.gifs

While riding from Jacksonville to the farm we found a rickety old playground in the boondoggles.

I made some crude .gifs of the occasion with Laurens camera.

I have long been a sucker for animated .gifs

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In case you’re wondering…..

How does one make gifs?

Here is one free/legal way to make yourself an Animated Graphics Interchange Format file:

/*Keep in mind there are much better and easier ways to do this sort of thing*/

Shoot frame by frame what you want to animate with a camera, draw over an existing picture or from scratch on a computer or rip a video file into a bunch of images.

If using a camera lower the resolution and shoot in burst mode (how many pictures the camera can take at a time depends on the resolution, memory card speed, and camera’s brains)

Hugin (optional)

good for aligning pictures usually for panoramas. Will only work with fancier cameras that embed exif data into their pictures (unless you happen to know/guess/look up what you have). Laurens camera did not cut it which is why there is some wobble in the above shots. It will quickly become apparent if your camera makes the grade. Tripods are good.

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Batch image re-sizer program (there are a f-ton of programs,  I used VSO image resizer for no reason)

hi res pictures w/lots of different frames = huge file unfit for the internets

*You may actually want to save this step for last and keep a huge local copy for the future when things may not need to be 320×240 to load fast

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Gimp

open as layers,  filters -> animation -> optimize (for .GIF) -> save as animation

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Upload to somewhere that will accept the larger file size and animated .gif format.

I used Image Beast.net (10mb limit)  there are probably dozens of others

Photobucket.com will re-size the animation to its 1mb limit….which could potentially be a good thing.

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Impress and annoy everyone you know with your stupid .gifs

I’ve never used it but the free program photoscape look like it might do all of the above steps.

Overall .gif is a pretty dated and shitty image format, consider the newer, larger, much more obscure but increasingly supported: .aPNG

-J

P.S.

Here are some other crappy .gifs I’ve made over the years, as you can see I am no expert:

for my sissy

of the bikes

time lapse of me staining a fence in San Diego

A phone call

me after riding to Austin in 2007

….And drunk man

P.S.  someone tell Lauren to start making posts again.

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