Category Archives: Images

Nothing but flowers

March 27, 2026 Murph 3 Comments

For #40DaysOfGoodShit days 5-7, I’ve been noticing flowers.

According to the PictureThis app on my phone and Pl@ntNet on the web, this is dead nettle. Looks pretty lively to me.

The lawns in my new neighborhood are full of the stuff. This makes me very happy – these large clumps of low-lying flowers coming up as a sign of spring. I’m sure plenty of people would define these as weeds and perhaps a sign that the builders of the development cheaped out when laying the sod, but I was pretty glad to see these purple eruptions instead of just watching brown lawns slowly turning green.

I just like this shot because I feel like it gives the scale of the flora better.

And then the very next day this happened.

At the same time that I am done with this winter, something about the variability we’re getting this year feels like home to my Washingtonian heart. If you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes.

Berea College has a pretty public commitment to trying to keep its grounds resilient and biodiverse (while also tidy and safe). So it was unexpected but not surprising to discover that the lawns are full of springbeauty.

This doesn’t begin to get the scope of it. There’s literally blocks of the stuff. Like the dead nettle, it’s lovely to see that everything doesn’t have to be just so.

Also, according to Pl@ntNet, springbeauty is formally known as Claytonia virginica, which sounds to me like a magnificent character name. “Claytonia Virginica Walsh sipped her tea, looked at the baseball sitting just inside her fence, and tried to decide which child would be brave enough to open the gate and retrieve it. It looked like the older boys were going to make the little squirrelly one do it.”

*It’s conceivable that’s Claytonia caroliniana, but that’s not nearly as good a character name. I suppose Claytonia Caroline, who goes by Cat, could be a detective in a cozy mystery series, but I’m not impressed.

40DaysOfGoodShit, Daily Create, DS106, Images, Text

Stand in the place where you work

March 3, 2026 Murph 2 Comments

Daily Create #5162 asks where we sit while we do our Open Education work. So here’s a picture of the new office.

In part, I’m just glad that I got those pictures on the wall reasonably straight and spaced without actually measuring. (My home walls have not fared quite so well.) And they tell a little story – the panorama is Cal Ripken’s last at bat, a nod to growing up an O’s fan and paying more attention to baseball in the 1990s than I do now. I picked up “Artist vs Star” at a campus art sale at Kenyon because I liked it and it struck me as edupunky/DS106-y. The Hot Licks Blues Fest poster of Taj Mahal is for my musical side. And the framed poem was a going-away gift from my friend and colleague Chris Gillen, biology professor and poet. It’s titled “How we got through Covid-19 and the times before and after” and it is up there to remind me that I’m actually pretty good at this pedagogy support thing.

Which is nice, because it turns out this is also bell hooks’ first office at Berea. And that reset my impostor syndrome real good. I mean I’m not filling her chair in any literal or metaphorical sense but… see earlier comment, I don’t not-believe in signs.

Anyway it’s neat to imagine Dr. hooks also enjoying this exact view. (Photo taken in December).

Berea College in the snow out my office window

40DaysOfGoodShit, Images

Long as I can see the light

February 27, 2026 Murph 4 Comments

On December 8th, I started a new job at Berea College and found out that my office is in the same room as the Danforth Chapel.

Later that afternoon, we had a family-and-doctors Zoom call about my father’s declining health and the need to start having end-of-life discussions.

I don’t believe in signs. But I don’t not-believe in signs.

It’s a bit of a cheat to call this #40DaysOfGoodShit Day 2, since the photos were taken the Monday before Lent, but it’s my second post in the series and there you have it.

We had another call that day, with a hospice team.

I walked into the chapel after the call. There was a break in the clouds outside such that the sun came streaming through one window and not its neighbor.

Sun coming through the window in Danforth Chapel, Berea College (retouched)

And the colored light fell on the podium in a way that was almost tangible. Illuminating the air itself. Not quite ghostly but perhaps Holy Ghostly.

