Globex Corporation Newsletter

I really like screwing with photos, mine or other people's, it doesn't matter to me. I worked with a guy who manipulated photos, had taken some classes in Photoshop and had acheived a pretty high level of expertise. One day he gave me a photo of my face on a picture of Keanu Reeves firiting a mini-gun in the movie The Matrix. He had captured the Matrix image from one of the digital VTR's at work (we worked in a facility that broadcast pay-per-view movies), the image of my face came from the internal network, everyone had their picture on the intranet and he had just grabbed it off of their and put it on the photo from the movie. He didn't really decide he wanted to make that photo with my face, it was completely serendipitous, my head was at the proper angle in my photo to look real on the photo of Keanu Reeves. It's actually a pretty cool picture, I have this sort of weird grin on my face as I'm blasting away with this high powered weapon. Again it was purely coincidental, but that photo really captured the attitude I had every day when I came into work.

There was one glaring (too me anyway) error in the photo. I could tell that the site on the mini-gun had been screwed with. John told me that yes, he had to do something with the site because my face was behind it so he had to mess with it. This was my first exposure to the critical thinking that you have to engage in to do photo manipulation.

As John brought in more photos I'd ask him how he did different things in each photo. I didn't have Photoshop on my computer at the time or even a digital camera. I found the process fascinating though and I learned a lot about how to acheive certain effects without being bogged down with the nuts and bolts of "push this button to do this."

I bought a ditgital camera in 2000 and it came with Photoshop LE. LE stands for "limited edition" meaning that it doesn't have all of the features of a full version of Photoshop. Hell, it was free. It sat on my computer for a while before I tried anything with it. The first manipulation I did was a photo of me near the Belmont Pier in Long Beach, CA. I was standing next to my bike with the pier and the ocean in the background. It was a nice photo but there was a very distracting metal hand rail behind me that was higher than my head. As I looked at the photo I thought of all of the things i had learned from John. Most of the area occupied by the hand rail had sky behind it. I simply matched the color of the sky and pained over the hand rail. The hand rail disappeared. Most of the manipulation was pretty straightforward. Today, that same job would take my about 15 minutes, but I poured over it for hours, figuring out how to make it look natural, I removed the shadows of the hand rail from the sidewalk, I cut and pasted a section of the ocean over a vertical section of the hand rail. I think I was proudedest of was the street light on the pier that was behind a portion of the hand rail. I painted sky over it, but realized that if you looked at the whole picture you could see that the lights on the pier were at regular intervals, removing one light detracted from the reality of the photo. Solution? I grabbed one of the other lights, pasted it into the proper position and resized it so it would look natural.

I learned a lot making that photo. My skills developed pretty rapidly after that, soon I started getting more adventurous. I started trying to make things that couldn't possibly be real, but tried to make them look real. My roommate at the time had three cats, so they became my subjects in a lot of cases. A photo of my neice riding a horse led to putting her on one of the cats. I added shadows to complete the illusion. There is a photo of me juggling the three cats, something I'd never be able to get away with in real life. It was a lot of fun.

I kept doing things like that for a long time, eventually moved back to South Dakota and got involved in music. I did some promotional stuff for the band I was in, did some images for the band's web site. I've told people that I enjoyed band promotion more than being in a band. Whle that's not entirely true, I really did like making flyers and table tents. I actually spent more on promotion for one gig than I got paid for playing.

Before the elections in 2004, the Rapid City Journal started Mt. Blogmore. Blogmore was designed to discuss things before the election. I chimed in from time to time. Before John Thune debated Tom Daschle on Meet the Press, Blogmore moderator Bill Harlan jokingly asked who was going to host the debate party. I used to get fights quite often on pay-per-view, it's always more fun if you invite lots of people. It's even better if you get them to chip in to defray the cost of the PPV purchase. It got me to thinking how a televised debate is a little like a boxing match. I thought it would be interesting to create "an old timey" boxing poster promoting the debate. It wasn't my best work ever, but I was just making it as a joke to send to Harlan. He posted it on Blogmore, he may have even asked my permission first....... Actually that's OK, as it started a side line.

I started submitting more and more stuff. Harlan posted a goodly amount of it, not all of it as not all of it was really that good. I had a couple of things rejected or changes were requested because of 'questionable' content. I can completely understand that as the Journal is a business. They can't go about just patently offending people since it could adversly effect business.

"Blind Orange" Julius is not a business. While I do care if I offend people, there is no ill financial result if I do. I started BOJ News Service a few months ago so I could have complete editorial control of what I do. I invited friend and fellow 'musician' "Twelve String" Andy along for the ride. If we offend someone, it's all on us, I'm a little more comfortable with that arrangement.

This move shouldn't be viewed as my dissatisfaction with the situation at Mt. Blogmore. I really like what they do there and still post there and send off the occasional image, particularly if they inspire me to do an image based on a topic. But most of my Photoshop work now is for BOJ News Service.

BOJ News Service topped 5000 hits late yesterday. I know that's not a huge number, but I'm a guy who does this kind of stuff because he likes doing it. I'd be doing it if nobody was able to see it, I have tons of stuff that only family and friends have seen. Most of my hits come from the state's fine political blogs. Yeah, most of the ones linking to me are left of center. That's the way it goes, I guess. I'd like to give special thanks to the following:

SD War College
SD Watch
Thune Watch

These three sites in particular have sent lots of traffic to BOJ News Service. There are plenty of other fine political blogs listed at BOJ News Service, check them out for a more free wheeling view on politics. And while I link them here already, Mt. Blogmore is still my favorite political blog, primarily because it's completely interactive. Oh yeah, they gave me my start.

BOJ