For now...

I've edited photos semi-heavily in the past. But nothing compares to the job I am doing now.

I put put together two or three photos, mixed, took a copy of that amalgam photo, and put a flipped version of it and its original side to side. This itself looks organic and good. But there was all this empty space in the middle that screamed at me.

So I have taken up pseudo-painting to fill and shape that space (read: artfully using a clone brush and avoiding palettes. I don't even know where palettes are on Photoshop).

I've also been cleaning up imperfections left over from the photo mixing process. In retrospect, I should've done this BEFORE I put two of the same picture side by side. However, going about this the really long way will make little nuances different on either side.

I say all of this because, when finished--hopefully--this will be the crown piece in my show collection.

It is potentially that good, maybe even more than "Welcome Home" (i.e. the abandoned burnt out building).

We'll see.

Tomorrow brings more monkey testing and standing or sitting in a room for an hour doing, well, almost nothing. It's a part of an experiment. Just two more pilot animals to do and then I don't need to do this particular bit for a few months.

My assistant Rachel wants more to do and recently sent an e-mail with lots of questions. I accepted her on for that same intellectual curiousity, and it is more fulfilling than just playing manager. She really likes the behavior observations she's doing and wants to do more stuff for the project. I say hot damn skippy. If she could code videotape data of the HIP AND NEP, Jah love that would be keen. And if she wanted to do the carrot test for the NEP too, I might just have to figure out incentives to keep her around for another 2 years.

Motivated assistants are worth their weight in diamonds.

I'm also happy to report that the 3rd set of revisions has gone more quickly than I thought. As usual my advisor was right...about most of his suggestions. For this particular version I'm setting up the graphs and legends at the end (so that reading the Results section isn't just a shitty game of Boggle). I'm also checking out the 'author guidelines' of the journal we want to submit the beast to. It has minutiae like whether I should italicize my p-values. I can do minutiae.

What I can't do is stay awake any longer.

previous - next