Recently, Gideon D'Arcangelo gave a talk on Active Listening: Social Identity in the New Music Economy at the BayCHI March monthly meeting. If you listen to Public Radio, you may already know of Gideon from his Listening In radio documentary series on American Public Media's Weekend America, or his Walkman Busting segments that he produced for Public Radio International's The Next Big Thing. Part of Gideon's BayCHI talk focused on "Music and Identity." MP3 players now let us carry so many songs with us, that we can literally carry our whole music collection with us wherever we go. If we can carry all of our songs with us, we can listen to any song we want to at any given time, from any given place. The music we are playing at any given moment from our MP3 player can now reflect more of our identity, rather than a reflection of the limited amount of music we can carry at any given time. In his Walkman Busting series, Gideon stopped people on the street and conducted short interviews on what they were listening to, as well as other music in which they were interested. This whole notion of how the music we listen to can be a reflection of our identity got me thinking... is there a parallel to this related to pictures? That is, how are the pictures we carry with us a reflection of our identity?

Over the past few days, I started my own sort of "Photo Busting" or "Looking In" activity. I basically asked people if they wouldn't mind showing me the wallpaper on their cellphone and explaining what the photo meant to them. Here are some samples of what I found:

• Joe, a twenty-something student from the Art Institute of California in San Francisco captures street art that he likes and uses that as his wallpaper on his cell phone;
• Lindsay, a twenty-something single professional from San Francisco has a picture of her cat;
• Dave, a thirty-something software engineer from Rochester has a picture from a recent trip to Colorado.

What about you? What photo(s) do you carry with you all of the time (e.g., such as on your camera phone) and what do they say about your identity? Here are three ways you can share your answer to this question:

• Leave a note in the comments section
• Fill out the short online survey here
• Upload a picture to flickr and tag it with photo_identity

If we get enough responses, I will provide a summary of the results in a follow-up posting!

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The Apple iPod silhouette ads have become so iconic that there's actually a separate entry for them in Wikipedia. You might be thinking "wouldn't it be cool if I could make my own silhouette picture out of a picture of myself or a picture of someone I know?" If you are, or have thought of that in the past, you are not alone. Enter "iPod silhouette" into your favorite search engine and you will easily find more than one online tutorial on the subject, such as the one at MacMerc.com or the one on PhotoshopSupport.com. Basically, you need an action shot, a photo editor with layers support, a bit of patience, and a few helpful tips from the online tutorials.

If you don't already have an action shot and need some tips on taking action shots with your digital camera, you can see my tips on Digital Action Shots. For this project, it is also helpful if you capture your main subject with as plain of a background as possible - this is not necessary, but does simplify the editing process! Note that you can use either a still image, or a frame from a digital video clip. The digital video clip will likely have a lower resolution, but it may also provide flexibility in capturing the action you want to use. In my examples, I used a frame from the video clip that was included as part of my DIY Skateboard blog post. I essentially dragged the video control slider back and forth until I found the frame that I wanted to use. I then did a screen capture to grab that frame. This did not provide a very high resolution image, but worked well enough for this project.

Once you have identified an image, you can use the instructions in the online tutorials to extract your main subject, create a silhouette, place the silhouette in front of a colored background and add some text. You can also add an iPod in, but I was more interested in the essence of the silhouette rather than creating an advertisement. Try different colored backgrounds, change the text, and have some fun with your new art!

What can you do with your silhouette art once you are finished? You can use it as your computer desktop background image, print a postcard or card to send to a friend, or even create a poster.

Have you created an action silhouette with any of your pictures? Share your experience or add a link in the comments section!

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