Artsy Fartsy (Pics)

 

My weekend was amazing.

You know what’s not amazing? These ads that border the WHOLE FUCKING PAGE. Jesus H.

It is ALMOST enough to make me pay for OD again. I might. I do miss some of the pay features.

Anyway.

Saturday night was exactly what I wanted/needed from my night. I was feeling a little creative so we skipped seeing Twelfth Night like we had planned in favor of drinking and taking pictures. Zac is pretty handy with a camera. He’s been doing photography as a hobby for several years and even did portrait photography professionally after he was laid off a few years back. So he knows what he’s doing. I on the other hand point the lens at something and struggle to make the thing see what I see.

Zac was experimenting with perspectives early on in the evening and there was something I had been trying and failing to accomplish for a few weeks now (don’t laugh those of you that actually know how to do this). Being a totally noob, I had no idea how to make the camera do what I wanted it to…plus I was attempting to do it on a digital that had a fixed lens (because the controls are so dummied down I feel less intimidated by it) which just wasn’t happening.

What did I want to do?

I wanted the camera to focus on a single object and blur the the rest of the scene. Which is kind of what Zac was experimenting with when I brought up not getting how the fuck to do it.

He was playing around with chessboards (again) and shot this:

(Kings in their Corners)

I’d been trying a few weeks ago to take a photo of this perfect rose blossom and make the background blur and just could not do it. I explained this and we set up a still set and Zac showed me how to make the digital do it and then again how to make the film ones do it. I can’t do film yet. I don’t care if that makes me less cool. I feel like learning on a digital is tremendously easier and cheaper. I’d rather learn on Zac’s mohunken testicular Nikon and then learn to translate that knowledge into using film later.

Anyway, I set up the desk of a fictional period woman and we practiced trying to focus on just the locket I had on the desk.

An overall shot of the setup:

That is ran through a filter in Tiffen. I don’t care about artistic value here. I was trying to tell a story. (Did I mention we were drinking?)

This is as close as I came to getting the focus to do what I wanted (no filters or editing):

I think that is actually focused on the edge of the book.

This one did well on the flower though:

 

I learned a lot from playing around with all that. The lighting was wrong for one thing. There was so much light on the scarf (which is super light colored anyway) that the eye goes there instead of to the locket like I wanted but…all useful information. You learn to walk by walking, right?

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After that we just went hog wild. (Well, as hog wild as you can get with a camera, some costuming and alcohol anyway.)

We started out practicing portraits with Zac and ended up dressing him up like Sherlock Holmes. I can’t find the normal/period ones but here is Holmes:

 

That was a blast. The only editing to those is a Tiffen filter to make it aged. We went through all the books in the background and made sure there were no modernish dates at all. We even lit little pieces of paper in the pipe to make it smoke (even though none of the ones with the smoke turned out.)

Seriously…hilarious and awesome. In that last one where he looks all maniacal it’s because Trillian jumped on him and he’s laughing around the pipe in his mouth. It’s my favorite though.

Finally, Zac got some crazy idea he wanted to take a picture of me surrounded by our antique books. Those are my favorite of the night. I was very surprised by how they turned out. As he was taking them I was envisioning disaster. I could not see how that could possible make a good photo but judge for yourself:

There’s a slightly more explicit one that shows some boobage but I don’t want to post it publicly (sorry Drilldude). It occurred to both of us after this was all cleaned up that we should have done these with my head facing the other way so there would have been a glint of my nose ring but maybe another time.

All the playing on Saturday has me really wanting to set up some more period shots. I have so much fun with them. We’re going to start scoping out the thrift store for more cheap costumy clothes.

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Anyway, that was my weekend. Sunday was spent recovering and writing a paper for class. We also saw Brave. Cute. I don’t like it as much as some of the other Pixar productions but it was good.

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There’s some family drama going on that I feel like I should write about but I just can’t do it right at this moment. Maybe I’ll add an addendum later.

I have several (at least 3) OD friends here that are going through some seriously heavy stuff right now. It’s making me check OD obsessively just to see how they’re doing. It wouldn’t kill me to write while I’m here.