My hiatus is over. I have taken a month off from blogging, on purpose – but didn’t announce it as such. Every now and then I need some time without thinking about my blog, what to write and what pics to take. It was good, and yeah I missed blogging at some moments, but also: it felt good to know I was on a break. If I make sense!

I am back though! And I feel like blogging again and sharing all kinds of stuff I discover :). My first topic of this year isn’t about a location….it is about something that is just fun, inspiring and surprising: pile-up pics on Flickr.

A ‘pile-up’ is a picture, usually an avatar in front of a green-screen, which you submit to special Flickr-groups, so people can download them and create a new picture of it. Be it in Photoshop, GIMP or whatever editing software they use.
In the past I have tried to pile-up some people, and it is great to do. You can play with an image, let your imagination go wild and mostly: it is fun to work on a pic that is not YOUR own avatar for a change.

The green screen is so that Photo-shoppers can easily select the background and remove it, to create a new set around the avatar. It is why, when you make your green screen image, it is important to think about a few things for the artists:

• Make sure you wear hair that isn’t too wild, no loose hairs..as less lose strands as possible, as those will make it really difficult to process and remove the green screen
• Same for clothing and accessories: keep them simple and not with many small details, to make it easier to transform your outfit and/or add props to the image by the artist. Less is more!
• Upload in the highest resolution you can handle without it getting blurry. For me 3000px wide work best, but some can do higher
• Make sure the settings on your image on Flickr are so that people can actually download it, and then the common license allows them to work on it! An ‘all rights reserved’ pic is of no use for this!

Last night I took two pictures of myself, in front of a green screen (which you can easily make yourself: just stretch a prim for background and colour it bright green – one of the default colours) and posted them on my Flickr and in some pile-up groups (links at the end of this blog-post).
 

This morning I was pleasantly surprised to see some people ‘played;’with me and I am really in awe over the results! So cool to see what they did with my avatar!

 

 

 

I should say, give it a try..either pick a photo from one of the groups or add yourself and wait…..it is fun!

Some pile-up groups on Flickr:

And they keep coming, oh my…..I didn’t expect so many and they are all so amazing!