Weekend Warrior

Weekends are by far my favorite time of the week. For me they are a time for adventure, exploration, and fanatical photography formulation. This weekend I was lucky enough to have the chance to visit a concrete plant for a shoot. This definitely brought me out of my comfort zone but I welcomed the challenge.

This shoot was an exciting chance to work with a whole new subject matter that I had not previously touched upon in my art. Although my day job consists of producing product photography, the inorganic shapes I worked with on this particular shoot made me pay particular attention to how they interacted with their environment.

Another thing I don't often work with is black and white. This is an area that I have been pushing myself in recently. A photo can taken a whole different mood or meaning when taken in black and white. This can be a challenge because it's not as simple as slapping a black and white filter onto your image. Anyway, here is the outcome of some of my work from this shoot. A little mix of industrial grunge with a splash of black and white practice.

 

M + J Engagement Shoot

For every shoot I do, I like to learn as much as I can about the person or people I am photographing. This is only natural of course. By understanding your subject you as a photographer are able to gain a bit of insight into their life to better capture their essence and beauty in your image.

As soon as they began to tell me about their relationship I was instantly inspired. Being an active and outdoorsy couple, I could easily relate to their appreciation of nature. When it was mentioned that the two of them loved water, my mind began to race with ideas for possible shots to do. A few locations were recommended to me but a waterfall was a must. I scouted out the different shooting locations before deciding on the perfect spot for them.

But as with all things, the shoot did not go completely as planned. When I arrived, as the sun was rising, I took a quick walk through the park once more to test the lighting in each area. Unfortunately the beautiful waterfall that I specifically picked this particular location for was not currently flowing. The water was very low that day which surprised me because of all the rain we had received that week. It was also a bit of a surprise because I had just been there a few days before when it was flowing perfectly. 

Even with this small setback we as artists must do our best to achieve our vision. I wanted this shoot to go well for this adorable couple so I went to work with what we were given. I am pleased with the outcome even if it wasn’t as I had initially intended it. I believe that this is not only an important part of being an artist but also just as human beings in general. We must learn to go with the flow (no pun intended) and tackle challenges head on.  

Click Here to see the full shoot.

Pokemon Shuffle Review

Some of you might already know of my avid interest (some might even say obsession) with the pokemon universe and its games. So it was no surprise when I hopped on board with this new FREE pokemon themed game: Pokemon Shuffle for the 3DS. For free a game I'll have to admit it is pretty great; very beautiful, adorable artwork, what more could you ask for? It had my attention for about a week or so, hey it's pokemon! There was no way I wasn't going to try and get into it as much as I possibly could.

 

This game was actually really fun at first. I made it all the way to stage 135 before I threw in my towel, so it's not that I wasn't enjoying the game...cause I was. This game is very similar to Candy Crush (and also to another pokemon game released back in 2006 called Pokemon Trozei), it is the usual match 3+ in a row but in this game you are matching pokemon to battle and defeat the opposing pokemon. You are given 5 hearts at the beginning of the game and you spend a heart to play a level. The down side is that it takes about 30 minutes for a heart to recharge. So honestly, it's only about 15 minutes of game time before you have to wait 2 and a half hours to play again. This I didn't find as fun. It's always saddening to me when a game tells me how long I can play it for. My mom did enough of that for me when I was a kid. BUT, you can spend money to buy jewels to buy hearts so you don't have to wait (jewels can be bought through the Nintendo eStore. One jewel is also given to the player after beating a "boss" in a particular area but only on their first play through). However, I'm not a fan of this business model. 

Anyway, the game involves choosing pokemon you've caught to fight for you. If you beat a level you have the chance to catch a pokemon to add to your roster. Each pokemon has a set catch rate percent and then a bonus percent is added on for how many moves you were under the target move limit. This is fine too! I like that a lot. It made skill matter. But then there were the pokemon whose base catch rate was close to 1%, you would literally have to beat their level in a single move for your extra move bonus to even give you a reasonable chance at catching them. Of course these are the tough pokemon that have such low catch rates, that's understandable but I always felt they were out of reach to me even if I was on a really good combo streak.