Light on podium, Danforth Chapel, Berea College (retouched)

I post these, partly to share them with you because it was beautiful, and partly to ask for tips on photo editing. Below you can see an album of the originals of these photos and the retouched versions (as well as an alternate angle which frankly I just don’t love as well). I’ve tried to boost the colors and diminish the brightness a bit to make the light stand out more, like it did in person. It’s not entirely successful at recreating the ethereal effect, but that may just be a limitation of moving from 2 dimensions to 3 (and/or taking photos with my cell phone). But if anyone has ideas of other ways to edit the photos, I’d love to hear them. Actually, they’re all CC-BY-NC; you’re welcome to have at it if you just want to tinker.

Light on podium, Danforth Chapel, Berea College

Biographical, Images, Text

Boychik

March 17, 2016 Murph Leave a comment

I wish it were winter.

I wish it were cold and the wind were biting our cheeks. I’d fix my son’s scarf around his neck and bundle up his coat and tell him that sometimes the rules are stupid, but we follow them anyway. And sometimes the rules are stupid and it’s not that hard to just go around them. We’d sit together at the coffee bar and drink hot chocolate.

But the crocuses are coming up, and our shirtsleeves are poor protection from the wind.

This little monologue or illustrated poem or whatever it is entered my head last night as I was trying to get to sleep, and it was still there this morning.

Both photos are mine, CC-BY-NC, taken on my iPhone and saturation and brightness tweaked in Flickr. The crocus shot was taken just two days ago; I stopped the car to get the shot just before a rainstorm rolled in. The sled shot is from two winters ago.

Daily Create, DS106, Images

Put me in, Coach!

May 30, 2015 Murph 3 Comments

I already drew a map which tells a story, so when TDC 1237 challenged us to make a map which explains nothing, it seemed like a fitting challenge. I was inspired by the map of “Super Bowl Wins By Country” on the TDC page, so here’s:

Change in MLB Batting Average by US State 2005-2014

(Edit: this used to be an interactive map. But Google killed the product. So here’s a screenshot.)

This map is made with Google Fusion Tables. The team batting average data comes from Baseball-Reference.com; the state shapes are a resource file within Fusion Tables. (This introduces the one unintentional inaccuracy in the map – I couldn’t quickly find a shape file including both U.S. states and Canadian provinces, so the Toronto Blue Jays are just left off the map.)

More importantly, its story is a mess. For starters, who would compare team batting average over 10 years? There are so many differences in lineups and managers (and probably even park effects) that it seems like a pointless comparison. (My baseball geek friends are welcomed to debate that point.)

“Batting average by state” is almost as meaningless as “Super Bowls by country” – maybe more so, because it suggests specificity. But if there’s a useful reason to compare the average batting average of the 5 teams in California with the 1 in Maryland, I’m at a loss to explain it. (And you can barely see the poor Nats in DC.)

The state statistics are actually an average of team batting averages in the state, but every team doesn’t have the same number of at bats, so that introduces a little inaccuracy. Not much, but it would show up out at the 4th digit.

And then there’s design. Google only labels the top and bottom of the legend, so we know the bounds, but not what the middle colors correspond to. I picked a green color for half the scale, on a map which is mostly green – very bad for readability, especially in the Satellite view. I also set green to correspond to the biggest declines, and red for the biggest increases, which I think is the opposite of American expectations.

But I did learn a little about Fusion Tables, and practiced normalizing data, so that was fun!

DS106, Images

Sketch the trees and the daffodils

April 12, 2015 Murph 4 Comments

We knew the previous owner of our house was an accomplished gardener, and all summer and fall we enjoyed the fruits of his labor – redbuds and crabapple trees, hostas and yucca flowers. But we’d chosen the house in May, and so we had no idea in our first April that the grove of walnut trees was about to explode into a field of daffodils.

Every year, the daffodils return – even as the trees along the driveway have started to crowd each other, even through the many years when the magnolias only have browned and wilted frostbitten flowers, even when the squirrels eat our crocus bulbs and the deer decimate the hostas. Every year, at least for a moment, they surprise and encourage me.

Today was that day.

It’s also a day when I can celebrate the fact that I’m making a little progress as an iPhone photographer, and more as a photo editor. The preset Flickr filters completely let me down on this photoset, and I had no hesitation about fiddling with the sliders myself. The first photo, for example, is unretouched, but on the second one, I added just a bit of saturation to the colors. My goal was to get the yellow centers of the daffodils to pop a little; notice how it also makes the grass translucent, and even makes the downed wood in the back show up better.

