After I posted my "clone" photos last week, I received quite a few emails asking me how I did it.  So I’ve decided to throw together a quick tutorial.  Hopefully I can make this clear enough for everyone.  It’s really a quick and easy trick to pull off.

To do this you’ll need to have Adobe Photoshop (I’m using Adobe Photoshop CS2), a camera, preferably a tripod, and a person to take the picture of.

1. Decide what you want the subject to do in the photo.  Try to make it interesting.
2. Set the camera on a tripod.  You’ll be taking two photos and you need the background to be the same in both.  If outdoors you need to take the picture fairly quickly so things like lighting and clouds don’t change much.  Position your subject for the first photo, then move them for the second without moving the camera or changing the adjustments.  It’s easier if the subjects positions aren’t overlapping. 
3. Open the two photos into Photoshop.  In the example below I’m attempting to make it appear as though my friend Luis is jumping over himself.  If you don’t have photos of your own to use but would still like to give this a try, you can use mine by clicking HERE and HERE.

Here’s one last picture from the other day.

Radioman, or "Radio" is a bum.  His real name is Craig Castaldo and he’s a former homeless man from NYC who earned his name by having a large radio hanging from his neck.  What makes him stand out from other homeless guys is the fact that he’s appeared in over 30 major motion pictures, including The Departed, Mr. Deeds, Elf, and Godzilla. 

I first encountered Radioman while I was waiting in line to meet Paul McCartney last November.  At first I thought he was just trying to find a place to sleep, but then the next day we actually saw him in the building waiting in line with the rest of us.  I learned his name when a couple of guys walked by and shouted "Hey Radio!"  He sat there all night rewinding his tape and singing along to commercial jingles that he liked.   It was really annoying.

Fast forward to yesterday – I was in New Haven picking up my costume for Indiana Jones 4, when Radioman bursts into the door and runs right past security.  At first everyone was kind of startled, but once they realized who he was they brought him over, gave him a shave and a costume, and let him be an extra. 

Following the last shoot of the day, Radioman walked towards Steven Spielberg to personally thank him for allowing him be in the movie.  Spielberg let him come right up to him, shook his hand and said  "No problem!  Great to see you again".  Again?  They know each other?  So I looked him up online.  There are pictures of Radioman kissing Jessica Simpson, a story about him in the New York Times, and even a profile on IMDB.   His website features pictures of himself alongside people like Tom Cruise, Pierce Brosnan, and Johnny Depp. 

Radioman used to be homeless and a drunk, but now is able to support himself by collecting the small amount of money he earns from being an extra in movies, and by selling the autographs of the celebrities he meets.  Sometimes he sells autographs for sandwiches.  He’s become well known among New York celebrities, and is a source of information for paparazzi because he’s "in the know" when it comes to celebrity appearances and movie filming. He has hopes of becoming a big actor himself one day.

From the New York Times.

I’m back from the Paul McCartney concert!  Time for the recap:

Let me go back a few weeks to explain this.  About a month ago I
found out that Paul McCartney would be doing some type of live
performance in NYC to promote his new album Memory Almost Full.  Any
large-scale world tour would be postponed to next year due to "personal
issues" (his divorce from Heather Mills).  So being a huge Beatles/Paul
McCartney fan, I did some intense research until I found out the
details of what would be going down.

I found out that the show was going to be a small-scale "secret"
show about two weeks ago and that I’d have to win tickets through a
radio station contest in order to go.  Only a few hundred contest
winners and invited guests would be given tickets.  So after looking
through the websites of nearly every FM radio station from the
country’s major cities, I finally found a contest where you could enter
a raffle to win tickets by correctly answering 20 questions about
Paul.  I didn’t win.  But my friend Steph did, and she offered to take
me.  Amazingly, my friend Bret won as well and offered to take my
brother Justin.  So now we had 3 people from CT’s smallest town attending a concert that thousands of people from around the world were trying to go to, and I was one of them.

More below the cut.

I was hired to give SCSU’s student newspaper’s website a cleaner, more modern look and to keep it up to date with each new weekly edition.  The previous website hadn’t been updated since October, and it looked like it was designed in the mid-90’s.

I think what I’ve come up with works very well.  I tied in SCSU to the design by using the school’s colors and by including the column of the school logo.  I used a Gothic font for the first two letters in the banner but I didn’t want it to feel too stiff, so I switched it over to a more simple serif font for the rest of the letters.  I tried to make the articles very easy to read and the structure easy to navigate.  I also tried to set it up in a way to encourage readers to leave feedback and to share the articles via Facebook and email. 

So far I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback and students seem to be using the site as I intended them too.  We had over 1,000 visitors during the first day and the traffic has remained steady ever since.  If you check it out please let me know what you think.

http://Southern-News.com