Li'l shop of photo horrors

Well, I've survived my first graduate mid-term maelstrom. I used two sick days to finish a paper and a take-home mid-term that was supposed to take about 3 hours total (HA!), turned my back into one giant, petrified knot from all the sitting and driving I've had to do lately, and had two nervous breakdowns. But I'm fine now. Though I'm proud of the essays I spent hours and hours writing, I'm not sure anyone else would read them unless under torture. Instead, I thought I'd share what I'm learning in my propaganda--I mean, in my visual rhetoric--class. The first image is one I took about a year ago at a lovely historic house and gardens in Northern California called Filoli. The second image is a manipulated version of the original. The goal of this assignment was to use Adobe Photoshop to give a neutral image a rhetorical slant. And so I thought I'd experiment with how gloomy and desolate I could make an idyllic place like Filoli appear with a little messing around. Spooky, huh? Looks like it could be the Addams Family's summer home. (My prof liked it--I got an A+.) Happy Halloween y'all!