Learn Something New

Day 28: I cannot recall when I heard this piece of advice, but it was a very long time ago and I have sought to live by it ever since. Perhaps it's because my maternal grandmother was a schoolteacher, and instilled in me a desire to inquire into the whys and wherefores of many subjects. "Knowledge," she would say, "is the most valuable thing you can have."

The last ten days have brought me to greater manipulative skills as far as post-processing of photos is concerned. Not only did I learn how to create a "tiny planet" with my PaintShop Pro photo editing suite, I also had a breakthrough with regard to adding curved text to an image. The manual which came with the program was sorely lacking in instructive material for the process, so I resorted to an on-line source which explained how to effect curved text using a much later version of the program. Substantial trial and error and many notes-to-self on a scratch pad finally brought me to a repeatable set of directions for text which followed a circular path. However, I was not content. I wanted to be able to add upright text to the lower portion of the image, as opposed to letters which went upside-down as they marched around the rim of the circle. I was less successful in finding details on line, but having accomplished the first part gave me some clues for achieving my goal.

As you might guess from the photo above, all other projects have been in suspension as I sought to master this skill. Now, if you'll excuse me, I really need to tend to my knitting!

Novelty Shots

Day 20: You've seen them...photos made with the "Tiny Planet" app. You may have even made a few with your phone if it has the capability. Mine doesn't. It makes phone calls and it takes pictures, but it stops short of allowing me to download them onto my computer. I don't care. I have a camera for that. But occasionally, some novelty processing gimmick comes along and piques my interest, and "Tiny Planet" fell into that category. I had an idea how I could effect the same thing using PaintShopPro, but could never quite get it right and gave up trying.

Recently, an internet friend posted detailed instructions for how to make your own "Tiny Planet," and I discovered that I'd been missing one crucial step: resizing the image to a square without cropping it, i.e., changing the aspect ratio and squeezing its dimensions so that trees and mountains were very tall and skinny. I tested it out on a few single frames and then decided I was ready for the Big Time.

Although it's not a requirement, this process is most effective if you can have sky in every shot of a panorama. That's not an easy thing to achieve when you live in a mountainous area because you're nearly always facing a hill in at least one direction when you live among valleys. I decided my best chance at getting a border of sky was to go over to the east end of Riffe Lake in the hopes that Dog Mountain wouldn't be too tall. I mounted the camera on a tripod, and after checking to be sure the horizon was level in all directions, I took a panorama of 19 images in order to get the full scene. At home, these images were stitched together and cropped slightly at the top (I got too much sky!), and then I was ready to create my "Riffe World."

Taking the long, skinny panorama, I resized it to a perfect square, then flipped it top to bottom. The next step was to apply a Polar Coordinates filter, "rectangle to polar" (not "polar to rectangle"). Bingo! Riffe World sprang into existence, mountains all around and one tall cottonwood standing like a spire. Because my panorama was a full 360 degrees, no additional trimming up of the seam was required. I finished the image off by framing it with four repeats of the panorama laid out like a log-cabin quilt.

Now ask me what earthly good this is, and I'll answer, "Probably none." It's just a novelty shot...fun to do, but not worth buying a fancy phone to accomplish.