Friday, August 8, 2008

The Best of Photo Booth

Friday, August 8, 2008
7 comments
This is an Unheavy Friday Post. What I mean by that is this: It's Friday. We don't need any more heaviness. It's a miracle that we made it through the work week, right? Thus, Unheavy Friday.


If you are the owner/user of a recent-vintage Apple Macintosh computer you may (or may not) be aware that there's a free program inside your computer that will make you waste hours of your time and will hog up entire gigabytes of your hard drive space.

It's called Photo Booth.

The Photo Booth window on my Mac.

Photo Booth uses the camera built into your computer to take photos of you or whatever is in the camera's field of view. Simple enough, right? Here's a photo of me, right now, working hard on this blog post at my desk.

Normal-ish photo.


Black-and-white, always classic.


But Photo Booth also comes with two sets of cool effects and that's where the Devil lives. You can morph yourself (and any body part you care to photograph) into amazingly weird shapes. My kids love to mess with Photo Booth almost as much as I do.

Here are some recent photos.
As if ONE Liam weren't enough...


Things always start off fairly mildly. Then they deteriorate from there...

Here is the second, wilder set of effects:

So many options. I'm still looking for the New Hairline effect.


The light tunnel effect.


Those are Liam's real teeth.

The kids took these images while we were stranded in the JetBlue terminal at JFK airport in June. They were laughing so hard at the photos that people started staring, then gathering around. Liam, especially, loved having the crowd. Everything was OK until his images began getting very butt-centric, then it was time to shut things down.

Phoebe has a huge brain.


Three-quarters of a family portrait.



Happy siblings.

Eureka!


Mamaw Phoebe.


Triclops Liam.

Alien Liam.

STOP TAKING PICTURES ON MY MAC!

This is how we save money on eyeglasses.

And this, too.

Chet Baker even gets into it, too.


I hope I haven't freaked you all the way out. Happy UnHeavy Friday!

7 comments:

On August 9, 2008 at 7:12 AM Kathi said...

Label me as Completely Freaked Out. [ROTF,LMAO] Bill, you are just a big kid, aren't you?

~Kathi, smiling her way into the weekend

On August 9, 2008 at 7:45 AM Jayne said...

Totally hysterical!

On August 9, 2008 at 8:54 AM John Carlson said...

That was hilarious. Thanks for starting my morning off with a good chuckle.

On August 9, 2008 at 1:22 PM Anne said...

Ah, that Thompson humor! Never fails to deliver. Glad to see you've passed it on to progeny.

On August 9, 2008 at 2:22 PM NCmountainwoman said...

Guess that's the electronic version of the gazing ball. The brainy Phoebe is fantastic.

Your expression in the "normalish" picture looks very much like Keith Olbermann.

On August 10, 2008 at 10:54 PM Lynne at Hasty Brook said...

Oh.
My.
God.

Laughed until tears squirted out of my eyes!!

On August 13, 2008 at 8:29 PM Mary said...

Oh, I'm howling! Your freaky photos amaze me. Bill, you are a kid at heart. I wanna play, too!

I could see how the night progressed with each photo getting better and goofier...


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