Will Knott

Dear Grannymar,

I don’t want you getting lonely, so would you like a toyboy to keep you company. One you can actually play with?

Meet Tommy. He’s a bit flash and a little slow… oh sorry that should be “he’s a bit of Flash“, and he’ll take more poking than a facebook account. He also seems to be allergic to shirts. Tommy is the “breast awareness guy“; the focus of a special website and starring in a tongue-in-cheek video which is also on YouTube (and embedded below).

The point of the video and the site is to teach you how to examine yourself for breast cancer (which also effects men, so its not quite as silly as it seem), and if you donate via his site he (OK, a server in Cancer Research UK) will send you an exclusive digital desktop calender featuring photos of Tommy. Shirtless naturally.

I wonder if the Irish Cancer Society would do something similar?

OK, its a little less pink than usual, but it almost fits the bill for Pink for October in Ireland.

take care,
and don’t play too hard,
Will Knott

I know that the October Breast Cancer Awareness Campaigns like the Pink for October sites are helping. However, is Filofax creating a range for “Breast Cancer Campaign”. “Beautifully crafted from pink lizard-print leather, the collection includes a pocket organiser, with matching passport cover, purse and accessory case. Filofax will make a donation of between £2.00 and £2.50 from the sale of every product direct to the charity” So for a £40 filofax, the charity gets £2.

The name is also a bit odd sounding. No ‘the’, the charity is called “Breast Cancer Campaign”. The charity registered in England (Charity No. 299758) and a company limited by guarantee (Company No. 05074725)

Why not more?
Will Knott

Rebecca Lipkin tells her story about breast cancer.

Simply and boldly told. Slightly surprising given the source.

take care,
Will Knott

As this is Breast Cancer Awareness month, a lot of products are jumping on the Pink for October bandwagon.

Image by on2wheelz via Flickr

So a pink coloured (and packaged) energy drink seems to be a “cheap” tie in. That’s what I first thought when I started looking at the Fuze energy drink brought out a flavour for October.  However looking at their “Heroes for Hope” sub-site it becomes apparent that this isn’t a tie in.

It s a commitment.

The site in in support for the “Susan G. Komen For The Cure” foundation (similar to our own Marie Keating Foundation), and it features video interviews and profiles of breast cancer survivors who are taking part in the “Heroes for Hope” tour.

A large pink tour bus travels around the country. Local heroes and committed activists are invited to participate in a formal photo session at the on-site photo studio (in and around the bus). A FUZE reporter documents participant’s story and selects ‘Heroes’ from each community that the Heroes for Hope Tour visits.

We’ve got to do something like that here. There are enough stories in the press, and enough bloggers in the country so that each site have have its own local hero.

What do you think?
Will Knott

This lovely lady (after some discussion on pix.ie) appears to be Brody Dalle, the singer of The Distillers, now Spinnerette here is a better stencil of her (created by Paulie Slim), and while it’s still graffiti / street art based, is something I sat on when I posted the other Cork graffiti shots.

Right now I wish the artist used pink paint, as I have nothing much for the Pink for October project (other than the slightly unheeded Pink For October Ireland), but these shots stayed in my mind when it came to cancer research. Other than the possible “magic bullet”, I don’t know why.

I think I’ll need to work on a Wordpress theme. When I get the time. Does the pink in the header count?
take care,
Will Knott

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• Spinnerette – Valium Knights

Hello again.

This post is going to be very image intensive, and I’m used thumbnails to help the bandwidth impaired.
Click on the image to see a larger version.

A quick word on Selective Colourisation, someone asked “what is it”…
Well, this is a colour image.

and this is the same image using selective colourisation on the yellow parts.

Effective isn’t it. The technique works best on a strong colour, unfortunately pink has many shades. Something which complicates things later on. And when yo do this technique on your own images, clean them up first. Red eye looks silly in black and white. However you could try selective colourisation and have a black and white photo, with red glowing eyes. Very zombie.

Anyway, in part one you downloaded your tools, and I gave you an image to play with.

So lets start.

Open the photo and you’ll probably have this view. The picture itself and the toolbar. However, in order to do make the changes, you’ll need to see the layers. To bring up the “Layers Dialog window” from the menu bar of the photograph, choose “Dialog” and then “Layers”.

And you then have the layers window.

What we are going to do first is create a new layer (a copy of the photograph) and turn that copy in to a monochrome version.

So go to the menu bar of the photograph again, and this time choose “Layers” and “Duplicate Layer”.

