March 29, 2009

Simple animation



       Ben came home for the weekend, and he gave me a lesson on simple animation.   This little clip was created with two photos of the little finch.   But there are three frames that loop over and over.   The third frame is a merging of the two separate photos. I would call it superimposing one photo on top of another, but Ben tells me that the correct terminology for this is extrapolation.



       This animation of the little sparrow was made by Ben. It was the demonstration created by him for my lesson.   If you look carefully at both of these animations, you will notice that the colors are not as vivid or sharp as my usual photographs.   There is a good reason for that.   When you save a photograph, you use a .jpg extension. “Jaypegs” are capable of displaying millions of colors!   To convert the jpg’s into animation, you must change the extension fom .jpg to .gif.   Gifs can only use the color safe pallete of 256 colors.   Your browser will approximate the millions of colors from the original jpg, and by a process called dithering, pare down the photo’s colors.   This unfortunately, can make the animated photos look a little grainy.

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March 3, 2009

Today I’m practicing drop Shadows


       I love learning new things and today I have been practicing Drop shadows.   They are a way of creating a 3D effect for text or graphics.   Drop shadows are used to produce a contrast between background and subject matter.

       To accomplish this, I have been using a free software program called The Gimp.   First, I type out the text twice, using two different layers and colors.   Think of layers as copies of the same picture, that can lie on top of each other, because the background is transparent.   The text in the background layer is blurred, and the text of the top layer is positiond over it, but slightly off center.   The last step is to merge (flatten) the layers.









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February 18, 2008


Image maps and hot spots


click on the ingredients


This is a picture of a salad that Megan & I made last summer. I turned it into an image map. This means that there are multiple “hot spots” to click on. Each spot is coded with a set of coordinates. Click on all the hot spots to see what ingredients are in my salad.


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February 17, 2008


Open a new window



Do you ever wonder how you can set a link in a new window?  This can be advantagous if you do not want your reader to wander away from your web site. 
 You can open a link in a new window by using the target attribute in your h ref.   Just set the value to blank.   I will write the code here so you can actually see it.
<a href=”http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038787/” target=”_blank” > read about my favorite movie in a new window


Notorious

read about my favorite movie in a new window


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February 3, 2008




Did you know you can code a picture to act like a link?   Just click on the picture of the snail. This is considered an external link because it takes you to a different web site.

A relative URL takes you to a location inside the same document, so if you click here it will take you to the first page of this journal.

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