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

http://photography.daniellenoah.com/

Check out Patti’s blog and baby girl at: http://www.brettandpatti.blogspot.com/

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Keep reading for screen shots or go directly to the pages to see what is coming!

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Angela is someone I met in school and soon bonded over our “love” for Dwight, Bentel & Hall. [Side note, she is the one who designed the branding and website!] It wasn’t long before I was trying to win over her husband in the hopes that I can steal his wife on a weekly basis. In the end, they have become my sanity in this crazy town. We have been emailing for work for a while but only became P.I.C (Partners in Crime) almost a year ago.

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Angela has shown me that friendship knows no bounds. Like in my Avatar post I mentioned that it is our greatest desire to “be seen, to be known, to be counted” and outside of family there have been few that I felt “know me.” But Angela is one. This Christmas, her and her hubby spoiled me rotten and decked me out with cupcake gear. Cupcake travel/baking case, frosting designs, note cards, potholders and recipes… what more could a cupcake enthusiast ask for?! Probably what made me most excited is knowing that in a month my lease ends and soon I will have a new kitchen to decorate and those dish towels are begging to be displayed!

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I have a new and exciting project that was brewed up in NYC by my mother and will be launching soon. I cannot wait to share with you but while I work out the kinks…

I have never had a point and shoot camera, never. Instead I have gone from advanced film to digital slr, always caring around with me this bulky camera that no one knows how to use besides myself. Always the photographer, never the photographed. Sigh! But this Christmas my family sought to change that by giving me my very own pocket sized camera. I have taken some pictures and cringe at the quality. The images are beautiful for a pocket camera but nothing can beat a professional canon. However, I am not detoured and have put my editing skills to the test to level these suckers out.

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With these images I went with a 70′s retro theme inspired by the photographs my parents try to hide from me in the garage…I am not sure why they regret their long shaggy hair with short shorts days. [And don't even get my started on my mom ] This editing can be mostly done in color balance by doing small adjustments to the hues. I wanted my colors to be toward the reds and greens to give it the old Polaroid look. Other edits were found in adjusting the levels and a bit of lens correction.

You can stay up to date on my picture uploads by bookmarking my flickr site.

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The colors turned out amazing and I love the added touch of the water droplets.  I had many to choose from but this shot ended up being my favorite.

As always… click to enlarge!

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In the United States of America we take for granted having clean drinking water. We are able to access it readily from our kitchen sink, refrigerator door or water bottles that we purchase easily and regularly.  Outside of our homes one in eight do not have access to safe, cleaning drinking water, almost a billion people on Earth.

Over Thanksgiving weekend the city of Portland Oregon reached it’s own water epidemic, traces of e-coli were found in the water supply.  Immediately water was no longer safe to drink. Water fountains were shut down and Brita water filters were put on hold.  However, even this crisis pales in comparison to the realities of worldwide water issues.

The earth is made up of 70% water with 97% of the 70% being saltwater. That means only 3% of the worlds supply of water is available to drink for the six billion people on this planet.  Diseases caused by unsafe drinking water and inadequate sanitation is currently the most serious public health threat, killing two to five million people. 85% of all diseases and deaths are from lack of sanitation and clean water. To make matters worse, countries that have limited access to clean water have poorer education, economic development, gender equality and nutrition. Our water epidemic is 100% preventable.

To learn how you can help visit Charity Water (http://www.charitywater.org)

The Whale Hunt is an experiment in human storytelling.

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Jonathon Harris spent 9 days in Alaska living with a family of Eskimos. Along with a friend who acts as his photographer their entire journey is documented in 3,214 images.

[9 days x 24 hours x 60 mins]/3214 images = 4 pictures per minute

Instead of going through and selecting only his favorites he created a website and sequenced every image.

The purpose of this project was threefold:

First, to experiment with a new interface for human storytelling. The photographs are presented in a framework that tells the moment-to-moment story of the whale hunt. The full sequence of images is represented as a medical heartbeat graph along the bottom edge of the screen, its magnitude at each point indicating the photographic frequency (and thus the level of excitement) at that moment in time. A series of filters can be used to restrict this heartbeat timeline, isolating the many sub stories occurring within the larger narrative (the story of blood, the story of the captain, the story of the arctic ocean, etc.). Each viewer will experience the whale hunt narrative differently, and not necessarily in a linear fashion, constructing his or her own understanding of the experience.

Second, to subject myself to the same sort of incessant automated data collection process that I usually write computer programs to conduct (in previous projects like We Feel Fine, Lovelines, Universe, 10×10, and Phylotaxis). Much effort is spent making computers understand what it’s like to be human (through data mining and artificial intelligence), but rarely do humans try to see things from a computer’s perspective. I was interested in reaching some degree of empathy with the computer, a constant thankless helper in my work.

Third, to take an epic personal experience from the physical world and translate it optimally to the Internet, so that many people can share it.

The final outcome, a success. A Whale Hunt is a prime example of a new way to tell stories. Like yesterdays Adage.com said “stories we create and consume are no longer defined by time, space or material object.”