Before this past weekend, I have never had a panic attack before. In fact, the closes I came was my freshman year of college when my neighbor was hanging out on my bed and he all of a sudden went catatonic. My roommate and I called the paramedics and he was rushed to the hospital where after a night of hanging out in the emergency room we took him home to find he had a severe panic attack.
With closing out my final weeks in San Jose I am feeling the weight of leaving my home, my friends, and my job. Coupled with a busy day at work, poor sleep, friend issues, and rush hour traffic… I found myself unable to breathe and my body completely tense. I called my mom a bit freaked and our discussion quickly moved to packing and moving my apartment. Let’s just say that didn’t help. Luckily, I was soon home and went into my bedroom, closed the door, laid down on my bed and did the one thing that calms all of my nerves…
I edited photos.
I love tinkering on photoshop and seeing what I can create in half an hour. The editing that I did to calm my nerves was take a picture of my sister and her boyfriend and edit myself into them. See, not all photo editing has to be serious. In fact, the more fun the better.
Original Image
Original Danielle Creation
To top it off I sent a very non chalent email to my sister saying I cleaned up the image a bit and fixed the color… something she often has me do for her images. Then waited and waited and waited.
But that’s ACTUALLY not why I wrote this post… it was just my long winded introduction!
My dad recently returned to Ethiopia and took his usual team of miscreants. One of them took some wonderful pictures and I took one of them and edited it, printed it, and gifted it to my father. I think it turned out quite nice. There are many many many layers and I only want to brag about one, you can see it best on the far left but I layered an image I took on my visit to Ethiopia of the material they use to make their mud huts. (Straw and mud basically) Also, “Tesfa” means “Hope” in Amharic (one of the native languages of Ethiopia).
Original Image
Original Danielle Creation
