Regular readers of this blog (ie, those that were reading months ago when I wrote more) know that I have a strong desire to do 3D art. This mostly is driven out of a need to express myself visually while also having very little actual artistic skill. That lack of skill is what drove me to writing, because I had to do that, too, and it felt less like work to acquire good writing skills.

Ok, honestly, I thought my original writing skills were pretty awesome. I was wrong, I can tell by reading things I’ve written recently compared to the original (11 year old!) blog that still exists on the internet somewhere (GeoCities). Somehow I stuck the writing, but I’ve always truned back to the visual, the graphics, those sorts of things. Today the electronic tools available for free or nearly free are pretty amazing.

The wife wants to learn to do this. We hope to do a comic someday, I think, or at least something regular and interesting. But first we need to work on our mad skillz. Because of my enthusiasm with 3D, I own victoria 3, along with most of her high resolution maps, and morphs. So she’s something to play around with. Unfortunately, I don’t own a current version of poser. But DAZ, hoping to support their model-selling business, offers DAZ|Studio, a package similar to (but not as powerful as) poser.
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Yeah, I know, it’s a conundrum.

I’ve spent the better part of my evenings this week (or the “free” time I have in the evenings) trying to find a camera. My wife and I have a camera, but it was picked to be one for her web-based business that I’m sure will starting soon (hint hint). She’s got some truly wonderful crafts that she’s created, and you have to have a decent camera to take the pictures of them.

I’ve used the camera to take some of the pictures I’ve used on the site. Most of them (a few of the first HNTs were actually taken with a camera phone of all things). I realized as part of that the deficiencies of our camera — nothing that I’m upset about, if I was buying a camera for the same purpose, I’d buy a very similar camera. Digital cameras are as bad as other computer parts: in three months the cheap cameras will be better than a not-so-cheap one is today, and that’s true now. Looking at Wal-Mart and Best Buy showed me that cameras priced about the same as our HP all have more megapixels (7.1 vs 5), better ISO levels, you name it.

I’ve got a decent photo editing package, so I don’t need a lot of digital zoom, but I do want a decent resolution. Having that can fix just about any other sin of the camera. If the pictures I took as a kid, and a lot of the ones I took with the HP are any example, I need something to deal with shake. But the most annoying thing about the HP is the digital equivalent of “film advance time.” That is, how long between photos. The HP is several seconds, if not as much as 5. That’s forever when your Girl is lying there in an uncomfortable pose, waiting for you to take, oh, five or six shots because only one is going to be right.

If she’s going to be uncomfortable, then I want to get more out of it than a picture, if you know what I mean.

Plus, I just want to have a camera to carry around with me, so that when the whim hits me, I can take a picture. I did a lot of this as a kid — Dad bought us each a Kodak Instamatic camera (that took those little film cartridges and had a fixed focal length and flash, but nothing else). So he’d be running around, changing lenses on his Canon AE-1, and we’d be taking pictures of seagulls, shells, and something blurry we never could figure out what was. The problem for me then was my over enthusiasm.

Dad solved his problem by taking slides — they were cheaper to develop, but my allowance wouldn’t support the 5 or 6 cartridges I could go through in a day. Digital camera are the answer for me, since I can stick an inexpensive SD card, and get more pictures than I can easily take (and review and clean them up if they aren’t quite what I’d hoped).

In other Visual Arts news, I’ve been re-energized on the 3D rendering front by SexyWife’s interest in rendering fairies. I’ve got the Aiko 3.0 figure (and it seems, some faerie wings, too). She downloaded DAZ Studio, and I’ll probably do it over the weekend. It’s a free version of a poser-like tool. And while I’ve had poser in the past, I never really had it, eh? It’s $249, which we may spring for one day, just like that copy of Photoshop that we’ll have one day. I’ve got Corel Draw and Painter, so I’m slowly building a library of graphics applications. I just wish they weren’t so damn expensive.

And yeah, I’ve used the GIMP. It made me want to chew a limb off.

Well, I don’t really have much else about visual stuff today. I’m hoping to have something a bit more interesting here next week, depending on what we find. Or maybe I’ll take the time to go through the pictures I have taken and post one of those. Planning is everything,eh? And here I didn’t.