āDo it scaredā ādo it aloneā are all great tips, but my biggest takeaway from therapy is do it messy. This is especially true if youāre getting out of a burnout, which I experience often. Literally just do it messy. You donāt need to pick the perfect trail to walk, the perfect playlist to listen to, whatever the fuck it is. You donāt need to have a meticulous to do list and wake up at the exact time you planned and drink the exact amount of water you planned to drink. Like the biggest thing for people like me to remember is sometimes itās okay to do it messy. Put on a random yt workout and just get it done in sweats. Do 5 minutes of a daunting task and go from there. Sometimes just getting up is a win during intense burnouts or depressive funks. Literally just do it messy.
god dammit, just battled an ancient evil too powerful to defeat alongside my heroic allies and now they're all talking about "locking it away" and "binding it in a vessel" we are soooooo fucked
the party mage just brought up the idea of each one of us taking a part of the sealing artifact to prevent them from being reunited again and releasing the evil, no way these dumb assholes aren't getting corrupted š¤¦
okay so after a little time bonding with my shard of the blackstar, I've decided that 1) this was actually a pretty good idea and 2) all the armies of the earth must tremble before me
hey white people . if u dont know how to pronounce an ethnic persons name *google it* or if its someone ur talking directly to *ask them*. dont fucking do that "erm i dont know how to pronounce but __" or "im gonna butcher this haha" or "im not even gonna bother trying" . ur not funny. do u know what poc think when they hear u saying that ? u sound like a loser asshole and we dont want to spend time with u . im so fucking tired of watching youtube videos about media from my country and hearing those phrases. im tired of people saying that to my face . i respect someone who clearly looked it up and is tryong but says my name wrong over someone who just goes with whatever bad first guess they had without trying. u have too many resources at ur disposal to keep doing this. for the love of god just Fucking Try. if ur confused Just Try.
I highly recommend Forvo.com, the website where native speakers of a language contribute their time and voices to read words and names in their own language. It is a fantastic way to expand your world, open up your ears, and it's way more likely to nab a hit than just googling.
Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.
i just saw a youtube short of brandon sanderson on a podcast. the whole time hes talking hes doing book signings. what a flex. so many bitches on my dick i gotta multitask
brandon sanderson is actually just built different. once on a podcast with patrick rothfuss they were talking about tools to write better and he said "i try to limit myself to 8 hours of writing per day." he took time off of writing during the first year of covid and accidentally wrote four unplanned books. he teaches a class at byu. his wife has a codeword to get him to stop writing in his head because at any given moment you might think he's doing something normal but no he's also writing another novel. stephen king said he's insane
Everyone talking about posts that changed their brain chemistry seem to be leaving out this classic, which probably propelled me into activism and more self confidence in a way that I cannot put into words.
Okay I have things I should be seeing to but I couldn't help myself. In case you, like me, have not read all of these stories and would like to be amongst the lucky 10,000 today:
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers*
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson**
The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe
The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs
The Most Dangerous Game by Richard O'Connell
The Nameless City by HP Lovecraft
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K LeGuin
There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
Honorable Mention from the comments/reblogs:
All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury
*note: this is actually a collection of short stories and clocks in at about 72k words
**Originally published in the New Yorker in 1948; interestingly, the New Yorker still has this story archived on their website BEHIND A PAYWALL. CAN YOU IMAGINE.
slowly roll your head forward, keeping the visualization that your head is a heavy thing pulling your upper half towards the floor from spine top to bottom (neck vertebrae to ribcage vertebrae to lower back vertebrae to waist vertebrae)
let your arms dangle as you go down. you ain't using them right now
you can wiggle your head/neck a bit if it helps you further relax your spine
keep your legs upright (bending knees a bit may be fine) and butt in the air (try to stretch out all the way to the tailbone)
hold in a comfortable position (donāt hurt yourself) and check in with how you feel till youāre ready to move
slowly (slowly!) roll yourself back up in a mirror movement of what you did earlier (so, bottoms up. donāt forget to slowly bring the neck vertebrae back in place)
if ya wanna, give your limbs a little shake out and spine a little twist or wiggle
no worries about how far you can go, you can slowly go further each time you reset your back until you get to a comfortable limit
As someone who does only a very small amount of (macro) photography and has only recently developed a slightly better eye for lighting (85% through finding Sir Frogsworth!), i'd like to try and run through some of the things i see here. Mostly it's just an exercise for me, though it has raised a couple small questions (if you're up for answering them, no worries if not!)
(I'm gonna ignore the one with Katrina sitting purely because it's different enough that it's not an easy comparison to write. Fantastic photo though!)
Sir Frogsworth has glasses reflection. Katrina does not have glasses so i don't know if that's avoidable, but i assume with enough skill & experience, it is?
Katrina's hair is a similar colour to Frogsworth's bear hat (very cute btw!) but i can see the details in Katrina's hair and none of the details in the bear hat. Same with the clothing, although that's a harder comparison because Katrina's clothes are lighter coloured.