This… does nothing to the photo. But if you look at the layers window, you can see that there is now a second entry.

Make sure that the upper-most layer is selected, because we are finally going to make that colourful photograph a lot less colourful.

To make the image black and white, go to the menu bar of the image (who by now is an old friend) and choose “Colors” and “Desaturate”.

This causes a new window to open asking you “How do you want to make this image black-and-white”.
Actually its asking “How do you want to make this layer…”, but you’ve probably going “I don’t know which one of Lightness, Luminosity or Average to pick”.

Well don’t worry about it. Remember how I said that selective colourisation works best with a strong colour. You will want the maximum contrast between your selected (eventual) colour and its surrounding monochrome. So at the moment you can’t know. If you want to be really sure, you can always take the same image make multiple layers… and try out the technique on them all. Then you can pick the best looking one. Or make use of “undo”.

Anyway, pick one.

You now have a black and white image. But if you look at the layers window you can see that the colour photo is still available. (You can click on the green arrows at the bottom of the layers window to change the view between the black and white image and the colour one).

So now its time to put some colour back. You don’t use some colour selecting tool, but a mask.

Go back to the picture’s menu bar, and choose “Layers” then “Mask” and “Add Layer Mask”.

This causes a window to pop-up. The default here is “White (Full Opacity)”, choose that one and click “OK”.

The way we get the colour back is to “cut” through the monochrome image. If you look in the layer window you can see that there is not a white rectangle next to the monochrome image. This is the layer. White here means that you can only see the selected layer. Black here means that the layer is transparent, which lets the image in the layer below show through. To do this we’ll use the paintbrust tool from the tool bar.

The paintbrush is the 4th from the left and the 4th one down. Pick this tool and you should see the selected (and alternate) colour for the brush. The topmost one should be black, and the one below it should be white. You can see the selected brush in the image above its called “circle 11″.

You can try out the process. Put you mouse over the image and holding down the primary button, scribble on the image.

See the colour show through?
You can easily get rid of this scribble by choosing “Edit” and “Undo” from (you guessed it) the menu bar of the image.

While the above brush is fine, you should really chose a fuzzy brush. Its more forgiving if you go over the edge of the item you want to return to colour. Click on the “image” of the brush and you’ll see a selection of brushes. Pick a fuzzy brush (you can switch over and over)

and go back to the photograph.
Before you start re-colouring the image, you had better zoom in (“View”, “Zoom” and either “Zoom In” or select a ratio) so that you can more accurately colour the image.

Now you can start to colour in your photo. Use small strokes, that way you can use “undo” as needed.

Personally I prefer to go along the edge of the part I’m colouring in. Filling in is the easy part.

At this point it might be worth looking at the mask itself. Choose “Layers”, “Mask” and “Show Layer Mask”.

And you can see the parts I’ve changed.

You can also see a little “scratch” next to the sleeve. That is a mistake for which I can’t use undo. I can however use the paintbrush to make that black mark white again.

Back on the toolbox, you can see a little two headed arrow where the chosen colours are. Clicking on this will switch the colours.

Now with my brush “painting” in white, I can erase the mistake.

Switching the colours back to black, I can cheat.
Since I “painted” the edge of parts I want to re-colour, I can use the “fill” tool (in the picture above it’s the left-most column, 4th one down with an icon of paint being poured from a tin) to, well, fill in a chunk of the image…

… and switch back to the brush to tidy up the image.

When you are doing the selective re-colourisation, I’d advise you show the mask so you can see if you missed a bit.

You can now turn hide the mask (“Layers”, “Mask” and select “Show Layer Mask” to deselect it) and see the image.

Using the green arrows in the layers window to see the full colour and selective colourised image to see if there is another part you wish to colour in.

Now it’s time to save your image. Go to the menu bar and choose “File” and “Save as”.
Why “save as”? Firstly, if you are using a borrowed machine, you need to make sure you are not overwriting the original image, and that the location you are saving on is going to be on your own removable media. The other reason? Well, GIMP uses the file name extension (the 3 letters after the main file name) to decide how its going to save the image. If you save with a “.xcf” then you are saving n GIMP’s own native format. And it retains all your layer information if (like me) you will need to return to the file to edit it. If you don’t want to return to editing, then the file name extension of the image file sill still be set to the file type you opened (in this case a JPEG or .jpg file).

When you save after editing you are going to get a few warning boxes.

This one reminds you that you are going to loose your layer information. Since that’s the point choose “confirm”.

