This week for our EdTech class, we looked at editing and overlaying images using PowerPoint. Last week, we had looked at editing videos in iMovie, which was something I was quite familiar with having edited in both iMovie and Final Cut Pro on projects in the past. However, editing and manipulating images is something I have very experience with and, in fact, I have to admit that PowerPoint in general is a blind spot for me. Having completed my undergraduate degree around fifteen years ago, PowerPoint was not something that was expected from students as most people at that time still didn’t have laptops. Therefore, this week was going to be pretty useful for me in being able to pick up some much-needed new skills.

Our task was to take images and put them together, superimposing images onto others. Nearly everyone in the class appeared to far ahead of me in terms of what they could do, so this was certainly the first time in a while that I’d felt somewhat self-conscious, and that my age, relative to the rest of the class, was showing through. I was determined to come up with something creative and so after class, I came home and tinkered with some of the stock images.

I quickly came up against some obstacles. I couldn’t figure out how to extract an image from its background. For instance, how could I take an image of a flying bird and remove it from the background of the sky? I found a tutorial on YouTube to see if I could get to the bottom of it. The one I watched showed how to do it but it was soon apparent that this was a very tedious process involving outlining the parts to keep by drawing around every edge and groove. I immediately felt there was no way my classmates had used this method as most had done it very quickly and efficiently, and so I set out to see if, instead, I could simply put the image of Bernie Sanders on top of another image and this is what I came up with:

At least I was able to make this, and quite quickly, but it still feels quite frustrating I wasn’t able to do more. I would have preferred to take other random images like, say, an airplane or a ladybug or a UFO and put them in the picture but the work I would apparently need to put in to try and figure it out doesn’t seem worth the reward. So for now, I’m just going to have to accept that this is the best I can do. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel dejected by it but that’s just how the cookie crumbles sometimes. Hopefully next week will be something a little more in my wheelhouse.