Free Twitter - Computer Backgrounds

Monday, June 8, 2009 by Matt Anderson

After reading my colleague Joy’s blog on creating a photo composition for Social Media, I was inspired to create a few of my own creative twitter backgrounds (or regular computer backgrounds).  I decided to do a slightly different approach from a design standpoint. Instead of creating the specific items of content with color manipulation, color retouching, and photoshop layer assembly, I chose to do the old fashioned route and actually find and photograph all the props for content from my toolboxes and cupboards!

The first step was to find a background. Joys barn boards seem to work quite well, so I had my son go out back and find some old cedar barn boards. We positioned the boards on some saw horses with an old door and used two 300w tungsten lights from the front center to illuminate our “desktop”. Next we scoured my cabinets, cupboards, toolboxes, and bins for items that created themes. I positioned my Canon EOS 5D Mark II approximately 3' directly above our set. With a Canon EF 17-40mm f/4.0 L, I set the focal length to 29mm f/14 ISO 200 for .5 seconds. I chose f/14 to established a gratuitous amount of ‘depth of field’ (keeping all the items sharp center to edge) while minimizing sharpness stealing diffraction and lens vignetting. White balance was set using a QP card 101 v2. I tethered the camera to my laptop using a USB 2.0 cable and the DPP software. The DPP software used in connection with the camera's live view, made setup and positioning of the elements silly easy!

The following is what we came up with.
“Plain Vanilla Jane”
Plain

Installing these twitter digital image media files is easy. (I'm going to copy and paste Joys install directions, LOL) Once you are logged on to Twitter go to Settings, then click the Design tab (the last one). At the bottom you will see Change background image, click this. Click Browse and locate your background. Sometimes it previews for you... sometimes it won't... click save changes and BAM your beautiful new background is now live and glorious!

You may find the images to be a bit big if your monitor is on the small side. (I have provided the largest size anyone should need.) Don't worry, it's an easy fix. Open the file you want to use as background, and resize the pixel dimensions to fit within your monitors parameters (1024, 1600, etc.). Resave the jpeg file, but make sure the file size is under 800k.

Being a remodeler and cabinet maker has provided some interesting and unique components for photographic content. On any given project I might be wearing a plumber or electricians hat. It’s nice to put all that extra “stuff” to use (besides overflowing my cabinets and tool boxes). It's kind of ironic that some of these old world tools and items would be used in such a current and trendy hi tech fashion such as a twitter background or computer background.

Keywords: Photoshop, Photography, Twitter, Background, Color, Photo Composition, Prepress

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