Katrina's hair is distinguishable from the background because the background just behind Katrina is lit. Frogsworth doesn't stand out from the background so well, probably because the lighting on Katrina's wall is like a ring around Katrina that gradients to dark around the outside (a little like a target or spotlight?) and the gradient on Sir Frogsworth's wall is straight along, so the light doesn't help to draw ones eye to the centre, nor separate Frogsworth from the wall. A darker background for Frogsworth i think would also help?
i think both people's main face lighting is coming from left-of-photo, but does Katrina maybe have a stronger light + something to bounce the light a little on right-of-photo? I imagine Katrina probably had a steady light too, rather than just the flash used for the Frogsworth photo, but i don't know what effect that would have besides possibly higher quality lighting and less guesswork.
I will try to answer your questions and expand on your observations.
Reflections in glasses.
Reflections on glasses have a few different solutions. For professional shoots, they might actually order frames without lenses. But often you can just play with angles to reduce or eliminate the glare. Even just raising the light a few inches and angling it down can do the trick. If you cannot find a way to avoid the glare, you can move the light as close as possible and it will reduce the intensity of the reflection. You can also take a photo with and without the glasses and Photoshop the glare away with a simple composite.
Whenever reflections are mentioned someone always suggests polarization, but that is a high effort solution that is rarely worth it and can cause unwanted visual side effects.
Personally, I like to have a little glare, but not distractingly so.
I think when glasses look perfectly transparent, it looks a tad fake. It looks like they took the lenses out. I like that tiny visual cue that there is glass in glasses. So I put the light close to reduce glare intensity and make sure the reflection of the light doesn't cover the iris.
It's subtle, but I feel it makes the glasses feel more glasses-y.
In any case, dealing with reflections is mostly playing with heights, angles, and distance through trial and error. Once you get skill and experience, the process goes much faster, but with experimentation, anyone can figure it out.
Shadow detail.
The bear hat has less detail for the same reason black kitties turn into voids in photos.
Black stuff absorbs light, but textured black stuff also traps light. The photons enter a forest of texture and bounce around and get lost. They just give up on reflecting away and transition into heat.
That is why black velvet is often used to keep light from bouncing around in studios. And that super dark Vantablack paint uses microscopic texture forests to absorb and trap light.
I could have used an edge light to add highlights to the bear hat. That is what I did with Katrina. I had two strip softboxes on either side of her to create highlights on her hair.
In 2013, I didn't realize the camera captures a lot more data than what is presented in the preview. In fact, no display can actually show all of the information the camera captures. It just gives you the best representation of the data based on various algorithms and picture profiles. But with an image editor, you can push that data around. You can reveal or hide detail.
The bear hat did actually have detail in the RAW file, but the image preview just wasn't tuned to show it. So if I increase the shadow levels in the hat, I can reveal that data
If you have a void pet, you can try lifting the shadows after the fact. Even with JPEG capture, you can usually bring out this detail. And your phone's camera system usually has basic editing functions that allow lifting shadows.
That said, part of the art of photography is knowing when to abandon detail. Sometimes it is better to let things go to pure black or white. This can create a much higher contrast image and our brains love bold contrast.
This is a RAW capture that has not been processed.
Again, this is just a representation of the data. A RAW file has tons of information, and through editing, you can push and pull that data however you like.
If I wanted to show every single detail, I could make an edit like this.
Or I could embrace the dark exposure and push the shadows and highlights like this.
High dynamic range capture allows you to show *everything* if you desire. It is tempting to lift the shadows and bring down the highlights and preserve all the details. But that isn't always the best artistic choice.
Subject separation.
That was a very intuitive observation about the background in the original photo. I was too close to the background, so the light on my face also hit the wall and made it too bright. I also had the light too far away, which makes the wall exposure very similar to my face exposure. You can read more about that in my inverse square law explainer.
For studio portraits, I like to put a light behind my subjects that throws a gradient ball on the background.
I use a standard reflector with a grid.
Sometimes the honeycomb grid lines are visible on the background, so I have a frosted diffuser attachment that goes in front of the grid.
You can make bigger balls with a looser grid and smaller balls with a tighter grid. You can add more or less diffusion for fuzzier or sharper edges. And you can put a colored gel on the light. The dimmer the light, the more saturated the color. The brighter, the fainter the color. And if you do a gradient ball, the center will be white and it will get more saturated as it radiates outward.
This is a form of subject separation. You always want to make sure your subject is the star of the image. And creating separation from the background is a great way to do this.
You can do this with background blur.
You can do this with opposing colors.
You can underexpose the background.
You can use edge lighting.
Pure white and black backgrounds.
You can use foreground and background objects to create layers of depth.
You can use a vignette.
You can even combine separation techniques. This photo has layers, background blur, and edge light.
I'm sure there are examples I am forgetting, but you get the general idea.
Good subject separation is one of the best ways to elevate your photography.
Continuous versus flash lighting.
The lights I used for Katrina are studio strobes. They are like speedlite flashes on steroids. They come in plug-in or battery-powered versions.
