Eureka!

            My research last night paid off! After cleaning up my laptop and quitting out of old applications, the Sketcher program worked astronomically faster. Since the conversion time for each photo was cut down to around two minutes, I was able to do so many more photos in a much smaller amount of time. In fact, I actually completed all of the photos on my laptop in less than an hour! I spent the rest of the hour converting photos that I found using Flickr Creative Commons Image Search. We used the tool in eighth grade to find usable photos for our Eighth Grade Final English Projects. It was fun getting acquainted with the search engine again and finding other individual’s really awesome photos of Ecuador. Although I initially wanted to keep the photos strictly from the Lovett community, I ultimately decided that the illustration quality would be better if I had an assortment of photos from different people around the world.

            One of the things that most surprised me about this search was the sheer number of individuals who have visited and photographed the same places as me when I have visited Ecuador. Sometimes I forget that Lovett is not the only group of people who gets to experiences the wonders of the Otavalo market or the farms in Pucará. After downloading a variety of photos from the Flickr Creative Commons site, I began to convert them to illustrations. Again, it is simply incredible how quickly this process went compared to yesterday’s process.  I ended up converting even more photos in a fourth of the time! However, I am still skeptical of my ambitious goal to order the book next week. There still seems to be lots of work editing and filling in the blanks for my book to be completely finished. I am also pretty scared about ordering the book next week because I will actually be picking back up my English class next week. Also, since I have family coming in town tomorrow morning I will not be able to work on my project much this weekend. Between family, college decisions, and impending AP exams, I am going to have to become a master of organization to finish this book!