Something for the weekend - Part 15 - Down to earth!

[davescm]

Hi

Some great entries from last week's water-mill challenge. There was a suggestion that the perspective last week proved a little difficult so for this week there are no such issues.

For obvious reasons (my tripod does extend that far), I've not used one of my own images this week. The image below comes courtesy of NASA's image gallery, which is well worth a browse. The challenge is simple - use this picture creatively in a new image.

Anything goes as long as it meets the forum rules on decency, copyright etc.

Anyone is welcome to have a go - whether you are a complete beginner or a Photoshop expert.

There are no prizes - just the chance to practice, show off, or bring a bit of humour and fun.

When posting back your edited images please use jpeg and downsize to 1200px on the long side. 

To download the image below without the forum scaling artifacts, right click and then use Save Image As / Save Picture As (or similar depending on your browser).

Have fun

Dave

[D Fosse]

Anyone still in doubt - read Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff". Not the movie - the book. Then you understand that such a thing simply couldn't be faked, except maybe by administering LSD and other high-powered drugs to the entire world population. I was only eleven years old in '69, but I still remember how huge it was, even here in Norway. Thousands of people were so tightly involved in this that they would have to know. There were observatories scattered around the globe, remember? And try getting that many thousand people to shut up permanently. Can't be done. Somebody would want 15 minutes of fame.

Now, as for the earth being flat...oh, I get it! That's why they did it! They didn't want the flat earth truth out! <slaps forehead>

[davescm]

I also followed the coverage at the time so must have been as high as the rest of the world.. The conspiracy theorists seem to forget that there was a space race between the US and the Soviets. Any chance to discredit the landings would have been jumped on at the time, by the USSR. It wasn't.

Now, back to today,  I'm getting dizzy going round and round on Terri's turntable

Dave

[Trevor.Dennis]

Blimey, I can't believe we are actually discussing the moon landings as if they really were faked.   Perhaps we need to hang an irony emoji after posts when we are making a wee joke.  I have nop doubt that the moon landings were real.  But now my irony meter makes it so I might still be joking.  We can't win!

[davescm]

Just for the record, and not that one of Terri's, no doubt in my mind that they were real.

Dave

[D Fosse]

Trevor.Dennis  wrote

Dag, seeing as we now know for sure that the Apollo landings were filmed in the Arizona desert, you'd have needed some added content to make it realistic

Ah, I love this...actually I love conspiracy theories in general, they are testament to man's - WAIT! is it still called that in English? Man? as in mankind, as in a man? No way you can get away with that anymore!

Anyway. Conspiracy theories. Sometimes they are so elaborate, so inter-dependent on a series of unlikely-to-impossible assumptions, that they approach works of art. They stand wobbly like a five meter high house of cards. I gaze in awe, barely breathing...

EDIT: you can see the moon landing was fake because the sunlight appears to come in from the left - but as Trevor shows, the sun was actually on the right. Left? That proves the reds were behind it. It's obvious once you start looking...

[jane-e]

“The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson

[davescm]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/D+Fosse  wrote

...actually I love conspiracy theories in general............

There was a group on the radio a couple of days ago blaming their local council's change to LED streetlights,  for every ailment under the sun - including nosebleeds......

Dave

[jane-e]

davescm  wrote

There was a group on the radio a couple of days ago blaming their local council's change to LED streetlights,  for every ailment under the sun - including nosebleeds......

Dave

I had to look that one up, Dave. Unbelievable how people will believe the nonsense that flies around!

"Residents are scared new LED street lights are causing insomnia, nose bleeds and miscarriages after Gateshead Council was accused of running secret government radiation trials"

[D Fosse]

Yeah, this is a beautiful specimen. The secret LED radiation trials, a winner.

It's all around if you start looking for it. Most of them have high entertainment value, and a few are outright dangerous, like alt-right, or the anti-vaccination scare. But they all have one thing in common: They reject both common sense (a priori) and empirical evidence (a posteriori). Immanuel Kant would turn in his grave. But then he probably had his dose of religious zealots to deal with.

So what's left then? What's left is only one thing: what you want to believe, for whatever agenda. What you want to believe becomes the truth, and nothing can change it.

There's a spooky, but subtle, aspect to this: It undermines human communication. There's simply no firm ground left, nothing to base any kind of conversation on. And I think we've gone a step backwards here. When I grew up, people could disagree to the point of violence, but there would always be a basic assumption that somewhere down there were the facts. This really happened, that is really there. The disagreement was about interpreting those facts. Not so anymore, it seems.

[davescm]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/D+Fosse  wrote

....The disagreement was about interpreting those facts. Not so anymore, it seems.

Don't forget to add in a dose of "I read it on the internet so it must be true" syndrome...........

Dave

[Trevor.Dennis]

I am not sure that Jane will have see The Young Ones, but Dave will remember Neil's ultimate conspiracy theory comment

It's at 10:30

[Trevor.Dennis]

A moment of staggering insight.  You can't talk about The Young Ones without thinking of Alexei Sayle who happens to be a clone of our Dave

You'll be feeling very confused right about now, so to help you out, that's Dave on the Left. 

