A lot of sculpture focus this week. I created the mockups for a new sculpture, or rather a remaking and reworking of an old sculpture, which I’ve entered into the Woollahra small sculpture competition. The eventual idea is that it’ll be made with perspex rod, and I’m currently investigating options for lighting it internally.
The photography side of this week involved an exercise as a part of the Camera Craft 2 class. The project was to just move a single light and experiment with setting different types of shadow – revealing and hiding detail etc.
These samples from the shoot exercise were my first attempt at working within a RAW workflow. RAW is a bit of a revelation – the ability to arbitrarily set the white balance in post-production allows a bit of a rethink of the whole chain of shooting.
One thing I will say, I’m absolutely in LOVE with this camera (Nikon D800). It’s a colossal tank of a piece of kit, but once it’s locked down on a tripod, it’s such a joy to use. I’ve got an order in for a cable remote release. Nikon’s official one is something like $50, but you can get one on eBay for $2.99, which all the reviews I’ve read seem to rate pretty highly.
On the comics front, nothing much has been happening as the Apple developer portal has been down for a week after a security issue. Unfortunately I’m just at that stage where I need questions answered, so without access to that resource, my options are limited. My thinking at the moment is that I can probably figure out how to do ePub versions of everything, and make those the plain standard just for reading edition. Then also make iBooks enhanced versions that allow the reader to flip the art back to sketch versions etc. The upside is that I definitely know how to make the iBooks versions – I can do it all in HTML, if I ditch the skeuomorphic rage turn effect, and go with a simple crossfade. I’m coming around to the idea that a slab of glass doesn’t need the page turning visual metaphor, which appeals to the capital “M” Modernist in me.