3rd post

I have been having fun using Photoshop, but it does seem to take a lot of time. Hopefully as my skills improve, my time spend on each project will decrease.

I am sure there are some ways that I could use my newfound Photoshop skill in the workplace. I am experimenting with a web site for my class that I teach. Right now the web site is very crude, and I have not been doing a good job of keeping it up-to-date, but I am sure that with a little Photoshop I could really spruce it up. Also, since I work for a Career & Technical School, marketing and recruitment are important issues. We have a wonderful marketing department at C-Tec, but I could also contribute in some small ways. For instance, I could use Photoshop to make a photo collage to be displayed in the hallway display case just outside my classroom. It would be a way of letting outsiders see what types of things we do in class and hopefully generate a little PR for the program.

For our most recent photophop assignment, I created a Gatorade advertisment in which a snail is racing a stock car. I had a hard time coming up with an idea for an original advertisement, so I decided to spoof an existing ad campaign. Somehow, the idea of a racing snail popped into my mind, so I took the idea and ran with it. I am pretty pleased with how it turned out. I shared it with some of my students and got a pretty good laugh.

2nd (belated) post

Whoops - I guessed I missed the blog portion of our assignment. I'll play a little catch-up.

For the second assignment, I based the topic of my images on the digital pictures I had available to me. Although I own a digital camera, I don't take too many pictures. I teach engineering technologies, and I had some pictures of my students surveying. I took my only picture that included the students' entire body and placed him in an interesting setting that would "work" with what he was doing, which was surveying. I thought that an easily recognizable background which would sort of go with surveying was the Egyptian Pyramids. The hardest thing to do was to get the shadows to work out right. In my opinion, the drop shadow feature is rather limited, unless I am just not aware of all the ways to manipulate it. So I ended up drawing the student's shadow free hand and filling in the outline with the paint bucket tool.

I ended up spending so much time on this image, that my other two weren't nearly as good. I made a picture of my dog, George, balancing several balls (football, tennis ball, etc.) on his head, and picture of my wife on the deck of a cruise ship, with a shark leaping out of the water in the background.

I like to make my images comical by juxtaposing things you wouldn't ordinarily see, so I will attempt to my my future images as funny as possible.

Inaugural Blog

Welcome to my first blog. I am Craig Whitson, a civil engineer turned math teacher, turned engineering technology teacher. I work for C-Tec (career technical education center) of Licking County. I actually teach at the COTC (Central Ohio Technical College) campus in Newark. My multimedia experience includes various drafting and modeling software (AutoCAD, Chief Architect, Sketchup) as well as some dabbling with web page design using Front Page. My teaching website can be seen at http://mrwhitson.50webs.com