Deviant improvement

As some of you may know, I’m an active member of the deviant Art community. I had an interest in photography, did not have any equipment, except my cam on my mobile phone and some crappy HP Photosmart that still seem to run on steam.

Back in the days, I wanted to see, if my interest for photography is actually real. I wanted to see if I stick with it, or if it’s just a mayfly. It turned out, after a couple of month, that this romance with photography was for real. In the meantime did I start doing some research on photo equipment, because I wanted to take decent pictures, too. As a fellow reader of this blog, you may remember that my final choice was a Canon EOS 500D with a standard 18-55mm lens.

My first pictures were taken with the creative programs that came with the camera. But after a very short period of trial and error I decided to switch the program wheel to the ‘M’ position and take control of every single aspect of the picture. It was a very steep learning curve that I took and without a doubt, the first pictures I took were absolutely horrible. Overexposed, underexposed, terrible f-stop, horrible composition, you name it.

I’m still in a learning progress, and hopefully will always be, when it comes to photography. Simply, because the curiosity, that drives you and the will to experience and learn something new, is the gasoline that keeps your creative engine up and running. I don’t say that the pictures I take these days are greater art, but compared to the shots I took two years ago, I would say, I’ve improved.

I’ve recently upgraded to a new camera, a Canon EOS 60D. Very, very recently, to be exact. Next step is to save some money for my first Canon L-lens. The lens that I currently use for the everyday situations starts to have more and more issues, I can no longer live with on a daily basis. Manufacturing wise and also in picture quality. But the main issue is definitely its slow focus response time and the weird focus itself. Well, we’ll see what lens the future brings.

After over two years of being a “deviant”, I can say, that it’s still fun to watch, what so many other people all around the earth create in photography. The community is still a very polite one and it’s mainly the new and unexperienced user that offends from time to time. But the community is aware of that as well and most of these newbies leave as fast as they came.

The only thing that bothers me a little, is that the quality deviant Art once stood for has turned more into a matter of quantity. Unfortunately do a lot of people put out so much rubbish and crap on deviant Art, that it’s almost close to be declared as spam. I mean, why so many pencil sketches of anime characters that no one actually cares about? But nevertheless, it’s still fun to be deviant.

Finish it

This week is the week of the finishing line. Project “Straight Edge” in version 1.0 is going to end on 15th July and on the other side I am pretty sure that my paladin in World of Warcraft will reach level 80. He’s level 77 right now and I’ll kick him up to level 79 this very evening. I bought my first part of the tier-9 set, some real nice shoulder armor that I can send the old shoulders to my undead warrior. Yep, yep, yep account bound items rule

But back to straight edge and a preview of version 2.0 of the project. There’s no doubt, version 2.0 will last for twelve month and there will be some rule changes. I was recognizing a lot of rule breaks when it comes to nutrition. You might remember the change to rule #5 because there was a kind of backdoor in consideration with sweets. So I decided to introduce the exception meal where I can whatever I want but only if rule #7 is fulfilled. I personally think that this kind of connecting rules with each other will make the whole thing more interesting and a little bit exciting to me.

Unfortunately is the weather absolutely exhausting these days because the temperature increased drastically but the humidity did not decrease. This like a murder to sports especially when you’re overweighted and your stamina is not as good as it should be. I was on a good way to get a better stamina but with conditions like these I definately have to do a step backwards and I cannot do sports at least four time a weak. If I am able to have two gym sessions a week I could very happy. It’s more a torture than an amusement. I guess I can do two sessions this week and then my vacation and trip to France will start.

If I’ll ever get the chance to do some kind of sports on my vacation I’ll definately grab it by the hand and do it. Meal exceptions are not allowed though it’s my vacation and it mainly there for recovery and fun. Hopefully I’ll be able to do some nice pictures with my Canon EOS 500D. I haven’t touched my baby for nearly two month and before it comes to vacation I have to shoot some pictures on a marriage. I fucking hate taking pictures of people. Portraits are okay but only if it’s a person I like or I feel comfortable with. But these stupid snapshots of a dumb ass party crowd are what really pisses me off. I haven’t bought my camera to do stupid snap- and mugshots, this is what grannies and old daddies do with their ugly ultra-compact cameras.

Stroke your EOS

It has been a while since my last photography related post and the reason for this is very simple. Everything I produced with my camera during the last weeks was a bunch of crap and absolutely worthless. I completely miscalculated the amount of creativity needed to produce nice pics. My opinion was that I take my camera, see something worth to shoot and hit the trigger. I am not talking about technical obstacles to take, it is all about the creativity. It depressed me in a way that the results varied so drastically but like every ‘artist’ you have to gain positive energy even from a misery.

I was near selling my camera and giving up my newly discovered hobby but I finally cleared my mind and continued my discovery into the great world of photography. I am going to release some of the brand new pics in my gallery here on bloodreaver.com and some hand picked and very nice ones will find their way to deviantart.com and their related groups. What should I say, I survived my personal lack of creativity and will definately continue photography. I plan to go mainly further with taking landscape pictures over the next two or three month and if some routine comes into play and every technical question is answered I plan to get into more into macro and portait photography. Hopefully I will be able to find some distinctive motives for portrait photography.