Kylash's Wonder Emporium

Try not to dwell on these things. You can learn and grow from them. You can fix them when you can. You can take accountability where it's needed. But try not to get stuck in these things.

divingbelles are mermaids in the selkie family who use humanoid skins to house aquatic forms instead of the other way around.

Magnifies a display beyond standard options with keyboard / mouse movement inputs or voice commands,

Can read text on the screen,

Has different color filter options for text / background distinction,

Can change and magnify the cursor beyond standard amounts,

Works on Windows or more than just Windows,

Has a keyboard echo (says the character you've pressed on the keyboard out loud)

a basket star divingbelle getting ready to go for a dip.

I'm a member of an advanced photography training community. My mentor creates challenges to help demonstrate certain concepts.

This one required shooting a pop-art-style egg photo to show how specular highlights change with hard and soft light.

This was the example image I was to emulate.

A specular highlight is just a direct reflection of the light source.

With hard light, specular highlights are perceived as brighter. To get hard light, the light source must be smaller (or more distant). So the reflection is smaller, but also more concentrated in intensity.

With soft light, the light source is much larger (or closer). So the intensity of the reflection is spread out over a larger area. So it is perceived as dimmer.

Think about looking directly at a flashlight versus shining it against the wall. The same number of photons are involved, but your experience of them is vastly different.

If you are shooting someone with glasses and the light is reflecting brightly, you can move your light much closer to reduce its apparent intensity.

I worked for 10 minutes at a time over a period of 4 days. I got some fake eggs so I wouldn't have to spend energy cooking. Frustratingly, they arrived with a matte finish. They would not take on a specular highlight at all. So I ordered some automotive clear coat and sprayed the fake eggs on my deck.

You may have noticed my context-less egg art on my deck railing in another post. It was drying in the sun.

The clear coat worked well, so I proceeded to glue the egg to some colored construction paper and tape it to the wall in my kitchen.

I don't have a top-down rig to shoot things from above, so I felt this was a creative and low-energy solution.

A bonus aspect of the challenge was to create a Photoshop composite in which I retain the shadows from the hard light example and the gradient specular highlight on the egg yolk. I can't decide if I like that or the soft light version better.

It feels nice to have accomplished something creative. I am struggling so much with boredom as I recover. And doing anything productive is physically challenging. But I've got my birds and now my egg.

artfight is about halfway through so here's all the stuff i made these past weeks!

characters belong to:

@bundaskifli

@lavenderknight and @winechildd

chuuyas348theyelash

lelie_of_the_valley

simplymisty_

StainedGlassMoth

@little-piece-of-tamlin