The images below began as real photographs. They were haplessly scanned into my computer and then digitally altered using that fantastic kitchen sink of a photo editor, Adobe Photoshop.

Photoshop allows you to take photos and cut them apart, layer them on top of each other, and blend them together, which you might do if you were carefully balancing a picture of a guitar on top of my head (see Guitar Hat). You can also "paint" with parts of pictures, which makes it easy to add more hair to someone's head (see the Jon Swartz images). You can also have fun with fonts, as I did when making the "Digitally Altered" title above. With a computer and a tool like Photoshop, the only limit is your own imagination and creativity!

City At Night It all started one cold November night in 1998, while I was visiting my friend Mike in Chicago. First we played around with some digital pictures he had of his coworkers at the water cooler. Then we ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant and ran downtown to catch some fireworks from his 31st story office window above Michigan Ave., but we didn't make it in time. We bought tickets to Enemy of the State and eagerly anticipated catching the trailer for the new Star Wars movie. After the movie we wandered around Michigan Ave., had some ice cream, and took pictures of each other and the holiday lights, with Mike's Fujifilm DX-5 digital camera. We took those pictures home, uploaded them to his Powerbook G3 laptop, and arranged and layered them to create this movie poster. The main part of the poster is a composite of two or three photos—my face, the light trails of car headlights, and some well-decorated trees. The bottom two photos are of Mike and me in his apartment. Pretty cool, and overall a fun day. (The next day we went to a Billy Joel concert, but that's a different story.) Enjoy the rest of my digital photos below.

A Mike In The Hand		Guitar Hat

Digitally Alter Your Friend!
This is my friend Jon Swartz. With more hair than usual and a really big mustache, of course. What a grinning old fellow.		For comparison, this is Jon before being digitally altered. Notice the profound emotional effect the lack of a mustache can have.

Jon Swartz In a dusty closet somewhere was a stack of 24 pictures. Each picture contained an image of Jon's face, undergoing one of 24 different expressions. They fell into the wrong hands. With material so inspiring, it was only a matter of time before I'd created a whole new image for my friend Jon. The Setting Swartz Witness the bizarre results of the combination of Jon Swartz and Adobe Photoshop. You've already had a sampling. But for the most hilarious pictures yet, you must see the Setting Swartz. They deserve a page all to themselves.

Jon, Washington, D.C.		Jon In The Theater

Power Of The Typist		To Become One With Internet

ZAP		BLAST