Graveyard Gif

Tis the season for cemetery gifs. If you watch this gif long enough, you might just see the crypt keeper himself open the door... Just kidding, but that would be a great thing to tell someone you don't like when you forward them this gif.

Moto Perpetuo

What makes a great song? I suppose no one can say for sure, but I personally am a subscriber to the One Finger Theory. That is, if you play the melody with one finger, and it still sounds good, you've got a winner.

The melody above is a little excerpt from Bach. Borrowed by The Toys in 1965, this melody gave them their biggest pop single, hitting #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Why only #2? The #1 song in December of 1965 was "Yesterday", by The Beatles. I wonder how Bach feels about this?

Looking for more rock music? Check out www.fictionist.com. In addition to finding some great tunes, you might also some great gifs. Hidden gifs. It might take a little investigative-clicking to uncover them - I might even suggest "double-clicking" in a very obvious place for a gif to appear. Just a hint. Happy hunting.

P.S. Rest in peace Jerry Leiber. Just heard the news. What would rock be without you?

More Coney Island Gifs

Here's a couple shots I took at Coney Island the other week.



I post these tiny little gifs because anything bigger would result in massive file sizes that take forever to download. But if you've got a fast connection and want to be hard core and view this art at its intended size, here's a link to the hi-res versions: Cyclone Wonder Wheel

Also, speaking of hard core, check out the gifs on this page: http://www.cruzine.com/2011/01/31/animated-gifs/ I feel ashamed to call myself an artist.

Swing, Swing, Swing

It's been two months and too long since my last post. Life has been busy. But amidst all that unimportant stuff, like working so I have money to pay rent and buy food, has been that little lingering voice, that call of the wild reminding me that life is more than satisfying physical necessity. It's also about sequencing digital images loosely based in reality and setting them to a rhythm.


Hopefully more to come to soon.

Psychedelic Sky

The clouds were amazing yesterday. The whole sky looked like a Van Gogh painting. I've never seen anything like it.

As a photographer I am always a little envious of painters for the freedom they enjoy with the canvas. Photographers rely completely on actual objects and the physical world for the content of their images. I like shooting the sky, because it's the closest thing I can find to pure abstraction.

And yes, I did tweak the colors; it's not the apocalypse...yet.

Soup

I licked the spoon a few times while making this, and yes it tastes just as bad as you remember it.

At the Zoo

This monkey was on a mission: destroy rubber vine!



Giraffes in 3D. Good thing the smell does not come in 3D. Pow!


Shot this through one of the observation scopes on the side of the pond. Flamingos do this amazing dance where they all move in sync. Actually, it's better with music, so check out this video.

Shake Shack

Just a reminder that I am still taking submissions for the 3D world tour. So grab your camera and go out and create some stereographic images! Also, if you have friends outside the U.S.A. please forward them a link to this post. Thanks.


I took this one hand-held. Here's my technique:

1. Stand with your feet planted at shoulders width.
2. Put all of your weight on your left foot. Use the dot or cross-hairs in your viewfinder to focus on something small and specific (in this instance I placed the focusing dot on the center of the S in SHACK). Snap the picture.
3. Now carefully put all your weight on your right foot. Keep your cross-hairs, or focusing dot, on that same focal point (the S in this photo). Snap the picture.
4. Look at your camera and flip back and forth between your two shots. If you have done it correctly, you should see a 3D effect (the foreground and background will move, but the point you focused on should stay the same). It takes some practice to perfect the technique, but with a little care you can master it. Good thing digital film is cheap, eh? It is very difficult to line things up perfectly in camera. Usually I have to bring the files into Photoshop to line them up correctly.

Tips: The goal is to take two photos that are similar in every way, but taken about 4-6 inches apart. Carefully shifting your weight from one foot to the other works well, but here are a couple other techniques. Try holding your camera against a railing. This provides stability, insures no vertical movement, and allows you to move it exactly 4-6" horizontally. Also, try shooting two photos in rapid succession from the deck of a boat, or from the window of a moving car or train.

