Happy Guinea Pig Christmas!!!

Merry Christmas, from Bailee the Guinea Pig

IT'S A GUINEA PIG CHRISTMAS!
Having fun with computer graphics

This year I wanted to do things a little different for Christmas. Since the economy wasn't doing so hot, I thought I'd make all my gifts from the ground up. So I fired up the oven and baked myself some cookies and fudge to give away. I then teamed up with my friend to create "Guinea Pig" themed Christmas cards.

Creating these cards took a little brainpower, computer power, but overall it wasn't that hard. In fact, here's how I did it! Maybe you can do it too!

Ingredients needed:

• 1 photogenic pig who isn't camera shy
• 1 friend who knows how to create costumes and props for their pig
• 1 film or digital camera
• 5 pieces of white paper
• 1 whiteboard
• photo-shop or equivalent photo editing program

Creating your own studio at home

The first step was to create the studio. Miniature Photo and video studios are rather simple to create. They are in essence, a solid color wall that is shaped like a ramp wall of a skate park. The effect you want to create is called an infinite wall, or a shot without a horizon. To do this, I took a white-board and removed the sidings from it. I then placed it flushed against the wall and took pieces of folder paper, taping them from the wall to the white-board, effectively ridding the photo of a detectable horizon.

The taping multiple pieces of plain white paper gets rid of a detectable horizon in photographs.

You don't really need to be to exact when creating the infinite wall for small projects such as this. The goal here is to to make to take a great shot that will be easier to work with in the computer

The original photo. Take note, the infinite wall is visible here, but it's still very easy to fix.
Also note the harsh shadows in the picture. You want this.

Now for the fun part. Hopefully by now, your best friend has dressed the guinea pig with ant leers. Take your camera and start snapping away. It's 100% a.o.k. to use a harsh flash for this shot, because you do want harsh shadows cast on your white-board. Harsh shadows will make it easier for you to place your guinea pig into any scenery you wish. Make sure exposure is perfect and you're good to go.

The touched up shot, with a new head, Santa hat, and presents in the sleigh.

I liked the original shot, but the only problem, the guinea pigs head was a little blurry, and she didn't look too happy. So I took her head off from another shot, and placed it on the new head. This was done rather easily with Corel Phot0-paint, my bitmap editor of choice (I like it much better than Photoshop for most things.) The next step was to remove the background, and that was as easy as selecting the background color and replacing it with the snow background of my choice. The process is very similar to what you see done on television weather reports, where meteorologists stands in front of a green screen. Whatever is green is replaced with a weather map; same-same here.

So the final picture was what you saw above. I did a few more pictures using the same technique as well.

I was thinking about submitting these pictures to Hallmark..what do you think?
This one is funny.


I like this one too

On another note, my Christmas was great. For Christmas Eve, I made my signature prime-rib roast and smoked a turkey. Christmas Day, I basically didn't do much other than play football with my younger cousins. Football every year with my younger cousins is actually a traditions. It's about 11 or 13 of them, with my Uncles, against myself and 4 or my 1st cousins. Yes, it's 13 on 5, but hey, we actually only lost by 1 touchdown. My ability, makes up for 8 of my younger cousins...hahaha.

Anyway everyone. Hope you had a Merry Christmas. New years for me will be rather busy, as I have weddings line up on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd!!


Steve Young
Hawaii Wedding Report
http://www.dreamweddingshawaii.com