It’s Shark Season in bavaland

Late last week DS106 Internaut Ashley Peterson tweeted me a link to this image:

Image of man carring shark
Link to see full-size image and full article here.

This striking image from Mogadishu, Somalia—which is described as the “world’s most dangerous city” in the article—is kind of a culmination of all our talk and crazy links about sharks so far this semester. And once I saw this image, I really couldn’t get over it. I mean how crazy, a man walking through the streets with a dead shark over his shoulder really does frame just how dangerous this city is, even for sharks. The link to the image came out of a larger discussion the DS106 course has been having about photography more generally these last two weeks, and after this image was burned into my brain. And given this I figured it might be high time to ask the great Tom Woodward to work some of his Photoshop magic. So via twitter I put out this simple request:

@twoodwar http://bit.ly/9z7spg Can you photoshop me in this pls?

And never one to let my vanity get in the way, Tom complied:

Image of the bava carrying a shark
Image credit: Tom Woodward’s photoshopped “man_carrying_shark”

A nice way to accentuate just how much fun you can have with a little Photoshop action. Now teaching Photoshop gets prohibitive given how much it costs, and how little access we have to it on campus. But this class does need some basic image editing elements. Charlie Rocket did a fine job taking his audience through the process of learning Photoshop last semester, but he had Photoshop and made it his semester-long digital story, and perhaps owning it like he did is the best way to learn it. I should probably dedicate some time to learning Gimp, and spend time teaching that. But with Picnik, Aviary, and Photoshop Express, most of the basic are already there.

I mean it is increasingly becoming apparent that one can never be too young to both learn sophisticated image editing, and there is no better way than creating Jim Groom as Conan the Barbarian images as Tom Woodward’s six year old son John has. pretty cool to see a kid this young working his way through Photoshop so impressively. You go John!!!

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6 Responses to It’s Shark Season in bavaland

  1. Tom says:

    I crushed my class the other night with Photoshop. I just got too excited, showed too many things. Not pretty.

    I did better with John. It was funny that he wanted to put your face on Conan. I have no idea why. Between Photoshop and FinalCut he’ll be rolling by middle school. It’ll be fun to see what these boys can do if they continue to have some interest.

  2. Reverend says:

    Tom,

    Now let me ask you, do they all have Photoshop? Do you have a lab at Richmond? How do you do it. I’d love to know some of your assignments, cause I think that might be a lot of fun to get at just the basics. And the work John did is awesome, and not only cause I have bigger muscles than you in the piece of art šŸ˜‰

  3. Tom says:

    Yeah, it’s a lab with CS5 on all of the machines.

    I don’t know if I have much of a plan when I intro it. I mainly try to build an interest in learning it prior to that day by showing neat stuff that they should want to do. I then do a brief overview with a focus on trying to explain layers. That seems to be one of the big mind shifts for people.

    Like I said, I failed miserably this time. I was overcome by my own enthusiasm. I did have two experienced students helping out and that saved me to some extent.

  4. Whoa. I wonder how he killed that shark ,or if he killed it at all. Other than that, thats funny how the Photoshop made it looked like Grooms killed a shark! The Conan picture, though, is pretty cool, it actually looks like the picture is originally of Grooms! Kudos to John!

  5. Pingback: Digital Storytelling 106 Documentary | Ashley Lightburn

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