(I’m not lazy, I’m grasscycling.)

I also used editing to save a couple shots. This isn’t a bad picture – I like the way the flowers stretch to the background, but the one which fell over messes up the line, and the garage of the neighbors’ damned McMansion is incongruous in the background.

My wife pointed out that it’s really a photo of the two closest daffodils… so I cropped it down until that’s what it was. (I really like the way the Apiary/Flickr photo editor is designed to remind you of the rule of thirds.) A little tweak of the contrast setting and voila:

On the next one, I actually quite like the way I got close-up on the flowers, with the vertical lines of the not-quite-awake trees against the sky. But there’s that damned garage again.

I had hoped the Focus tool would make the garage go away; it didn’t, and it became a photo about how I found the Focus tool. So back to the crop tool I went. I had to lose a little bit of the trees, because the vertical impact was too strong in the narrower photo, but on the whole I’m pleased.

I suppose the next lesson is to see these photobombs while shooting instead of fixing them in post, but it’s nice to have a growing sense of what’s fixable.

Happy Spring to you and yours!

DS106, Images

All alone in the moonlight

March 24, 2015 Murph Leave a comment

I used to piss and moan about the cold. I took winter personally, as if the creeping cold and damp grey skies were a direct affront, some rude gesture designed to put me in my place.

The winters of the last few years have disabused me of that notion. Something about 0 Fahrenheit, about -10 Fahrenheit, hit a reset button. Obviously this was not a force which cared a whit for my little existence. This was something monumental; a simple, brutal, elemental force to be endured.

I also know that the last snowfall in this area can be as late as April 15th, but I let nature fake me out with a week of very pleasant temperatures. Yeah, that one felt personal.

So I let it shake a mashup loose, which I’d imagined some time ago. I’m actually surprised I couldn’t find it already in existence:

The background is an HBO wallpaper of the Iron Throne, and the tag line is the motto of House Stark. (I thought about using a picture of Sean Bean, but let’s be honest, it’s been done.)

The little mouse is Leo Lionni’s Frederick. Frederick is a twist on the tale of the ant and the grasshopper – while the other mice industriously harvest food for the winter, Frederick sits about and “harvests” the senses and stories of summer and fall. When the dark and cold comes, the mice have laid up enough food to go on… and Frederick has kept enough memories to give them a reason.

Technically, this was a nice easy combo to work with – Lionni’s pages are simple, so I just selected all the white in the image and made it transparent. (And then I got to paint the whites of Frederick’s eyes back in.) I wish perhaps I’d spent a little more time cleaning up the edges, but the lighting in the HBO shot is weird enough already (coming from both in front of and behind the throne) that a little highlighting around the mouse and flower isn’t too offensive.

Artistically, I like the juxtaposition of gentle Frederick and the violent Iron Throne. Winter can make us mean. Our bodies even respond to cold by hunching in on ourselves. It’s a time which rewards hoarding and holing up… maybe that’s why Americans put our major food-sharing and gift-giving holidays in it. Frederick responds to this instinct to hoard by preparing to give of himself – his memories, his sensations, his art – because he knows his community will need that too, and he knows no one else is preparing for it.

So make art, dammit.

DS106, Images, Text

Hamster Dance

February 24, 2015 Murph 3 Comments

I bought myself an Intuos tablet some time ago at work, on the grounds that I would use it for Big Serious Stuff like annotating screenshots or making screencapture videos. In theory, drawing with a mouse is hard and a pen interface should be easier. In practice, a tablet input is neither like a mouse or a pen (or a touchscreen) and it can be frustrating to get started.

And there it sat, gathering dust, taunting me to read the manual, pick software, practice, prove myself worthy.

Now might be a good time to point out that I describe my drawing talents as “maxed out at stick men.” So when it said I wasn’t worthy, I assumed it was right.

I brought it home a while back, thinking big thoughts about how I’d use it to think about the shape of stories, especially as they relate to the stories we tell when we do technology trainings. Sitting on the dining room table, it caught my son’s eye.

“Daddy, what’s that?”

“Oh, it’s for drawing on the computer.”

“Can I try?”

“I guess so… but I have to plug it in and find the software and all that.”

“OK. Well, can we do that?”

