I Came Upon a Unicorn

Submitted in fulfillment of Splash the Color visual assignment located here

Story

While you’re reading, you can enjoy (or more likely not) me playing Colors of the Wind on the recorder (embedded below the photo). I chose this to play because it has the word “Colors” in the title…the selection criteria is very stringent.

I came upon a unicorn whilst walking in a wood
Humbled by its aura I was frozen where I stood

Up to me it came and sang its song of rainbow light
Aware I was unworthy of this truly wondrous sight

My strength then fled as I was lured to the path below me
The world could offer nothing more was truth I now could see

It was to rainbow song my last thread of conscience harkened
My mind was glowing past its seams as the world around me darkened

Process

I read the assignment prompt and looked over the visual assignments, but didn’t pick any. Instead I went to a couple of parks and downtown Fredericksburg and just started taking pictures. I’ve never had any training or been a photographer or anything and I just wanted to get a feel for how it works. As I got used to it I started experimenting with different points of view and got this picture which I love, though I prefer the full color version.

From a technology standpoint, I edited this photo in PowerPoint. (Rant incoming) I love using PP for photo editing, but my pretentious photography friends denigrate that all the time. I KNOW photoshop is amazing, and even free versions like Inkscape can do amazing things, but sometimes those are just total overkill, and I don’t think PP gets enough credit for how it can contribute to a bunch of different digital tasks outside of presentations. To back this up, I made a tutorial video:

As for the music, I don’t mix or anything like that, I use Audacity (free) just to record and upload. I think I could probably do it straight to SoundCloud, but I’ll think about that later.