14 posts tagged “city”

Here are a couple of photos from my New York trip.  Fist, a random street scape, and then a shot of the Armory (where the Print Fair was held):

For my graphic design class we had to play with the letter A, in Helvetica.  The first part of the assignment was to deconstruct and rearrange the letter using cut-outs and stenciling.  Then we took a foam version and brought it around Portland to be photographed.  Here's one of my photos:

I'm back at MECA now, meeting all the new people and waiting for classes to start (Tuesday).  I have a nice sunny single room on the top/fifth floor of the dorms.  Here are a couple photos of my view, which is a lot more exciting than it was last term... I can even see the ocean!

Though Portland has a great many beautiful brick buildings, there are of course many that are far more prosaic.  This is one of them:

I took this picture probably a month ago... I just haven't shared it yet.  This is a wall next to a playground in downtown Portland:

Ever felt the urge to jazz up your photos beyond a simple levels adjustment?  I know I have.  I don't have the know-how to do awesome effects in Photoshop Elements, though, and I don't have any of those cool novelty cameras (e.g. Lomo or Holga) that do them for you.  That's why I was so happy to learn about Picnik, a website that mimics their effects.  And it's free!  (Well, there is a "Premium" option with even MORE cool stuff, but the free part is certainly good enough for my purposes.)  Here's an example of what it does:

It's a photo of the Clapp House, the former MECA admissions building recently donated to the Portland Museum of Art (to which it is adjacent).  The original of this photo was very blue.  I altered it using a mix of Picnik's "1960's" and "Cross Process" functions.  In the future, I'll tag any Picnik-edited photos with "picnik."  If it doesn't have the tag, it was most likely edited in Photoshop, if at all.

No, not the movie (though it was excellent)... I mean the building material.  Boring ol' brick, in use for over nine thousand years.  Brick buildings became common in New England around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and the region still contains many beautiful old mills, factories, and warehouses.  Portland has an extremely high number of brick buildings, due to an 1866 fire that destroyed most of the city.  Here are a couple:

Today I discovered a strange tradition that happens in Portland (dating to the late 1970's, according to the Phoenix).  On Valentine's Day, these red hearts show up everywhere:

My art history class (actually, all the AH 101 classes) went to the Boston MFA on Friday.  I stayed after to hang out with my friend Miriam!  Here's a snapshot just to illustrate how different Portland and Boston are:

This looks like a nice place to have lunch... unless there's a fire!