There is also the option to spend coins that you have collected from beating levels on power-up type items that increase your chance of beating a level. You can also buy This would be great if levels gave you more than 100 coins at a time. The cheapest power-up is 300 coins and it is also the least useful in terms of you beating the level (it gives your pokemon who fought more experience at the end of the fight). The most expensive/useful is 9000 where one less pokemon will show up on your play screen, making it easier for you to make large combos. Connecting your game to the internet once a day for a "check in" will earn your 500 coins so that means for you to be able to use this power-up would would either have to pay money or wait roughly a week (that is playing everyday at every possible time your hearts are recharged, checking in, and winning the level on the first try) to earn enough coins to use that power-up. And that isn't even a guarantee that you'll beat the level with it or catch the pokemon in that level. That's rough.

Pokemon Shuffle became less about skill and more about luck than I was comfortable with. I tried my hardest to line up my moves so that they would create chain reactions within my board (honestly I was thinking at least 3 steps ahead of myself at all times) but I felt like I wasn't in control of my game, like it had a mind of its own trying to keep me from winning at all costs.

Now you might say, "dude its a free game don't worry about it", and you're right. There was nothing keeping me from playing when I wasn't enjoying myself besides the fact that I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it (and the fact that it's pokemon). But I know now that I can't without spending money and that's not my fault. I would have gladly paid money for this game straight up over having micro transactions so that I could enjoy playing it. No thank you. 

Job Hunt and Game Polish

Looking for a job is hard. Although I have been spending countless hours with my eyes glued to my computer screen in hopes that I may find a job opening in a field I will enjoy, it hasn't stopped me in my search. With graduation coming up I need to have some idea of what I am going to do to pay my student loans. In the meantime, I continue on with my class work and honing some photography skills.

Along side that there is obviously still FireFight. This game is scheduled to be finished some time in May. So hold tight! Below is a picture of our new level select screen. We are really excited to work on polishing the game and making it the best that it can be with our given time frame.

Game Festival

Submitting your game to a festival can be scary. A lot of pressure is being put on you to have the best and most fun game out of all the other submissions. It can also be pretty interesting and informative, especially if you're sending your game to another country.

We did not toss aside the idea of sending our game into the Brazilian Indie Game festival (BIG). With some research we found out that a lot of Brazilians are actually learning English from American video games. So why not? We will take any chance we have to get our game out there and recognized. We are definitely looking for some great feed back after the festival.

Although we will not be flying out their ourselves, it is still a chance to spread the word about our game. Hopefully this will be an enriching experience for us as a team; working together with a set deadline in mind and specific requirements and polish.

How Much I Love Photo Editing

I'm just going to say that it's a lot. I really do have a passion for photography and photo editing. Below I have added some photos that I needed to edit for class that I had a really good time doing. These were intended as practice with editing photos in Photoshop and Camera Raw (so they were not taken by me just edited). You can never get enough practice. There is just something about the creativity you have, not only while taking a photo but with the post processing as well, that I just love.

Photo Credit: Scott Kelby (pre-edit behind)

This photo was an example of edits with white balance, that is the photos color temperature. New cameras these days have so many settings when it comes to white balance. You can allow your camera to do the work for you and use its little camera brain to determine the best balance for your photo or you can access the lighting yourself and let the camera know how it should balance it. Our eyes have a way of balancing the colors in different lighting so it may be difficult at times to understand why your pictures comes out with a particular hue to it and what white balance setting to use. 

In this case the original photo came out very blue and cold (this may be how you wanted the photo to come out, and that's fine, its all artistic opinion). A blue hue is usually caused by fluorescent lights. This can be combated in post by changing the white balance to the fluorescent setting and by making some adjustments of your own as well.

Animations

After trial and error I finally have some animations! I have never found animations to be very easy for me but I have always found the art fascinating with an incredible outcome. But I finally have something game worthy! I am proud of the hard work I put into these little guys. With more practice I hope to make them even better in the future. For now I am keeping them simple; none of the walk cycles I made are over 4 frames. This is also to prevent the game from being bogged down with too much info.