Man in the Mirror

This post is dedicated to my coworkers who let me walk around with a mustache all day and never said a word.

More Shadow Puppets

I like turtles. No really, I do.


Did you know you can place any gif on the internet into the body of your email? What better way to help emphasize your point than by illustrating it with an animated gif? It's easy. Click and drag your mouse over one of the gifs on this page to select it. Copy the selection (control + C). Then as you compose your email, paste the image anywhere in your text (control + V). That's it. This works with gmail and most other email clients.

Shadow Puppets

World Tour in 3D

Now calling for submissions for the World Tour in 3D!

I am looking for photographers all around the world to take pictures of iconic landmarks near their homes and turn them into 3D gifs. When I have enough submissions, I will post a new 3D gif everyday for a month. We'll get a stereoscopic glimpse across the globe.

How do I make a 3D gif? Any camera will work. You simply take two photos of the same scene: one from the perspective of your left eye, one from the perspective of your right eye. Then using Photoshop, or other image editing software, create a gif that toggles back and forth between the two images rapidly. If you've taken your photos carefully, you will see the illusion of three dimensional space. For more detailed instructions on creating 3D gifs click here.

Email your 3D gifs to 3DWorldTour@gmail.com
- 500 pixels on the longest side
- 450 kilobytes or smaller

Contact me if you have any questions. I can help you create a gif. Happy shooting!

Sad Morning: 3D World Tour is Postponed

Due to a shortage of entries, I am sad to announce that the 3D World Tour will be postponed. However, I have not given up hope! This dream will come true! Consequently, this will be my last post for the week as I devote time to requesting more 3D submissions. Please check back next week for new gifs and an update on the World Tour.

Weekend Special: Grand Canyon

People have been creating stereographic (3D) images for well over a hundred years. Here's a little gem I pulled from the Library of Congress and turned into a gif. Did you know that the LOC has thousands of photographs you can download digitally? Everything is in the public domain. Check it out: http://www.loc.gov/index.html It's a great reference if you're an artist or if you just like old stuff.

March is 3D month. Create your own 3D gif and email it to me and I'll post it on the blog. Click here for details.

The baby is keeping me up at night...

Guest Artist: Jake Wyatt

This post marks a milestone. I am proud to introduce our first guest artist... (cue trumpets) Jake Wyatt! Jake is a comic book fanatic, lover of literature, great storyteller, exceptional artist, and a true gentleman. He definitely ranks on my list of Top Ten People to Invite on a Road Trip. Someday we will all be watching his movies and yelling at our kids to put his comic books down and clean their rooms.


These gifs are snippets from a larger project yet to be unveiled. If you'd like to see more of Jake's work, visit his blog: http://jake-paperlife.blogspot.com/

Call for Entries: World Tour in 3D, Iconic Landmarks

Do you own a camera? Do you live somewhere? Could you borrow a camera? Could you go somewhere? If you can answer yes to two of these questions, you qualify to participate in the Wiggle Gif Around the World Event happening right here on The Radical Blog of Awesomeness in March 2011.

Recent innovations in gif technology now make it possible for anyone with a camera to capture a part of their world in 3D and post it on the internet for all to see. (hey that rhymes!) Here's how it works: you take your camera and find a place with a good foreground, middle-ground, and background. You take a photo and then lean slightly to one side and take another photo. You then make a gif that quickly toggles between these two photos. Voilà! You have just made a 3D image that anyone can view without the aid of glasses. Send me the gif, and I will post a new gif everyday in March.

So think of something iconic in your neck of the woods. A famous landmark, or something that makes your community unique. My goal is to have every continent represented. If you know someone in Antartica, please let me know!

Here's a link that describes in detail how to create a 3D wiggle gif. It does not require a fancy camera, just a little love and care. I will be taking entries between February 21 and March 1. Please email entries to 3DWorldTour@gmail.com. Gifs should be no larger than 300k. If you have trouble let me know. I can help or will even make the gif if you just email me the photos.

