made for a good joke (I hope). This poster was created entirely in GIMP and uses a Creative Commons licensed picture of Mr. Scalzi that I found on Flickr.

I should probably give you a bit of background, as not all of my readers necessarily read Mr. Scalzi’s blog on a daily basis. On 15 March 2007, Mr. Scalzi received his ballot for this years SFWA elections. After looking it over, he decided he had some problems with it and posted a note on his blog that he was now a write-in candidate. The next day he posted some promotional images/posters made for him by various fans. A couple of days passed and still he kept talking about this whole SFWA election. Naturally, this kept the fans pouring in with comments and additional images. Finally I could resist the siren’s lure no more and created the image you see here.

Update: For the closest thing to an explanation of the bacon on a cat thing, you’ll need to read this post over at the Whatever.

Sam Javanrouh runs one of the best photography sites that I visit, but unfortunately of late I’ve not had the time to look at his site. This evening I decided to make some time and I’m so glad that I did. While browsing through the archives, I ran across a link to a color correction guide that details exactly how Sam cleans up his images for presentation on the web. Very, very nice. It looks extremely helpful for Photoshop users…. Now I just need to see if I can replicate his techniques in GIMP.

A four day weekend goes by and I posted nothing. Nothing I tell you! Why? Because I was tired/sick/busy. Is that a real excuse? Not really. Many bloggers post under those circumstances. Bah. You want an update? Well, here’s one…
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Dusty road part 2 (Altered)

I’ve created a new section in the gallery, called Altered. This is where I’ll be putting any photos that I’ve manipulated beyond shrinking and labeling. For example, the dusty road picture attached to this post is one that I had been thinking needed some sort of work to make it pop (for lack of a better word). So I fired up GiMP and did the roughly1 following:

  • Copied the entire image into a new file, to preserve the original.
  • Created two layers in the image containing the entire image.
  • Selected the bottom layer and applied a 5px Gausian blur.
  • Selected the top layer and set it the mode to multiply.
  • Flatten the image to save it as a JPG.
  • Resize and label.

I really like this altered version vs the original one. Also in currently the altered gallery is a picture I took of some clouds and that tonight I ran through the same basic steps to enhance it. This version of the image also really pops! 🙂
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Throwing my wicked GiMP skills out to AWelkin.

What Would Super Kuma-san Do?

For those of you obsessed with checking this site frequently; you might have noticed that the image has been changed. That’s because the original… well, it sucked serious dingo-kidneys. When I got home from work; I completely redid the image and now I’m much happier with it. If somebody absolutely insists on it; I might be persuaded to put the original back online but that might require some bribery. *grin*