Will Knott

Today is National Daffodil Day.

Daffodils are a sign of hope, after all they usually mean that spring is here, but they can be nasty. As a cut flower they release a chemical which causes other flowers to die off really quickly.

Daffodil Day is organised and run by the Irish Cancer Society. It is the most popular charity event in Ireland and is a chance for everyone in Ireland to make the biggest difference to the lives of everyone affected by cancer.

This year you can also plant a daffodil in their virtual “Spring Garden of Hope. Visit www.PlantaDaff.ie and write a message to accompany your daffodil in the Garden.

Or buy a pin, a daffodil or a bunch of daffodils from the sellers around the country. Just don’t mix the cut flowers with others.

Take care,
Will Knott

A last rose in winter. A last chance?

Well it appears that I’m a photoblogger, and I’m responding to Geraldine Moorkens Byrne’s call for photographers to give up a Sunday for a shoot to support St. James’ Cancer Unit. The Cancer Service helped my father with his treatment. And his final days.

So I’m committing my time and feeble skills. There are people there I can’t help enough, so I’ll be there. Anyone else willing to help out?

take care,

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

I wanted to do more. I wanted to use the Pink For October meme to generate funds for Cancer Research.

Image via Wikipedia

Maybe next year.

And I set up the Pink for October Ireland with the intention of using it as a hub, to allow the photos to be registered with the models and to display some of the finest shots.

Maybe next year.

But as I said, I registered the site, and I want to use it. Join me.

This year.

The Pink for October Ireland site is now an aggregator site. Register with the site and when you post about Pink For October  using the category p4oi (that’s a letter, a number and two letters) the software will pick it up. I know its working for Wordpress blogs, and I just know I’m going to have fun with Blogger, Typepad, pix.ie, flickr etc. but I’m going to give this a shot. The registration is moderated (by humans too), but the posts are not.

Come on over and register.

Pass it on. If you know someone in Ireland (or from Ireland) who is going to do something for Pink for October on their blog, let them know.

Join in,
Will Knott

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I had been looking forward to placing a call for photographers on the blog now and directing people to the PinkForOctoberIreland.org site to register as models and photographers.

But that is not to be. Instead, I’m afraid to say that there will not be a Pink portraits day on September 20th in Daunt Square, Cork.

If I was to do go back in time to prepare the Pink idea again, I’d have to go back to June. Then I would…

• Start the call for photographers.
• Get then to register.
• Explain that they need to register full contact details so that Gardai and City Council required
  • health and safety
  • traffic management plans
  • pedestrian management plans
  • first aid appointees
  • public liability insurance etc are in place.

  Also the Garda contact mentioned that mobile numbers (or at least contact numbers) of all the “staff” are required

• Also the HSA have legal requirements for event with more than 3 staff

So that seems to be that.
I would like to have a photo-walk in its place. A meeting of photographers and photo-bloggers to wander around Cork City with their lenses out on a busy Saturday. How does 11am in Daunt Square sound as a meeting point? If you want to contact me, my details are in the about page.

Sorry to disappoint those who registerd on the (admittedly half built) PinkForOctoberIreland.org site, but if you’re interested in doing something; I’m planning on turning the pinkforoctoberireland site in to a blog aggregater for this year (should be up soon), and make plans for the photography next year.

If you want to blog, comment etc as part of Pink For October, register with the international PinkForOctober.org site. And when I have the aggregater up, register and tag your posts with “p4oi”.

If you want to do more, bring pink objects to donate to the ICS shop just off Daunt Square when you are coming on the photowalk. Should make us easy to spot.

And as for next year. I’ll take all the help I can get

Care to join me?
Will Knott

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Is it better to go on without someone you are sure you need. Or should you wait.

I’m at a crossroads with the Pink Portraits for October project, and a very strict deadline with a heap of organising to do. And no official word from the officials source other hand “wait and see”.

For this to work we need:

• Photobloggers to group and work in teams, while spread out across the county
• A complete model release form (literally yesterday)
• Advance publicity about the photoblogging teams so that willing volunteers show up to be photographed
• Those willing models, who will also commit to buy the photographs
• Enough lead time to modify and print the photos

I’m sure I should be bothering HARO and a few of the PR guys for help.

Any tips on ways to get large groups of volunteers to show up?
Is an online model release form legally binding (a copy to read would be a good idea anyway)?
Would a facebook group (or 2 for each country) or myspace pages be a good idea?

Given that pinkforoctober.org exists, should I set up a site just for the portraits?

Of course doing any of these actions guarantees that any official support will just halt.

And all of this on our own. Or is it my own?

I’ll take all the advice I can get in the comments,
Will Knott

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The first I heard of Ronnie Drew’s death was when DeirdreMarie commented on this picture.

The photograph was taken as part of a visit to the Guinness Storehouse arranged by Lisa Fitzsimons and the Guinness Storehouse as part of the Guinness Storehouse photo competition. I’ll type more about this later.

I met Ronnie in 1984 in a production of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” where he played Jacob. What I remember of him is a quiet man with a large greying beard and jokes mumbled in our presence. I suspect now that those jokes were not quite suitable for the children’s choir.

He died of throat cancer. No, I’m not going to go on about my idea this time; but to point you to a campaign for the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) called Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C).

Ronnie Drew 1934 – 2008

take care

Will Knott

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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

When I wrote “Pink makes the money goes around” I requested that a technique called Selective Colourisation (or selective Colorization if you prefer). When I mentioned this a while back a photobloger (who shal remain nameless) said that (s)he didn’t know how to do it.

So Dr Kno(tt) is here to teach you how.

First off, you need the tools.

I’m not going to assume you have a PC (yup, that simple) but if you have a camera, you probably have a memory card somewhere.

You can install (and run) a photo editing site off that card. I’m talking about the portable app version of GIMP called (naturally enough) GIMP Portable.

Download it, install it on a USB drive or a memory card (even the memory card your use for your camera).

Why?

Well if you don’t own a PC, you can get access to one. At school, in a net cafe, at your friendly neighbourhood co-working facility and even in an emulator on an Apple Mac. The advantage of this method is that you then have an easily accessible photo editor, and you can use it without altering anything on the borrowed PC.

If you have access to your own machine. Use the full version of GIMP. Its available for a wide range of operating systems, and its free (for personal use anyway, which is this P4O project).

So download it and play with it for a while, and tomorrow we’ll be seeing the selective Colourisation of this photo.

I’ve chosen this photo for a few reasons. I’m going to select only the red of Séan Creagh’s top and the Star on the poster he points to. The poster is about a play in Cork called Prisoners which runs on August 15 and 16 (and the trailer for it is below), so its a little topical.

And because this arm covers a red advertisement on the window. Red against red. Something which makes this difficult.

So download the software and install it on your removable media, take a copy of the photo, and we’ll start editing it tomorrow.

take care,
Will