Scanography

Recently, I discovered the, seemingly little-known, art of scanography. It basically involves scanning your face. In fact, I don't even think you need to scan your face but I'm not sure, I don't really know the specifics of it yet.

Anyway, I've only been trying it out for two days and I'm already addicted to it. I find myself discovering new ways of photography and things related to photography recently and becoming a little bit obsessed with them. First it was freelensing and now this. Who knows what next?

This is perhaps my favourite scanography shot I've taken(?) so far:

And now I have the topic question for my new art project at college, I can actually incorporate scanography into it. The topic is 'collections of everyday objects', which is very broad, I know. But, well, they always are in art. That's one of the best (and sometimes worst) things about it.

Here are a few other shots I took to link to my art project:

And I'm hoping for plenty more great shots to come. Better shots, fingers crossed.

Instant Inspiration

So, I know that people find inspiration from all kinds of weird and wonderful things, everything from books and films to a specific location or pet. But there are certain things that spark people's imaginations every time when it comes to photography. Or so I believe. It may not be the case, but there a some things that reoccur in people's photos, ideas that people are constantly re-working, re-using and re-imagining.

For me it's sunsets. I have 30 photos of sunrises and sunsets on flickr and mainly it's because they're easy to access and so many people just let life go by and don't pay the slightest bit of attention to the beauty they can see every day. This offends me.

The possibility of seeing the sun set is the one thing I most look forward to after finishing college (that, and sleeping) and I find it insulting that people can just wander idly by and not even notice the magnificence of nature. And I'm sure other people feel this way about whatever inspires them the most.

Sorry, this post sounds really angry and I don't mean it to. I'm just passionate about what I'm talking about.

On a lighter note, here is yesterday's sunset:

Photo Editing

This is regarding the editing for this photo (because someone on Flickr asked):

Okay. First I took the photo of me 'sleeping' using the self-timer.

The camera needs to be in exactly the same place for all of the photos. It would be extremely helpful if you owned a tripod. I do not. I had to balance my camera on an easel.

Then I sat on a stool on top of my bed and took this part of the photo:

Then stood up and took the rest of them.

I use a free editing software called GIMP to edit my photos. I put the 'sleeping' photo as my base image. Then I put the first of the other images of me on top of it. Then I used the eraser tool at 100% opacity to erase the stool and my legs and most of the background so you can see the base image of me as well. Once I'd done that and the photos looked like just one photo, I used the eraser tool again, but at about 50% opacity and went over the top photo of me.

After that you can anchor the layer down and do the same with each of the photos separately.

After that, I used the equalise tool to adjust the colours and brightness and things.

Taa-daah!

Inspiration vs. A Good Photo

About 3 months ago I got my first DSLR (he's called Gregory) and have been using him almost every day since then. But I was wondering if there's a strong positive correlation (yeah, I do A-level Statistics) between a photographer's inspiration and the quality of the resulting photo.

Up until recently I didn't get inspired by anything, I just took photos of things I thought looked nice, and my photos were consistently average. Case in point:

But now I've actually got inspiration (which seemed to be the moment I started doing self portraits), my photos appear to be consistently below average. Such as:

However, when I look at other people's photos on Flickr, the photos that were inspired by something or someone- whether that be a friend, a film, a song or just a line of text- tend to be the most interesting shots of theirs.

Is there just a fault in brain that's constantly giving me bad ideas? Or am I just terrible at executing ideas- so bad that I actually execute them? I think I may be the murderer of good ideas.