A Room With A View

I'm currently working on a few new articles for the newspaper at Robert Morris University, and one of them revolves around the non-for-profit organization Action Now. 

Action Now is a grassroots organization focusing on educating awareness of the state of living wage jobs, quality public education, and affordable housing for communities, and then organizing and mobilizing communities to form strong voices to be heard for changes they would like to see. 

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to observe a protest they were putting on at the Illinois capitol building in Springfield. 

While I was there I took some photos. Quite a few actually.

I'm still working on some of photos and the article. 

However, I have a small offering of a panorama I took, and a variant of it. 

These are about 20 photos stitched together with Photoshop. They have been saved at 60% to save on loading times and storage. I'm no professional, but with every step forward I get a bit better. You can click on them to see them larger. 

Learn more about Action Now here

As always there is more to come...

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Ain't No Job Like A Snow Job

So, we had another heavy snowfall last night in the ol' Midwest of the U.S. of A. We got an estimated six inches of snow. ;) Mother Nature keeps giving it to us! I swear she's just trying to keep me from going to the zoo so I don't complete my final for Animal Behavior. Maybe she just doesn't want me to see the red wolves there. Anyway, I woke up early this morning due to the fact that I haven't been sleeping well lately, and with a heavy head full of the knowledge that I was going to be in front of the computer all day finishing up a brochure and a documentary for school I decided wanted to do a lil' sumpin' sumpin' fun for me. 

During my morning Facebook scroll over coffee I found a fantastically appropriate Photoshop tutorial about changing a sunny sky into a snowy one. So, after scouring through past photos of the perfect sunny day, and consequently photo dumping a load of fun photos of friends online, I hopped on that tutorial like a sexy lil' snowbunny in fresh powder.

And.... here are the results....

Michael enjoying a Corona on a sunny summer lake day

Michael half in Tibet and half on the lake 

Michael enjoying a frosty beverage on a snowy day in Tibet

I had a great time doing this tutorial, and I'll no doubt do more later. I also learned some quick tips & tricks about working with layers. 

For anyone interested in doing it yourself here is the free tutorial I used. Enjoy! 

tuts+ - How To Add Realistic Falling Snow To A Photo In Photoshop

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