Two days without any posts. That’s almost unheard of for me. Sometimes I’ll skip a day every couple of weeks, because I do sometimes have other things to do or I have nothing to write about, but I don’t recall going two days without writing. However, I do have good reasons for neglecting the blog for the past couple of days.
The main time-suck this week has been Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I picked up a copy last Sunday and have been reading a few chapters each night. I read the last chunk on Thursday night, which made me forget to write anything for the blog. The last few chapters of the book just sucked me in, and I couldn’t put the book down until I finished it. It was quite the shocking ending for me and well worth the eye-strain and lost hours of sleep.
Yesterday I received my copy of The Art of Rigging Volume 1 from CG Toolkit. I’ve only just started flipping through it, but it’s already looking like a great reference/tutorial book on rigging for Maya. I haven’t built any character rigs in quite some time, but I wanted to get back into it and work on some rigging techniques for my own personal use. Now that I’m animating every day, I have a better idea of what I like and don’t like in regards to animation rigs, and I really want to test out some ideas that I have. I think this book will help me move along much faster than if I was shooting blindly.
Last night, as I was straightening out my living room, I found my good ol’ Canon AE-1, my very first SLR, and reminisced briefly about all the fun I had with it while I was in art school. Although I had a point-and-shoot camera at the time, my AE-1 was my weapon of choice for more creative work. I shot a lot of black and white film with it (Tmax 400 was my favorite film back then) and actually developed all of it myself in our school’s photo lab.
The camera had collected a little bit of dust over the past couple of years, so I decided to take some time to clean it. As I was handling it, I remembered why I liked this camera so much. It is compact enough to be unobtrusive and easy to carry around. It’s also big enough to have a decent lens on it for good image quality and nice depth of field.
Interestingly enough, I had recently been checking out some of the more analog-based groups on Flickr, so finding my AE-1 film camera was a nice coincidence. In particular, I’ve been really fascinated with the images in the Lomo group and at the Lomographic Society web site. I don’t plan on getting a Lomo, but I really do like the look those cameras get. I don’t think my AE-1 can produce images like those (it wasn’t designed that way), but some simple adjustments and tweaks in Photoshop can yield similar results.
Today I continued my photography research streak and spent many hours at Borders and Barnes & Noble’s with my nose buried in photography books. I read through the National Geographic field guides, looked at many portrait collections, flipped through photo magazines, and skimmed many introduction to photography books to gain as much knowledge and tips as I could. I read a bit about everything, but the stuff on portraits and street photography interested me the most. I’ve found people to be the most interesting and challenging subject matter to photograph, and I really want to get better at it.
With all the reading I did, I haven’t really done my actual photography this weekend yet. Assuming the weather is decent tomorrow, I’ll probably head out and try to put some of my newly-gained knowledge into practice. I may even pick up a couple rolls of film and lug my AE-1 with me as well. Only way to improve is to shoot more and more.
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