You might remember Alexie (the one on the right) from one of the Indiana Jones movies.  This shows him bumping into a car because they wouldn't let him wear his glasses.   They let him keep one of the camels after the movie, which he still has, and feeds exclusively on Newcastle Brown Ale. He calls the camel Pet, because being a Geordie it's easier to remember.

[jane-e]

Trevor.Dennis  wrote

I am not sure that Jane will have see The Young Ones, but Dave will remember Neil's ultimate conspiracy theory comment

I'll have to watch this later today, Trevor—my friend is coming to pick me up to see The Winter's Tale at The Folger. I'm only mentioning that we'll be in her Tesla because of your Mill Docking Station.

[Trevor.Dennis]

jane-e  wrote

Trevor.Dennis   wrote

I am not sure that Jane will have see The Young Ones, but Dave will remember Neil's ultimate conspiracy theory comment

I'll have to watch this later today, Trevor—my friend is coming to pick me up to see The Winter's Tale at The Folger. I'm only mentioning that we'll be in her Tesla because of your Mill Docking Station.

Jane, The Young Ones was very 'of its time', and you might not want to subject yourself to that entire video.  It was a bit of a long winded lead up to where one of the characters, Neil, comments 'Everyone knows that sleep gives you cancer'. 

[davescm]

So this what a tectonic plate really looks like........ 

Dave

[jane-e]

Trevor.Dennis  wrote

Jane, The Young Ones was very 'of its time', and you might not want to subject yourself to that entire video.  It was a bit of a long winded lead up to where one of the characters, Neil, comments 'Everyone knows that sleep gives you cancer'.

Well, Trevor.Dennis, I just watched if, and if I had to pick one word to describe it, it would be "random". Still, it made me laugh. But I do have a warped sense of humor.

I'm not sure if we ever saw this in the States.

[Terri_Stevens]

davescm  wrote

https://forums.adobe.com/people/D+Fosse   wrote

...actually I love conspiracy theories in general............

There was a group on the radio a couple of days ago blaming their local council's change to LED streetlights,  for every ailment under the sun - including nosebleeds......

Dave

I saw that too. There is also quite a lot of concern about electricity pylons causing cancer as well and I tend to believe that one. I spent a really nice holiday once at a place called Kendoon, near Dalry on the Scottish English borders. My husband and I thought of maybe getting a holiday home there as it was incredibly cheap to buy and very pretty. Then one evening down the local pub we got talking to locals and they told us why it was so cheap. Apparently it was built by Scottish Power for hydro power station workers in the 1930's and there are high voltage cables radiating out all over the village, then the villagers started getting leukaemia and it was classified as a 'cancer hotspot' and Scottish Power moved everyone out leaving the village for holidaymakers with short term stays, which is harmless. Still, I think in recent times some permanent residents have moved back simply due to the price of the cottages. You can tell there is a lot of electromagnetic radiation around as you cannot get a radio or tv signal and cell phones just don't work. Apparently the late Ken Dodd considered buying the entire village , remember it's called 'Kendoon'  , but nothing came of it.

[davescm]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Terri+Stevens  wrote

.............there are high voltage cables radiating out all over the village,

Now that explains a few things Terri...

Dave

[Trevor.Dennis]

Hah!  I like it.  You _so_ need Eye Candy 7 though

[davescm]

I was going to use After Effects and make the moving lightning but didn't have the time. If I get the chance later I'll do something.

Dave

[davescm]

Trevor.Dennis  wrote

......... You _so_ need Eye Candy 7 though

Ha - who needs Eye Candy when we have After Effects

Dave

[Trevor.Dennis]

Nice one Dave.  After Effects is orders of magnitude better than Photoshop when it comes to animation.  It gives you total control of each element individually, although I have never used to produce a GIF.  Can you do that directly from AE, or do you have to render to video and change the video to a frame animation in Photoshop?

I don't use AE very often, but it is a godsend when you need it like in the unexploding logo at the beginning of this promo, and  the sun rays at 15 seconds in.  Please don't watch it all unless you having trouble getting to sleep .   Of course I ignored my own advice, so I discovered that I also did the film canisters with AE, and more disturbing, I have gained some weight since this was filmed five years ago (that's me in the green shirt right at the end). 

[davescm]

I've seen that one before Trevor - it has a good mix of stills and video, and the exploding logo works well

For the GIF I rendered from After Effects to TIFFs then used "Load to Image stack" in Photoshop and made the frame animation. Finally I used Save for Web to export the GIF.

There may be a quicker way - but it worked.

Dave

[Trevor.Dennis]

Dave, I am thinking that it might be less work to render to MP4 and import that to Photoshop.  It's then just one click to change it to a frame animation.  The downside is that you'd get one to one video to frame animation frames, but that would be OK with a short MP4 (25 frames per second)

[davescm]

Hi Trevor

Knowing that the output was to be a gif, and a gif is not going to play at 25 fps, I picked a slow frame rate in After Effects.  That gave me 48 frames for the 4 second clip. Rendering the 48 Tiffs took seconds. In fact it took longer for Photoshop to load them into the layer stack afterwards.

When making the gif I didn't even try to set each frame to an accurate 0.083 secs but just set them to 0.1 which was close enough. You can never guarantee a gif playback speed anyway so it is not worth worrying about. If timing had been critical I would have just made an mp4.

Dave