Loveliest Magazine published their second issue ever yesterday, and featured these four photographs of mine.
I can't explain how charismatic my photos of the Coogee-Bondi coastal path have been. Shot with my old Powershot SD1400, an exceptionally slim camera with good quality standards for a non-fully manual point and shoot, these photos have compelled publishers to put them in their magazines--Halcyon Magazine, Window Cat Zine Press, Magnolia Review, Beechwood Review, and now Loveliest. I shot them on a two-hour walk on a very sunny day, and used my (at the time) very basic editing skills to polish them. They were shot in jpeg as my camera didn't do RAW, and with a lot of limitations. I've run out of photographs from that shoot sooner than I've run out of places to send them to. I think a lot of the appeal is the carefree, saturated, colorful feel, especially to a bunch of miserable people in the middle of winter. There's an energy to a summer day--December in Australia--that I love to shoot. It's funny to look back and reflect on them, because the camera's limitations are in full view, especially in the high-res, TIFF format that Loveliest requested. The lens distorts some corner edges. Some sharpening issues that post-processing can't solve. Yet the beauty, I think, shines through. I have some photographs from a Maine summer that I hope will do as well, taken in a location that's more familiar and intimate to me. The new camera I have is better than the old one, but I'm still coming up against some frustrating limitations. Now that I've retired the collection, I can post the remaining photographs on DeviantArt. Some of them are already online in this gallery.
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I'm working on a set of two unusual-size paintings: 3x9 inches, a good length to flank a larger work (or architectural feature) or fill up a narrow space. I've detailed the jump from schema to finished work in this post on DeviantArt. But, as I work on this commission, I plan to document each step of the process. These were specifically commissioned to go along with two other works, Sky Slice and Moon Slice. Moon Slice itself was commissioned as a companion piece to Sky Slice. I wasn't 100% happy with the pairing of the two, so I intend Sea Slice and Star Slice to complement the set, filling out a spectrum of moments between the two. I want the kinetics of the paintings to mimic the others, and the colors--a blend of cool, warm, and dark that invokes the eponymous entities. Although these are abstract paintings, they capture a specific essence. I hope to paint more like them in the future. The size and shape is accessible to anyone looking for good art in the home, and it makes the price affordable as well. Many of you know that I play Star Wars: the Old Republic, a Star Wars MMO. I've been playing since the launch of the game in December 2011, and I've been leading a guild (an online community of people) since August 2012 (officially, at least). During that time, we have been competitive on the PVE scene and, also, a tight-knit community of friends with two in-person meetups and countless get-togethers, lots of fun online and in-person memories, and a thriving membership.
People that I've met through the guild helped me volunteer in Cambodia last year and in Uganda this year. They've become, I hope, lifelong friends, business contacts, and ardent supporters. The problem isn't the community; it's the game. The developers have been completely schizophrenic, directionless, and tight-lipped for years. They've made a series of wrong decisions that has killed the entire PVE community. There are still aspects of the game that I enjoy, but not enough to keep me--and our remaining 80 qualifying accounts--satisfied. Our schedule had nine raid teams before the holidays, with around 60 people participating on those teams. Now, as some of the last holdouts, the schedule will have two or maybe three teams on it, some people who are on more than one team, because people are unsubscribing en masse. I don't blame them. I probably would unsubscribe if I wasn't the guild leader. At this forced crossroads, the officers and I had two choices: we could continue being a swtor guild and bleed out members while doing content that we had already done, or we could branch out, play new games, and stay together. We'd already played some games casually besides swtor, but this was moving MMOs. Nothing is as soulcrushing as starting again from level one with zero money and zero resources--but we were all willing to do it to keep playing together. So we've subbed to World of Warcraft, bought Guild Wars 2, and are also considering some other games with co-op play such as Diablo 3 and Heroes of the Storm (which many of us were already playing). Anyone who is reading this is welcome to join us as we embark on this new chapter together. It's my hope that one day, we'll be able to play swtor, the game we all love, together again in the way that we used to. It sucks that the game hasn't gone away completely, but has rather become a shell of what it was. It hurts. So it's a new year for me, and all the members of <Aisthesis>. I'll be talking honestly about the challenges that we're facing going forward, and the joys of doing something new, in between other types of posts, of course. Ajantis#1246 Ajantis-Durotan <Aisthesis> (A) Aotor-Ysera <Katabasis> (H) Ysera-Durotan is a connected server Ajantis.4795 <Aisthesis> [Ais] |
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