Author: michaeljcripps

When I saw today’s DC, I was immediately thinking about the Tank Man photo from the democratization demonstrations in China in 1989 – and Savannah’s recent Daily Create that featured a duck crossing sign – with a duck crossing!

I didn’t like the yellow signs, as the Tiananman Square massacre called for color signaling greater danger.

I had thought I’d make it into an animated GIF, where I might change the text from “democracy” to “dictatorship” – and back – but settled for a less rigorous creative effort. In hindsight, I should have done that GIF for dramatic effect.

And here’s Savannah’s tweet for those who might have missed it.

Oh, the meanings of spare. I played with three uses in my Daily Create tweet today.

I keep a surfboard in the office at all times, just in case. Usually, I’ll have a board on the roof if there’s swell and a chance to surf after work – or at lunch. But sometimes I get caught out and forget to load the needed equipment. When that happens, I turn to the extra – spare – board.

• Spare as an “extra” – the spare board.
• Spare as “save me” – the excuses.
• Spare as a “type” – the ribs.

This was an easy Daily Create, as I was already in the office and could take a photo. I used Photoshop to erase a good bit of the ceiling/wall and draw attention to the board/rack. Then I threw down some text to establish “proof of created on…” information, which I like to do with the Dailies.

The fun/creative bit was in crafting language to use a few “spares” in the tweet. It mostly works.

What’s in my toast? I sat on this one for a good bit of the morning. I just wasn’t sure what to do. We didn’t have toast for breakfast. But let the day tell you the Daily Create and things can – and will – happen.

My daughter and I had plans to surf on Sunday afternoon, as the day was gorgeous and longboard waves were in the forecast. After lunch, we headed out. My instincts told me to head south, but following the advice of my neighbor Nick, we headed north to a punchy beach break that I sensed would not be ideal for the day.

All was ok. Until disaster struck! An outside set came in, and we were stuck inside. I was not far enough over from my daughter, and she lost control of her board. Her board got pulled over into mine, and my fin sliced into her board. From tasty waves to a board toasted by fin.

As I pondered the idea of toast and surfboards, I couldn’t help but channel Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and his tasty waves. So here’s a GIF.

Household dirt. Hmm. Surf themed. Hmm. It took more than a minute to figure out how to handle this seemingly easy Daily Create.

Some years ago, I came across a longboard that was basically trashed. It had a massive delamination on the deck, and the nose had been snapped off at some point in its life. It was repaired, but the person used automotive fiberglass resin for the job. Unlike the clear resin used for surfboards, auto resin has a golden/yellow color. It’s ugly! I bought the board for a song and dance, with the idea that it would be a good beater/loaner. I put a red resin panel on the deck to attempt to hide the yellow resin, and I did the same with the nose. The results were less than ideal. OK.

My oldest son took it on as an art project and painted a mermaid on it. We looked up the Greek word for waves. And the rest is in the photo!

This DC was pretty simple. Get a photo. Pull it into an image editor to add some text and establish a created on date.

I wasn’t sure what to do with this Daily Create, at least not at first. I have been stacking cord after cord of wood in the yard (5 cord so far!), and I initially thought I might want to create something about my intentional effort to stack the full delivery in one session. It’s a challenge to load a wheelbarrow, run the load over to the fence, and then stack it – over and over – in a single session. But that’s not a “surf edition” Daily Create. Then I remembered the Instagram video by Evan Loignon that a fellow surfer shared with me about a month ago. I don’t know Evan, so it was kind of fun to see that he caught me surfing and used it in a short film he calls “Low Presser.”

It’s a chest-to-head high day in early winter, with very strong offshore winds and a bit of chop in the water. I’m out there almost alone. What makes it a challenge is the fact that I’m surfing a board better suited to smaller, cleaner conditions. I took a portion of the original clip, pulled it into iMovie, added my own sound effects and a title/description to establish a “created on” date, and tweeted it out.

The original film is viewable at Vimeo, and you can really tell that it’s a tough day to be paddling into waves: https://vimeo.com/308315264. I found it challenging, but the shortboarder in the film found it nearly impossible!

I immediately thought of a crowded line up at the break when I saw today’s Daily Create. Unfortunately, my day was so crazy I didn’t have time in the morning to tweet my DC. I did manage to find a good shot of a crowded line up at Pipeline.

It’s less a “line” or queue than it is a free-for-all out there, or so it might seem to the casual observer. There is a real order to things for the most part, and eye contact, body language, and sheer effort often work to help establish who gets which wave. when it’s crowded. Sometimes it gets ugly, but most of the time surfers can sort it out in the water. Look closely at the photo and notice that only one person is actually paddling INTO the wave.

This DC was a minimal effort. I grabbed the shot, pulled it into an image editor, and threw phrase, the TDC created on information, and saved as PNG. Done!

This one was a little tricky to sort out in my chosen “surf edition” approach for this round in 2019. I couldn’t figure out where/how to go, actually. Then I remembered that Brian Hilbers at Fineline has a couple boards named “ant,” the Ant and the Micro Ant.

I grabbed the Fineline “micro ANT” flower image and the label. I made a bunch of copies of the ant in the label and sprinkled them between the surfboards. Then I made a series of layers with the surfboard flower, rotated the boards to set up an animated GIF, and converted the layers to frames for an animated GIF. The image quality in the final GIF isn’t quite what I was hoping for, but I wanted a reduced file size. Tradeoffs abound! I’m reasonably pleased with the outcome.

STOKED
Stoke and the autumn wind are covered,
Your breath did beat on the sea.

This one was pretty easy, actually, and interesting. A mix of AI and words from 19th century poetry, the Poem Portrait tool is part of Google’s Arts and Entertainment effort. Type a word into the poem engine, take a selfie, and get a two-line poem supposedly developed around associations with your chosen word.

The hard parts: What will my word be? What will the photo be?

The glitch here is that Twitter cropped the actual poem in its resizing of the image to fit the Twitter frame.

I happened to have my wetsuit, gloves, and booties hanging on the fence outside. As my goal here is surf themed Daily Creates, I thought that might work well. What’s the word going to be? I thought of fin, swell, waves, and more. Then for some odd reason “stoked” came to mind.

I started the engine, entered my word, and snapped the selfie with the laptop’s webcam. Once I had a Portrait Poem, I downloaded it and added some Proof of Creation Date information. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

I notice that the tool recognizes where the portrait is and superimposes the poem text over it: Portrait Poem. Get it?