I Hope You All Know A Good Photography Major

Does anybody remember taking rolls of film to be developed at a photo hut in the mall? Or even your local Walmart or pharmacy?

Do you recall paying so much extra for double prints or trying to avoid the watchful stare of the developer, in your shared knowledge that he has already seen photos of your girlfriend naked? Even before you got to see how they came out?

I ask you this, because I realized I don't have photographs in my room. I've have art – pop art prints, a signed-and-framed movie poster, even a few original paintings. All my photos are in albums next to yearbooks and whatnot in my night stand. The last, maybe half of those are just printouts of facebook pics.

Pics. Not photos, but "pics." One or two might even have little neon hearts and dates on them, but a few are just cropped. All are on standard, bleached white printer paper.

I own photo paper, what the hell? I could make a real photograph out of any hi-res image on my drive. Why didn't I? Why don't I?

And I'm in a better predicament than most. Half of my friends don't own a printer. Several don't own a working computer. Several are without cell phones. In 2012.

And that may be the problem. It's 2012. I've seen this movie. We don't grab our digital photo frames. The kids grab their GameBoy 6GS-X's and John Cusack grabs the kids and throws them in his plane. Everything is connected, and everything is in the cloud. Hoarding physical media collections is considered an eccentricity, and I can see why. We have fewer things in physical space, just as we expand our presence out into cyberspace. There's an infinite world a half-dimension away from us, and we're just expanding laterally.

Except none of us have any faces of friends and family on our shelves.

So for everyone with adorable children on the horizon and fantastic adventures in your spyglasses, I encourage you to invest in a stack of high-gloss Kodak paper.

Either that, or make nice with your friends from high school who ended up buying $3000 Canon Rebels, because they're going to be the only ones who'll be able to hook you up with eight-by-tens or know what stop bath is.

A Classy Parisian Vacation on the Cheap

On Photoshop

I learned to use Adobe Photoshop by trying to seamlessly alter my driver's license.

Oh, I never used the thing. I'm not even sure I printed it. The point was, I learned how to Photoshop using some real low-grade, knock-off software and unrelenting obsession with individual pixels.

I moved on to making custom DVD and CD labels, making some amusing captions and altering family photos because some old flame asked for a picture of a dead relative and my grandmother and her sister were so insanely spiteful that they'd rather I remove a woman from a picture of a man who looked like that relative than get a real copy of  photo made.

And then, yeah, I had my own comic strip online and in the college newspaper for like three and a half years. That probably really helped too.

What do I use it for now? Mostly crap like this:

 

Yeah, that's the same guy Photoshopped over every other person at the party. To be honest, I'm not even sure which is the original at this point. I think it might be the one in red on the left. Or it could be the one with breasts. Either/or, really.

Anyway, that was my entry into last year's "Aaron Gold Photoshop Challenge." It did not win. Nor did my rendition of the Lincoln Monument using this same kid. Did I mention the point of the contest? No? Well, it was Photoshop Aaron Gold into a photo of something else. And it was a contest. I really feel like I didn't need to explain that after all.

But this year I will win.

I warmed up with some astrophysical Face of Mars layer work.

Not only did I get to work with layers and color adjustments, but this one refined my clone-tool/spot-healing work. I had to combine two pictures to get the hair right.

Next I did some Earth-based geography just to get the warp-tool down.

But this was all leading up to my masterpiece. My Sistine Chapel. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "The Creation of Aaron":

Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. I might go for a sculpture of David next, but I don't know. Maybe a Mona Lisa or try for an abstracted, Picasso piece. We'll see. All I know is I'm too much of a classicist to ever win this contest.

But I'm totally down with carving out the winner's skull to use as a paint can.