Holograms and Upcoming Project

First, to start off... I'm including a photo-edit I did recently. What is this? This is a passport picture of myself, with the holograms enhanced rather than the underlying image. To produce this image, I photographed the document at multiple angles (one for the majority and a different angle for the compass element), and then took different edits (color extension, colorization, decompose + threshold + recombine differently, and increased contrast) and mixed them together. I think it's kind of fun, along the lines of modern art... but again, I think of this more as a novelty than as real art.

Why did I do it? I did it because I feel the elements of identity documents are really fascinating... but we often just ignore them, because they are tangental to the purpose of the documents. We usually care about the faces and names of the bearers, not what security has been added on. As a technology enthusiast (I am an IT professional, after all!) I am hugely interested in how these work, but also at the skill and design involved. Next time you look at your ID card, passport, or drivers license, look for the holograms and see if you find anything fun or interesting. One other note: microprint is great fun to read... oftentimes elements of the page are integrated into the microprint and it can be a whole other world. Yes, it's true, I can read microprint if I squint... :P

Secondly... can you guess what my project is? I'll have some upcoming sewing posts once I figure out how to get this sewing machine working right. I've never seen so many knots... but I'm informed this is a tension issue... (although, I think it may be a bobbin threading issue, where I may have pulled the thread incorrectly) Please understand that I've never used this sewing machine before, so I'm still figuring it out, lol.