Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Plenty of people have tried XX things in XX days schemes, such as the The Blog Herald’s wildly successful and interesting 100 blogs in 100 days, but where these ideas fail is in the content they provide. Typically a blogger asks his readers for contributions and then posts them over the course of some period of time. This allows for, on a popular blog, a distribution of new ideas, but it contains nothing of the blogger himself.

What I want to do is different than blogging pro bono. I believe that a blogger needs to put some of his own skill into a post, to remix and rehash the content provided by his readers. It’s more interesting when there’s an application of your skills to reader-submitted content.

Let me introduce the idea: blogging ars pro bono. What I will offer over the course of the next month is a case study in a cycle that takes user-submitted content, remixes it with special skill, and then releases it back onto the web. “Technique for the good,” an elevation of the interaction between blog and reader.

In my case, the skill I offer for the next 30 days is digital retouching. Everyday I will retouch a user-submitted portrait and post it on the blog, along with a short text description of the author, subject, details, website, anything. If you are interested in submitting a photo to be digitally retouched, please send an email to ecb29@cornell.edu with “Digital Retouching” in the subject line, a brief textual summary including attribution, title, and a link, as well as a high-resolution photograph. The first 30 submissions will be queued and released over the next 1 month.

Ars photoshop is my gift to you, blog readers, pro bono.

This is a particularily cute entry from www.worth1000.com/cache/contest/contestcache.asp?contest_id=7285&start=1&end=10&display=photoshop :

“O Lord, why do I throw like a girl?”

If you were to follow this great retouching in photoshop guide, you could totally produce pictures like this every time:

Notice how sharp my eyes are, how smooth and wrinkle free my skin is! It’s like a total photoshop makeover. Finally I look hot!

UPDATE:

For those who doubt my skills, this is a really ugly photograph of me. I just added the javascript to prove it. Mouse over to see the original… in all its “I just woke up” glory….