Home › Forums › Shoot to Serve Assignments › Opportunity: VersePic: "Seek Ye First"
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Benjamin Holmes.
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February 20, 2017 at 5:57 pm #21734
Benjamin Holmes
ModeratorThis weeks VersePic was what I would call an “Urgent Care” or Emergency VersePic. Due to various circumstances, I had to postpone working on it until the deadline was looming above me, and then after spending a long time working on the photo I had picked, I found that I was having extreme difficulty working with it too the point that I didn’t have any more time and couldn’t work on it any longer! It’s at times like these it’s time to panic! Or, … not.
In a year of producing a weekly podcast, you get pretty familiar with deadlines. Late nights aren’t a stranger to any of us I’m sure, and I’m almost certain that I do my best work with segments, sermons, and VersePics late at night. Not that I want that to happen mind you, but it does happen, and we always have to deal with it! This week, I had forgotten about a church activity, so I wasn’t even able to really sit down and work until the afternoon! And of course, we all always get to loll around the house on a weekend… 😉 After I found out that the picture I had been working really hard on wouldn’t work, I hit Pixabay to find one that would, and after some diligent searching, I did!
I adore this photo. Period. It looks amazing and there is just a breadth to the shot that amazes me! I also love the use of light here, where the haze on the mountains and the distance just turns to a white sky. I say I found this photo, but really, it sort of it was more of a “WOW! I DESPERATELY NEED THIS IN A VP!” moment! That photo was so perfectly edited and shot by the photographer, I didn’t need, or want to edit it all all, so I didn’t. (Also, when I went to see if I could improve what was already there, I found I couldn’t!)
The text was fairly simple, with just two fonts, both Italicized, with no artwork, and with no drop shadows. There was only really one challenge to the text this time, and that was to try to find a way to get a good shape. After extensive experimentation, I found that detaching some of the text and making it slightly smaller than the rest of the verses gave me the best looking shape, and without me telling you that, you really wouldn’t be able to notice, although there is a pronounced difference to the original size in terms of how it looks.
Dark text is always a challenge to work with, as the struggle for contrast balance and a feeling of natural color is one that can often be hard to create. Solutions I’ve used in the past have been to use very specially colored drop-shadows, lower the opacity below 100% (80% usually looks pretty good!), or to try and find a good color from the image itself using an eyedropper tool. I went with the eyedropper option here, grabbing a great dark bluish color from the hiker’s backpack. Because of the fantastic lightly colored and lightly detailed background, the text popped easily without the slightest bit of a drop-shadow, and looked much cleaner that way too, so I left that alone.
That’s pretty much it! Emergency VersePics tend to be simple, and I like it that way. A saying I use definitely applies here: If you have to do tons of editing to make a photo work, you’d probably be better off using a different one. The thought I want to emphasize here from that phrase, however, is not that if the going gets tough you should just give up and try something else, but rather that we need to be aware of our limitations. My limitation here was time. I couldn’t afford to stick with the image I wanted to use, but instead of recognizing that I was on a deadline and the work needed to get done now, I wanted to “stick it out” and find some way to use the photo when I knew I couldn’t. I wasted a lot of valuable time on something when I knew I didn’t have that much of it, and that’s never a good idea. If I had more time, I probably could have used that image, but I didn’t have that, and I needed to move on.
Recognizing our limitations, whether they come from your editing software, looming deadlines, shooting location, or even our limited resources helps us to think about what we can do, and how we can use the talent and the ability that God has given us in a better way.
Hopefully that all made sense to you! In any case, one more thing I wanted to mention is that we’ve been actively and passively working on a huge upgrade to the VersePics section of our website, so definitely go check that out at http://www.sharpeningcharacter.com/versepics and give us some feedback!
One final thing I wanted to do is to actually show you how VersePics are used on mobile devices, and hopefully that will both answer a lot of questions on why I need the photos I need, and also why VersePics are so useful for memorizing and meditating on God’s Word. The photo below should hopefully explain everything, but if it doesn’t, head over to the newly designed VersePics section on our website!
an iPhone 6s and 6s Plus with our specially formatted “Phone” size of VersePicHave a great day in the Lord!
Ben
VersePics Director for Sharpening CharacterFebruary 20, 2017 at 9:17 pm #21742Benjamin Holmes
ModeratorHi Guys! Just wanted to let you know the newest Shoot to Serve request has been released! You’ll be shooting for Matthew 16:24-25:
“Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”
As they say, have at it! 😉
https://www.lenspiration.com/forums/topic/versepics-take-up-your-cross/#post-21741
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