Br'er Jeff NOT REALLY doing anything that cool.
When I was a kid, everyone knew that the pretty girls in the ads were all ‘airbrushed’. That was the term. Oh, she’s not THAT pretty really. She’s been airbrushed.
And your high school yearbooks would show up. Everyone’s photographed acne had been “carefully” doctored by a “professional”. If you lived in my little town, that meant that some chimp had “corrected” the photos with what amounted to a magenta crayon or a mocha crayon, depending not upon race so much, but apparently based on mood or level of drunken rage. Beats me. In fact, my sophomore photo looked a LOT like someone HAD beaten me. The acne had been bad that year, I guess. Couldn’t have been as bad as the great magenta patches, though.
Anyhow, nowadays we don’t airbrush. We photoshop. I have a theory about a wonderful business opportunity. I’m apparently not going to use it, so I’ll throw it out to you guys. Somebody might as well have the fun, and the debt. And the risk. And the nervous flop sweats. Never mind that. This is a hot idea.
Okay, here’s what you do. You move to Jackson Hole, right? And you set up shop in the tourist square, there. Now, what you do is provide the ULTIMATE souvenir! You’ll need a computer, a camera, the latest version of photoshop, some nifty backgrounds that you can shoot anywhere around Jackson Hole, because everywhere around there is GORGEOUS, and one of those monstrously huge commercial printers. People come in. They like to, say, mountain bike or kayak if its Summer, or they ski or snowboard or snowmobile if it’s Winter. Jackson Hole has TWO tourist seasons! Okay, so people come in and they say, “We’ve just been out mountain biking! We’d like to have a poster of US, doing that just outside town!” You say, “Certainly sir and madam! Would you care to choose from our backgrounds here?” They choose some great shot of the surrounding hotdogginess. They choose photos of two mountain biker bodies that look enough like themselves, or they opt to stand in front of your camera with their own bicycles and filthy sweaty bodies (Put the photo area near the FRONT of your shoppe) You get a photo of their heads either way…Then you PHOTOSHOP them a poster of themselves doing cool stuff! If it’s a FUNNY version, like with big caricature heads (for easy recognition and all, caricatures have large heads, which are the important parts… at least you HOPE your face is more important than your li’l cartoon background) then you can do a poster with lots of crazy stuff- bicycles shooting off cliffs, hopping on clouds, tearing past Jackalopes, giving the finger to passing mountain lions… whatever! Awesome! You print them a poster, then offer them greeting cards, tote bags, Tshirts, and all the rest with themselves (skillfully photoshopped in clever tones of magenta) all over Jackson Hole!
There you go. Instant tourist GOLD. And if you need me to come to Jackson Hole for a couple of weeks a year to fill in while your photoshop jockey goes on vacation to Peavine PA (the total opposite of Jackson Hole) well, then, I’m available! Need proof? Find Jeff’s shadow in the photo above. I took it off the rock where he was doing a trackstand. I put it where it needed to be.
Welcome to the Red Bull Rampage!
I really need to get my bike fixed. I haven’t had a near-death experience in like, forever.
I’ve only knocked myself out once on a bike, and I haven’t broken a bone in a bike crash yet (knock wood) I usually come away feeling like I didn’t push myself enough or something.
I know a guy who does something similar in a tourist trap that is supposed to simulate an old timey mining town. He photoshops people’s heads into tintype photographs, and manages the “general store”/gift shop. It was supposed to be a summer job out of college, but he’s still doing it 10 years later. He hates every minute of it, but you would never know it by the act he puts on.
Maybe he would like it more if he were photoshopping heads onto people SKYDIVING OVER JACKSON HOLE!! Woohooo!