Peace

As always, please feel free to take these gifs and use them as you like, i.e. email, blog, website, etc.



This one's open to interpretation. I made it a month ago, and I'm still not exactly sure what it means. So let me know if you figure it out. Until then, have a gif day, and remember to be a peacemaker.

Tied to the tracks

Trains are very loud. If you have ever been talking on your cell phone or trying to have a conversation with someone near the tracks, you've probably been passed by this train.

Candy Hearts

This post is for all you lovers out there and especially to my sweetheart. I was going to make some bitter ones as well, but I ran out of time. Sorry, maybe next year. Until then, please enjoy these Valentine's Day gifs. They are dropped to white on the edges to facilitate delivery on white backgrounds.

Happy Valentine's Day! Boogie forever!

The Invisible Slide

When I was 4-years-old I had a dream...


In the dream I woke up in my bedroom. It was the middle of the night and everything was how it should be: the soft whirr of the air conditioning, the yellow light from the hallway filtering in through the not-quite-closed door, and the general sense that everyone else in the house was asleep. And that's when it hit me! Something was different. There was an invisible slide right there in the middle of my bedroom! I jumped out of bed, climbed the ladder to the top and slid down. It was magical because I could see right down to the carpet underneath me. Each time I went down the slide I landed a little closer to the wall until finally I slid right into the wall. Literally. I entered the wall and became part of its two-dimension universe. I couldn't turn my head. I could feel myself flattening. Time and space ceased to exist. My reality became a world of wallpaper, perpendicular lines of orange and blue on a tan background, extending out infinitely. And then I woke up.

Once again, please feel free to take these gifs and post them wherever you like. Check back next week for more gifs and for our first guest artist!

Never Ending Story

Stuck

I remember watching a commercial on TV when I was 4-years-old. A bunch of kids up in a tree house are looking at a map of a chocolate chip cookie like it's a minefield, strategically planning where they can take a bite and not eat a chocolate chip. Turns out that with Chips Ahoy, that's impossible.

This is the image that comes to mind every time I walk down the sidewalk in Brooklyn: a minefield. Do this many people chew gum? And does everyone just spit it out on the sidewalk? Gross!

Did somebody say pizza?

It's Friday night. You're sitting at home - alone and bored. "Where's the party?" you ask yourself incredulously. And that's when inspiration carries you away on its wings. You post this GIF to Facebook and reach for the phone. The pizza guy is on his way, and you know that when your friends see this bubbling mass of molten mozzarella, missing this party will not be an option.

jumping high five, freeze frame.

Books

I made this one the other night while watching a bio on Metallica. I write this only in the hope that some Metallica fans are going to get google-duped into visiting this page. If that's you, welcome! Next GIF on Monday. Have a great weekend.

And they spoke their first words...

Tribute

Hello friends.

Is anyone else a little stunned that this URL was still available?

Well, I've finally found my calling in life. I was born to be a GIF artist. Every day I'm going to post a new animated GIF to this site. Today I'm appropriating my imagery, but check back tomorrow for some 100% Grim Photos. I'd also love to have maybe a weekly GIF contest or feature some guest artists.

In launching this blog devoted to GIFs, I thought I'd start out with a tribute to the great animators who have gone before. This first post is an homage to one man who has inspired us all: To the man who gave us for 25 minutes of uncompromised entertainment and then taught us a moral lesson. To the man who taught us that you don't stab people with a sword, but that you use a sword to hit other swords and to deflect lasers and sonic waves from magic spells. To the man whose very goodness exceeds the evilness of Evil himself (I'm not making this up, go watch the show if you have not seen this episode). For crushing the boundaries between Sci-Fi and Fantasy with probably a boulder you threw with your bare hands, this one's for you He-man!





Take these GIFs and post them everywhere! On emails, Facebook, other blogs, where ever you can make them stick. Anything I make for this blog is fair game (just don't tell the people at Filmation, they will sue my pants off). Check back tomorrow for another GIF!