I’m feeling rather “blah” lately, especially today what with the phone bill showing up and stressors being piled on at work. I haven’t had much to say about much of anything this past couple of weeks, not even about the wedding I took pictures of eight days ago.
So, here, look at what the Spud gave me, bought with his ticket winnings at the nickel arcade:
Nice, isn’t it? It’s actually a piggy ducky bank, I just didn’t take the picture from an angle which shows off the coin slot.
I started my day with some cleaning. I emptied the garbage cans in my bedroom and bathroom, then started in with clearing off the main desk. Why? Because it just might make a workable set for photographing rubber ducks, of course! (As if anything else would motivate me to wading through years’ worth of paperwork and other detritus. Seriously!)
Eager to show off the fruits of my labors, I reached for my camera.
Say, why don’t we get some ducks into that shot?
It took five minutes for me to locate one of the nine, however. Turns out that he’d been forgotten in my backpack for a few weeks, since the last time I took the ducks out-and-about (intending to do some outdoor shooting which never quite happened). Oops. Adding injury to insult, he’s a bit the worse for wear:
Some of the paint on his bill rubbed off from being jostled around in my bag all that time. You can imagine how delighted I am at the results of my own negligence.
The show, however, must go on. We’ll deal with it. Now I just have to convince him not to eat my brains while I sleep by way of retaliation…
Do you see what happens when I’m so excited by my culinary success that I feel compelled to run upstairs and grab the camera? Do you?
That’s the chicken I cooked yesterday, awaiting insertion to a bed of noodles (mixture of shells and rotini, as yet uncooked in the above picture) and grated cheese (cheddar of various sharpness, plus some other mixed cheeses, not pictured).
I’m such a dork. But I can live with that.
I refuse to take responsbility for any hunger pangs you may be experiencing on account of reading this post.
Following Dad’s suggestion, I picked up a couple of “sunlight” bulbs for scene lighting from Freddy’s. A quick trip to Office Depot netted me a pair of flexible desk lamps to put ’em in, and here are the results:
The colored towels are there for testing purposes. As you can see, these ducks look pretty good now. My next trick will be to come up with a “set” of some kind. Mind you, I don’t plan to restrict things to just the one location, and in fact with sunnier weather on tap this weekend I’m considering getting some usable shots out-of-doors if at all possible.
Another, albeit less critical, task that I’d like to accomplish involves some softening of the lighting. Both Dad and Uncle Pete have given some good suggestions on that, it’s just a matter of acquiring materials and performing more tests. (Oh, shucky darn, I’ll have to take more pictures. Boo hoo.)
Progress, it is being made. Once the physical requirements are met, though, I’ll have the really tough work: Cranking out enough scripts to get a few weeks’ worth of material into the queue… and there’s the whole “gotta do something about the website design” thing, too. Ack. What have I gotten myself into?
I tried to tweet about this, but for some reason folks were getting a 404 error… even though the image link was 100% correct. So. I don’t know whether WordPress or Apache is at fault. I don’t have the luxury of time to spend tracking it down, either, especially when a simpler solution can present itself: I can blog about it! Duh!
So. Here you go (click the image to embiggen):
Meet Poe. He’s a pretentious little twit duck. Figures he’s named after Edgar Allen, but everyone else knows that his name’s just short for poe-zur…
(Also, I won’t be using the Dragonbones font in the actual project. I just liked how it looked during testing so I kept it in the “final” image.)
I still need to get my hands on a good light source for indoors (so if there any shutterbugs in the Rose City who have good tips on inexpensive lighting, let me know) but I wanted to show you what that earlier picture of my recently-cleaned ducks was supposed to look sort of like.
From left to right in that photograph is the starting lineup for that silly little project I’ve been prepping for: Rei, Shimako, Roger, Sachiko, Li, Poe, Neil, Rusty and Score.
The next bit of preparation will involve layout, image editing software & templates, and… fonts selections. Stay tuned, duck fans…
