The final boss battle

I grew up a video game kid, that was how I rolled. Sure I went out side and played more than I played video games but when I was growing up video games were alot more repetitive. On top of that there were no memory cards, hard drives or Internet so unless you ripped the cheat page out of a game pro magazine or something you had to play the first level every time you decided to give it a go, which sucked. So water fights and hide and seek were alot more appealing back then.Yet and still they had a profound impact on me, and if I didn't find them highly addictive like some sort of mind numbing super crack I would still play them on a regular basis. Sometimes I feel sorry for kids these days. Video games are so cool now they make going out side to play seem really lame. These kids are going to grow up with no kind of imagination and no clue how much fun a game of freeze tag can be. Anyway I'm way off subject now. All this to say it's finals week, and I just realized how much reminds me of the last boss in a video game. Yeah initially you might think that's pretty dorky of me, but if you think about it I'm right. Everyday class are the levels full of little obstacles that you can take out easily no real challenge. Then you make it to the mid boss or in a school the Exam. Given you did everything you should have done in the level the boss should be difficult but beatable. After you defeat the boss you acquire his power which you will need to beat the next set of levels and the next mid boss. (this is the accumulation of knowledge in school) Rinse and repeat until you get to the Final boss who is ridiculously strong and you have to master and use everything you learned up to this point if you hope to come out victorious. The final boss being the final exam which is basically making you use everything you learned so far in order to pass....SEE I WAS RIGHT HUH!

Hey thanks for the thumbs up of approval Hands of many white people!
Back to the point of this. So it's time for the final project for my digital photography class and we have to make a composite panorama photo that is at least 20 inches long. Now for the project before this I got chewed out because I had all these grand ideas for things to shoot but none of them worked out so after like three failures I was out of time and went down town and shot buildings and tried to call it a series. Well the teacher called me on my bullshit and even though my pictures came out nice she said it wasn't 'cohesive enough of an idea to be called a series.' which I actually understood and agreed with. Well I refused to let that happen again for the final project. This time I thought in terms of things I can actually shoot. First I thought about buying a bunch of piñatas grazing in the grass while an angry mob with baseball bats approached for the distance with ill intentions. I thought it was a great idea but then it hit me that I would run into the same problems as the project before this one so I disregarded it..hopefully I'll get to do it one day though. The next idea I got was to cut all the pages out of a book and take their pictures in order one by one and line them up in chronological order then trace a map over them that would guide the reader through the structure of the story. But even though I like the concept I thought it might be visually boring plus the idea of cutting out hundreds of pages then taking hundreds of photos really turned me off...I'm thinking i still do this though but just when I have more time. What I wound up choosing was pretty cool I think not to mention doable.

I had this vision in my mind of a pretty woman in the bubble bath with candles like and rose petals everywhere. The typical romantic sexy set up...but with a catch she would be playing with bath toys like a kid! I thought the contrast of the environment and the action would be pretty funny. So I went to target and bought some bath toys (which are extremely overpriced!) and asked a friend to help, Luckily she said yes and the shoot went pretty well. Now comes the hard part, putting all the pieces together. At home I had photoshop CS2 which has a really lame photomerge option so I had to ...ehem "borrow" a version of cs4 from the Internet. Which took about two hours to download and then even after that it was a dud. So I had to download another and Bingo Bango it was a winner and only took about thirty minutes...go figure.

So when I was in class we went over how to use photomerge and it was fairly simple. All I had to do was click the files I wanted to merge together and photoshop is so "smart" it could do the rest. After that I go into my layer mask the the program so generously created for me fix the parts that don't make since crop off the wonky edges and wallah...all done. Well when I did it thats not what happened at all. I selected the photos to be merged and when photoshop put them together...it was all fucked up...I had "borrowed" a stupid version of photoshop! I thought to myself "That's why it downloaded so fast." I played around with the thing till six in the morning trying all sorts of stuff and watching every tutorial I could find online until I "fuck it," and accepted defeat for the night/morning I decided I would try again after some sleep...(Just like I would do when I was younger and a boss was kicking my ass for too long!)

The next day it's the same problem but luckily for me I had the class that night so I could ask the ever so knowledgeable teacher for help which I did and received. The problem wasn't I downloaded a "special" versions of photoshop. She said t that the images were to similar and the program couldn't tell one from the other. "Oh" I said "that actually makes alot of sense." So she told me I was going to have to do it manually without the automated assistance of photomerge....whoopee...ya for me....I thought with a straight faced look of unexcited glee, and went back to my seat. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be though, honestly it was pretty fun. Luckily I was saving as I went because half way through my computer crashed then froze. At the end of class I go to put my file on my flash drive (which is 4 gigs by the way) and it was too big waaaaay too big! It was like 560 Mb or something. The final boss had hit me with another devastating blow...but I dodged it with my skill this time. I decided to crop it down as small as i could make it and reduce my pixel size and BOOSH! it fit. The finals boss retreated from the screen and his minions are now starting to attack me. (Every final boss does this when he is getting his as kicked then he comes back with different patterns and stronger moves. After that it's over and you save the world or the princess or whatever it is your trying to save watch the boring credits at the end and stare at the screen with a grin for ten minutes) so I got my file home and thats where I am now. When it's finish I'll show it to the world..as for now you can enjoy a picture I took form the shoot.