So That's What I Look Like

Yes that is me in the picture. You can click it to see a larger version if you like. I needed a photograph of myself for inclusion in the 2006 International Space Development Conference Space Art Track Programming Guide. To get the picture, I set up my digital camera on a tripod and took a photo of myself sitting in my office chair. With the magic of Photoshop, I erased my office background from the picture. I then used Photoshop to create a separate picture of an astronomical scene to use as a background. I then merged the two pictures together and scaled them down to the required size. Creating my picture for the program guide in this manner served two purposes. First, it was the opportunity to create a distinctive portrait for the program guide and second it was to give me one more excuse to experiment in Photoshop, which is my preferred image editor.

Too bad my night sky doesn't really look like what is shown in the picture but living in a Chicago suburb – our night sky consists of a bland orange background and a handful of stars. Well that's not really true for the suburbs but take a trip to downtown Chicago and look up: you'll see what I mean. Who knows, if all the world's skies were as bad as Chicago's, we'd probably still believe that ours was the only galaxy and the heliocentric model would be alive and well.

Ad Astra, Jim

| Return to the Blog Index | This entry was posted on Friday, October 13th, 2006 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Digital Photography.