These lights have a continuous "modeling light" which gives you a rough preview of your lighting. The modeling light can also be used for video, but they are not as powerful as dedicated continuous lights.
The modeling light is not used in the final exposure. The glass ring is a large xenon flash tube that can create a very short duration pop of light brighter than midday sunlight at close distances.
These strobes are so powerful that no other light in the room can contaminate your photo. If you were to turn them off, your frame would be pitch black. The aperture/shutter speed/ISO are set so only the strobe light will register in the image.
These studio lights have a Bowens mount, so you can attach any modifier you want. And the quality of light is full spectrum. Even the best continuous LED lights struggle with color rendition and many of them can't output the violet part of the spectrum. (Humans haven't seen true violet indoors since LEDs became ubiquitous.) Whereas the CRI for strobes is near perfect. And because they have short duration bursts, you can freeze motion. It's like having a shutter speed of 1/8000th (or much faster).
Strobes give you perfect control, color, white balance, and sharp photos every time.
The main issue with strobes is the learning curve. Adjusting the camera settings is more complicated, everything is manual, managing multiple lights with multiple power settings is confusing, and you can't see the result until after you take the photo. You can get a rough idea of the lighting ratios with modeling lights, but it is always a guess. And if you don't have a lot of experience working with strobes, this can lead to a lot of trial and error and long setup times before you even take your first photo.
Painterly, dimensional light.
My current approach to lighting design is to create a painterly effect in-camera.
I want to use only light to make my images photographic with a tinge of painterly vibes.
I've been accused of doing heavy editing or even using AI to achieve this effect. But once I learned everything I could about lighting, I found myself doing much less retouching on my photography. Every photo needs to be processed and edited, as RAW files are bland by design, but the lighting does most of the work.
How do I approach this?
The first issue is dimensionality.
When using telephoto-ish portrait lenses, you have to stand back farther and that distant perspective causes facial geometry to compress. This is often called "lens compression," but it is actually just the result of being farther away.
Flattening facial features can be more flattering, but it also makes people look a bit two-dimensional. A close perspective can give you more depth cues by exaggerating distance and creating geometric distortions. A far perspective can remove those distortions, but then you have fewer depth cues to feel the dimensionality.
(not my photo)
It's kind of a Paper Mario effect.
How do traditional artists deal with dimensionality issues?
Shading!
They create gradients from highlight to shadow to give a sense of depth on a two dimensional medium.
In photography, there is something called Rembrandt lighting. Unfortunately this lighting style has been heavily simplified to placing the light above the subject, 45 degrees off-axis, and creating a triangle shape on the opposite cheek.
(not my photo)
It looks fine. But it doesn't really represent the tonal complexity of an actual Rembrandt.
Rembrandt carefully created smooth tonal transitions from highlight to shadow. He used gradients to sculpt people's faces and give them dimension. He wasn't trying to just get a triangle on the cheek.
So, how do you create these smooth tonal transitions with real light on a real person?
The lighting term is called "falloff." And it is a function of the inverse square law. When light is close, it has less time to spread out. So it transitions from light to dark much faster.
If the light is far away and is able to spread out, you will get less falloff.
If you place the light much closer you will get more falloff.
(not my photo)
Since the light is concentrated on the face, it won't spread out enough to hit the background. So the background will be darker as a bonus effect.
And because the light is closer, it is bigger relative to the subject. So the light will be softer and the tonal transitions will be much smoother. The shadows will be fuzzier.
This is basically how you do shading with light.
And it is why I tell people it isn't enough to have soft light. You need to have *close* soft light.
Remember, soft light is a big light... from the perspective of the subject. So you can actually use a physically smaller light close up to get soft light. And this can allow you to get much more precision with falloff.
For my portraits of Katrina, I used a diffused beauty dish.
(not my photo)
It looks small, but when you move it only a few feet away from the face, it becomes big, relative to the subject. So I can get very smooth gradients exactly where I want them.
Here is my lighting diagram for this shot.
The light is focused on her forehead and the falloff radiates in all directions from that spot.
I then have another light hitting from the side, which creates a sculpting gradient toward her cheek.
Because the light is soft and diffused, these gradients blend into each other. And this is how I attempt to create that Rembrandt-style dimensionality.
So what could I have done differently with my 2013 portrait?
I should have moved farther from the background and closer to the light. That would have created more sculpting falloff on my face and darkened the background to give more subject separation. It would have reduced the intensity of the glare on my glasses. I could have also added a hair light from above to create a highlight and some texture on the bear hat. And I could have increased the power of my flash so that no ambient light in the room would affect my exposure and color.
I edited a rough simulation of what those changes may have looked like.
At some point, I'd love to recreate some of my old portraits using the knowledge I have accumulated over the years.
It's always fun to see how far I've come.
I hope this was enlightening and thank you again for that wonderful analysis.
Pick one of James Baldwin's works and read it!!! The Fire Next Time is an excellent essay, most of us are familiar with the quote on gay white people from The Last Interview but not the rest of it. If Beale Street Could Talk even has a movie!
Some Kind of Mess @restless-shade - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
