heya

Chapter 25

Have nice holidays and a Happy new Year!!!

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Chapter 15

Happy valentine's day!! :9

PREV // MASTERPOST // NEXT

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.

my full hermitcraft season 7 comic for @ascarianzine! 1 of 3 comics i did, and this was a collaboration with the awesome @azurecake16, who wrote the outline for this! :D

please check out the full zine here! so many talented writers and artists have worked hard on this and i'm so grateful to be part of it. also, i made a cute little doodle for the final pages that you will only see if you check it out ^_^

"Murder is bad. In the time period discussed, people sometimes committed murders (2 citations). And most people agreed that murder was bad, but it was widely known that murders still happened."

And your advisor goes, "Did most people agree, though? Was it widely known?"

And you go (sigh.). Okay. And do twelve hours of going back through your readings. And rewrite.

"Murder is bad (4 citations). In this time, people sometimes committed murders (6 citations). People did not all agree that it was bad (2 citations). There was disagreement about exactly how bad (3 citations)."

And you look at your draft. And you go. But. But we all — I mean, the archival sources from the time are in fact QUITE CLEAR about how widely known it was! Like–! I've read hundreds of letters and a third of them mention murder! I've talked to so many historians of this time and place and we ALL talk about the murder thing!

And you look at the twelve goddamned hours of searching you did. And you write several increadingly desperate emails to colleagues. And after another few days, you come to the agonizing realization that, in fact, there are no citations of published work establishing that people knew murders occurred despite them being bad and against the law. And then you spend another week looking up those archival sources. And you rewrite again.

So fun story, when i was working on my dissertation I came across something that said "cattle eat about 30% of the total biomass in a Sahelian rangeland" (number exact, wording paraphrased)s

I was like hm that seems suspiciously round to be an experimental result, let's see what the citation is. after repeating this process for SEVERAL iterations, I got to a book published in 1991 called "Manuel sur les paturages des pays sahelien" where it was cited as "personal communication" (translation: I called someone I thought would know and that's what they said")