Both my father-in-law and boss bought this radio controlled, inexpensive, helicopter at about the same time. It flies really well and its a ton of fun. If this Amazon.com link doesn’t work, do your own search as the same copter is offered by more than one seller and the prices/colors/shipping varies a little.
Carey & I like to drive down to Marysville/Yuba City early Saturday mornings for shopping trips. The drive is extremely pretty and takes us from the foothills down to the valley. Along the way, one view we like is a house by the side of the road that has an old Silo on the property. Behind the house is open-space I think it’s some kind of wild-life refuge:
One morning, I ran down there to shoot a photograph. It is actually a panorama (a combination of three images “glued together using Photoshop. My bicycling buddy Ed, who owns “Grass Valley Sign Company” blew up the sign to about 3′x5′ and mounted it on some backing so that it can be displayed on a wall. The detail & colors are amazing (this image simply does not do it justice). Click here for the full-size image.
Here’s the poster. I got a “C” on it because the teacher didn’t like the design. I updated the design, as she made one good point, but I like it. So here goes:
Enjoy!
The assignment was to create a stamp for an “Ordinary Hero”, which meant to create a stamp about somebody you know. I chose my dad:
This is a composite of two photographs. The picture of my Dad was lifted from a 1966 article from the New York Times announcing his promotion to Vice President of Alexander Wolf, & Co. which the Times called a “real estate concern”. The company not, my Dad was the “concern”. 
The background is a picture that I snapped in May, 2006 of the apartment building where Dad grew up on 150th Street in Manhattan. You can tell that I straightened, cropped, and applied a Sepia finish to the building before including it in the stamp. We had to create the “perforations” around the picture so we had to search around the internet for a tutorial on how to do that most of them are junk, but I finally found one that helped. Like most of Photoshop, it’s easy once you know the secret of how to do it (which is nearly impossible to learn by exploring the program itself).
Here is a scan of the NY Times article:
We also had to create a poster advertising the stamp. I’ll put that up in the next post.
We were supposed to build a montage of several images imitating either this artist whom I never heard of or this one whom I knew just as much about. Here’s my submission: Click on it to enlarge:
According to father-inlaw John (aka The Avocado King), this is not Santa Barbara Airport. Here’s the quote:
“Not SBA. The hanger’s are too close together”
He’s been flying out of the airport for 60 years so my guess is he would know. Guess it’s time to Google to see who figured it out.
Watched this Verizon commercial last night and that airport sure looks like Goleta to me. As Ashe likes to say in almost every email he sends, click on the image to see full size version.
Our assignment was to find an old photograph, restore it and colorize it a touch. We could use our own image or find one we like on the Library Of Congress Online Catalog. I found one a photograph I like there
And here is what I turned in:
You are supposed to combine two images. Both are from the Reno Air Races 2010. The planes on top are the same ones on the ground in the bottom. I flipped them upside down because it I though looks more dramatic.