This one tell you that since a jpeg can’t handle the transparency its going to turn your multi-layer image in to a single layer one. Again that’s the point; choose “export”.

And finally (you will get this one)

The scroll bar on the top wants to know about compression. Since these images are going to be for printing, choose 100%. However if you are just trying out the technique, (and the 100% reslts in a large file size) you can leave the quality levels at a lower setting. Once you are happy with the quality setting click on the “Save” button.

We now have a selective coloured image.

If you look at the pointing hand, I didn’t colour in the cuff. This if you remember is the difficult part.
I could use the same careful drawing technique that I used before (or just leave it as it looks OK) but I won’t.

I’m going to leave it to you. This is the reason for the half post. I want you to tell me the techniques you used to colour in this part. Leave a comment below or e-mail me I’ll post the replies next week.

Take care,
and do your homework,
Will Knott

Dear photobloggers. I want you to do something. Raise cash for the Irish Cancer Society!

Most of you are at least aware of the internet phenomena that is Pink for October. This is a breast cancer awareness programme, where websites and blogs go pink for the month, and photobloggers show pink photos for the month.

However, it occurred to me that the one thing this internet outreach does not do is actually help cancer charities. So lets fix this.

Last time I was in Cork city I called in here…

my local Irish Cancer Society shop. I’m not sure if the Castle Street shop in cork city is unusual, but they tend to have big window displays. So I chatted with the manager (nice lady) about making a window display using pink photos for October. In Cork, the Jazz festival will have its own display, but since she hadn’t planned anything from the start of the month until the festival, she is willing to display the photos.

However it might be worth going one better… donate the photos to the charity not just for display, but to be sold and raise money for the charity.

And while photos of pink objects might sell, portraits will sell, to the subject at least.

My plan is to go to the streets of Cork with model release forms and approach people wearing pink (anything pink from a splash of pink lipstick, to a pink bow in the hair or a pink tie). Explain to the subject why I’m taking the photos and if they would be willing to pose and (under no obligation) buy the photo (I’m thinking €5 at most) from the Cancer charity shop and have the photo displayed online. With a bit of publicity I suspect there would be volunteers lined up on the streets.

Personally I would like to perform a selective colourisation on the photograph so that its a black and white photo with only the pink coloured, but that isn’t a requirement.

Then in the middle of September, present the collection of A4 printouts to the charity shop for display and sale.

So what am I asking you to do?

1. Go to your nearest Cancer Charity shop (In Ireland it’s the Irish Cancer Society, I’m not sure what it is in Northern Ireland let alone the rest of the world)
2. Ask the manager of that shop if he or she would be willing to accept the donation of photographs as part of the “Pink for October Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign“, display and sell the photos. You might have to explain the Pink for October story and that model release forms will be produced.
3. Take the photographs. Print the photographs. Yes some time and expense will be involved. Anything worth doing involves a bit of an outlay.
4. If you wish, do put some identifying marks (like a web address to the online version of the photo) on the printouts. A Pink for October logo and link should also be included.
5. Present the photographs (and at least offer the release forms) on (or around) Friday September 19 2008 to the charity shop so that the manager has time to display the photographs. (I can see Kilkenny photoblogers being a little later if they want to include a Podcamp Ireland photowalk)

So, is this a dumb idea?

At the moment I’m looking for a little help with this. Could you help me with…

• Commitment to join in. You have over two months to do something this year
• The wording for the model release form. I’m not sure how it should be worded and what details are required.
• Would I (or anyone else doing the street portraits) need a licence of some kind? If so where and how would I go about getting one?
• While I’m willing to print out my photos myself, does anyone know of a willing printer?
• Anything else I should know about?

Happy snapping,
Will Knott

update September 3 2008. The 2008 Pink for October Ireland portraits won’t be happening. Details in this post.

pink31 Creepy Milk Teeth
Originally uploaded by cork_host

And so its over. This is the last pink photo for the Pink for October gig. You can see all the pink photos on flickr if you like.

The bad news is I think I got the photoblogging bug. Just as well I have a crap camera…

Will

p.s. Happy Hallowe’en

pink28 bonbon
Originally uploaded by cork_host

Halloween wasn’t always the candy-fest it is today. Once we had to put up with apples and peanuts.

Kids these days. They’ll expect to drive on their second provisional yet… oh hang on…

pink26 Roosters
Originally uploaded by cork_host

the answer, for those not reading the comments, was indeed Roosters.