I saw the reprint/remakes of famous patents for sale on a site a while ago and then today I saw them on My Modern Met which resulted in the example below and a new #ds106 assignment. I remembered that Google lets you browse all kinds of patents and I spent a chunk of time searching for all sorts of patents. It is a fun place. It’s worth keeping in mind that even if there isn’t a thumbnail there are still images. You can also sort by age if you’re looking for older/newer material or look by inventor or company. My first goal was to find something interesting. I look at everything from lightbulbs to submarines but eventually settled on this machine gun. It reminded me of a video game it was so massive looking. That got me the image below. I put it in Photoshop and attempted to improve things using mainly brightness/contrast but wasn’t thrilled with the results. They didn’t look much different that what you see above. So I put it in Illustrator and ran a live trace with the black and white logo as the base setting and touched it up a bit. That improved things some. Not perfect in terms of the lettering but good enough for my purposes here. The next step was to add […]

I don’t want to be the “creepy guy with the camera” that D’Arcy mentions in his #ds106 talk but I do want to be able to capture certain images and interact with other humans in a variety of ways. If I can make myself keep trying these I’m hoping, eventually, I will have the banter and people skills down well enough to do this without it being awkward for both parties. Taz was chosen in part because he didn’t look like he’d be worried about me- camera or no. He’s pretty much the exact opposite of the first portrait. I learned his name but nothing else about him. I did not need to tell him not to smile. This experience was different than the first stranger photo but not any better in most ways. You’ll also notice that the pictures is out of focus as well but we’ll cross that bridge when I can focus more on the photography and less on the human interaction portion of things. I will say that this would make an interesting project to do in a school. You’d have to prep students properly but it would be interesting.