Making the Sun Salutation

Small Project #1

Over the past two weeks, I’ve started attending the yoga classes offered by Campus Rec. I’ve never taken yoga before, but it’s always seemed interesting, so I decided to push myself outside of my comfort zone. Even though some of my friends say they’ll go with me at some point, none of them have shown up or gone with me yet. My mom and boyfriend challenged me to go to a yoga class and neither of them had faith in me or thought I’d actually go because I can be pretty introverted. Of course, I had to prove all of us wrong, so I went to a Monday evening class taught by Bill. This week, I went to Bill’s Monday evening class, Raam’s Thursday evening class, and I will go to Bill’s Friday Relaxation Yoga class as well.
For my first small project, I tried to reflect this small change of going outside of my comfort zone and trying something new. I made a two GIFs of a yoga pose called Sun Salutation. I chose this pose because Bill incorporates it into all of his classes and because of the health benefits and historic importance of the pose. Sun Salutation is a pose made up of 11 to 12 different yoga poses. When practicing Sun Salutation, you flow through these precise poses to accomplish the full salutation. It is an important pose in yoga because it provides a full-body workout and includes flexing and toning muscles, stretching, and is a good exercise to help lose weight. It’s used as a precursor to mindfulness meditation by relaxing the mind.  I used two slightly different versions of the pose so I could get a little more practice at GIF making but wanted the same result. I found images of the poses on Google; I couldn’t find the copyright information for these, but I don’t plan on sharing them. I used them for my own practice for the purpose of this project. This was my first time ever using Photoshop, so I had to do some research about how to actually go about making GIFs. After downloading and creating a trial Photoshop account, I went on the service’s virtual tour of its tools (there are a lot, and I still don’t understand all of them). I gained a lot of simple, practical knowledge about the tools offered by Photoshop and other photo/video editing services. I experimented with tools such crop, cut, blur, revert to history, and learned about layers and how to organize a video timeline project. The result may not be huge, but I definitely learned a lot about digital media. I’ll use this project and experience as a springboard for my later projects. Ideally, I want to create my own digital images to modify into GIFs or some other sort of movie or possibly add audio.
I am an eager, novice yogi who is thoroughly convinced in the transformative, life-enhancing power of yoga. I’ve started doing cardio, group workout classes and weightlifting more frequently in combination with yoga. I want to continue these practices, and I think having these GIFs will be useful in helping me accomplish these goals because they are quick enough to refer back to during a workout. My boyfriend is a computer science major and is taking an app development class. I plan on talking to him about creating a mobile app for yoga workouts because, from my searches on the Apple App Store, there aren’t any free, step-by-step yoga workout apps. I think that this could potentially be a great project to take on. Although small, this first project has inspired ideas for other projects for my individual study, and I’m now more familiar with how to use some of Photoshop’s extensive tools.