Ideas: What to do with all those Blurry Photos

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What to do with all those Blurry Photos

What BlurryPhotos?

Cameras are so ubiquitous now that our PreK-6 grade children are surely all trying their hands at photography. If not yet, I encourage you to let them ASAP.

Tyler Ponders, a self-prortrait, ©2006. Clicking on the image will link you to the page with some of the images of Template Design Sets and Backgrounds that were produced by children in ways described here. Each image links to another page concerning this art. Purchase it in a TDS.

But, what to do? What to do? Your child’s first foray into photography produced blurred and poorly exposed photos that you are considering trashing. STOP! These pictures are still usable. Even the pictures of the ground at your child’s feet are usable.

Let me explain how. Make graphics for digital memos, cards, documents, presentations, and emails with otherwise unusable pictures. Those really great pictures work well for this activity, too.

Obtain a digital image of the poor photo. Let your child edit it with your photo editing software. NO, the object is not to fix it, but to use it. Have your child experiment with the various photo effects in the software. One child's favorite effects are the Sheet Metal Effect and the Expansion Effect in ACDSee Photo Editor, which he used to make the background for a set of .ppt slides.

Allow time for lots of experimentation. Whenever a particular effect produces interesting results, save that file. We use a series of names like “leaf_on_ground_1.jpg” and “leaf_on_ground_1-metal-effect.jpg.” Using similar names in a numbered series keeps all trials in one spot in the pictures folder.

Note--How to name the image: Using CSS in web pages requires that spaces between words of an href such as an img src be marked somehow, hence the underlines and dashes in the .jpg filename. --Val

Try applying an effect, saving that image, and applying another effect or three on that image. In a chain of effects, the distortions become tremendous. Some will be grotesquely funny; some will be downright ugly; but some will be awesome. Siblings will compete to make changes.

Grass is blurred in this image. Do you see the photographer's shoe? This image is the source of the design above and others in the Template Design Set Metallic Grass.

Tyler was 6 or 7 when he did these designs.

Hence this activity is not just fun and games. There is a usable product in the works.

Locate the best image, or just the best part of an image. Crop to get the best part. Save the smaller image. Now use the awesome image.

Of what use is it? Try using it to decorate emails, documents, presentation slides, memos, and greeting cards. Here’s how.

Use the image as you would a clip art or background. If entered into your email stationery as a border or background, it will become a part of any email sent on that stationery. If placed in a memo or document template, it becomes part of any message sent using that template. Your child can have his own stationery for emails and memos and letters to Grandma. This image is a .ppt template.

Another trick is to use the image as a background. You do this by formatting backgrounds with the choices Fill Effects>>Picture>>Select Picture>>Browse (to the image file)..select>>insert>>OK. Background formatting works for documents, webpages, and presentations.

Try this method for making borders on colored stationery. You can make a border by placing the image on a blank presentation slide. Stretch the image to cover an entire side of the slide, but be narrow—or just line up lots of copies of one or more images along one edge of a slide. Format the background of the slide with the color or Fill Effects that go well with the border. Save the slide as a jpeg file, choosing to save just the selected slide. Now you have an image on a colored (or white, if no fills were used) background.This Metallic Purple Border Clip Art bordered image can then be used as a background for a stationery, document, email, memo, or presentation slide. Use it to format the background for a template, save it in your child’s name. He will now have his own templates for his own writing.

Let him write to everyone he knows.

This image began as the grass in the blurred photo above. Copy it--it's free. It is also much prettier in its original size. It is reduced by 3x here.

Here’s another trick. Take that blurred image of your child’s self portrait, crop it to get a surrealistic image, darken it if necessary, and turn it into a presentation slide background. Use the same process as above, except save the image on a slide master. To do this Go to View>>Master>>Slide Master. Adjust the sizes of the text boxes and the color and font of the type. Save this file as a template file, .pot.

Finally, let your child take a disk or cd-rom of his work to school. Most schools can show a presentation on the classroom computer, so collect the work into a presentation for your child to show to his classmates. Make a presentation of the photos that turned out well. Include this file in the disk/cd-rom. Watch your child strut off to class proudly.

You will have transformed a potentially frustrating failure as a photographer into a successful graphics artist. Pat yourself on the back, too, for you will have taught your child to make lemonade from lemons.

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