“Um… yeah. Yeah OK. Let me see.”

It’s hard to enter the Kingdom of Technology like a little child, after I’ve debugged and disinfected and documented professionally for so long. It’s a challenge to ask “why not?” But I got the drivers installed, and after dorking around looking for the “right” software, I figured out that Microsoft Paint would work as well as anything for letting my kid play.

And it wasn’t simple, his learning to match up the pen to the screen. After a bit, he got it and started exploring Paint. An arrow became a house. Green squiggles became grass. A line was the horizon; the fill tool gave him purple grass and a yellow sky.

And he said it was my turn.

How about a bunny? I think I can draw a bunny. (It’s like a dog with no neck and bunny ears, right?) Hey, maybe the spraypaint brush will make the fur look more furry. A bunny should be on grass. OK, painting that grass was kind of annoying, what if we do the sky with a fill tool?

Draw your stuffed hamster? Sure, why not. I can draw Hamster.

Oh, the hamster’s name is Rhino? Of course it is. I’ll draw Rhino.

Objectively, I know it’s … primitive. But the fact is, I made it, and making it was fun. And I pretty much killed the excuse that learning how to use the tablet would be too hard.

I’ve tried to get multiple faculty members to try out these tablets, and few of them are willing to put in the work. I wonder if the problem is that I haven’t asked them to just draw a happy little tree.

Biographical, Daily Create, Images

Everybody Eats When They Come To My House

January 28, 2015 Murph Leave a comment

Cross-posted from my thoughts on education blog, because a daily create for the You Show looks a lot like one for DS106. Starting to understand why Jim Groom is pushing the “write once, publish anywhere” idea of Known.

I love to be in the kitchen. The kitchen is my playhouse. It’s a place where I can focus, where learning and doing emulsify, where this singular moment connects to long tradition. I expect I could find the path from the stove to the fridge to the sink with my eyes closed.

OW! Well, I can if the cat’s not in the way.

So it was easy to drop what I was doing and answer the question “where’s the you in your kitchen?” I had a quick look around – knives on a magnetic strip on the wall, utensils on hooks, fridge, cluttered counters, the sink…

the Lodge cast iron skillet. The stove is my place in the kitchen, and what I want on that stove is either that heavy black pot frying chicken, or the large brewing kettle full of wort.

Yes, the cabinets really are that cattywampus. It’s an old house.

This was a pretty quick shoot – though I did have to get the stock pot down and declutter the counter a bit. No flash, though it took one overexposed shot to learn that. I’ve loved playing with the presets in the Flickr app, but this shot didn’t need them.

I’m a relative latecomer to the smartphone world, and I’m still getting used to this idea that I am always carrying a camera. I tried to become a shutterbug for a while in my early teens, but it never really took. If playing with the You Show and DS106 only made me better at taking photos (and more conscious/confident of the option to take photos), that would be a big step in the right direction.

Daily Create, DS106, Images

I’m not your handyman

January 11, 2015 Murph Leave a comment

A visiting faculty member in Music found out that, back in high school, I played the flute. He fixed me with a stare like a dog gives someone who doesn’t play with a ball and said “well, why aren’t you in my wind ensemble?”

I said “I used to play. It’s been 20 years!”

The corner of his mouth rose. “And tomorrow, it will be 20 years plus one day.”

I’m still not in the Wind Ensemble, but the phrase has stuck with me. And so, before the cobwebs on this blog are “2 months plus one day” old, a few short writeups.

I made this one for TDC 1051. The create starts with exploring Unsplash, looking for a photo which seems to want a DS106-themed caption.

Well, I can’t help it, I’m a punster from way back, so this is the one which spoke to me. A dad joke for a picture of dad’s workbench.

That leads to the visual challenge – where and how to place the text. I still have a lot to learn about color palettes and tricks like drop shadows which can enhance the visibility of text. I remember that brighter colors popped on this image, but they also looked cartoony, fighting with the detailed photo. It was also tricky to find the location – the light and shadow in the upper right, the diagonals of the folding rule, the bright light on the lower left. Ultimately, all those restrictions led to their own solution – if the caption doesn’t fit in a single block, where do two smaller blocks fit?

I’d welcome any comments which might help me think about this kind of design.

Joe’s DS106 Site