Posted by: skelseh on: June 29, 2010
I tried making something a bit different today, while Vince and I watched some new Marble Hornets style vids on YouTube (Get your Slenderman fix with EverymanHYBRID!). I wasn’t sure these would work, but I’m actually pretty pleased with the outcome.
We’ll see if anyone likes them! I’ve been adding a lot to the shop lately in a bid to get more traffic. I’ve actually sold three little charms since being in Sydney and one was even a custom order. Fun fun.
Night x
Edit: Seems someone did like them enough to buy them. Thanks Pablo
Posted by: skelseh on: June 20, 2010
Being the generous boyfriend he is, Vince has given me his cold. Right on a weekend. The rain I was complaining about a couple of weeks ago has since vanished into a cloudless sky, the gorgeous 33°S sun pouring over Sydney, warming the chilly winter air to a very pleasant 20ish degrees C. But we’ve got colds. Smeg it.
As a result, we haven’t felt like doing much this weekend. We managed a couple of trips to the shops and back, but nothing to write home about (or blog about?!). As such, indoor persuits has been on the menu. I, ashamedly, have restarted my subscription to World of Warcraft, more out of interest to see if it works than anything, and Vince has been enjoying a mixture of Left for Dead, Splinter Cell and Battlefield.
I have also been making a few more beaded thing for my Etsy shop too though, and today I got around to constructing a sort of lightbox to photograph them in. It’s a bit shoddy and cheap as, but it does the trick and costs only a few bucks. If you want to build your own Shoddy Lightbox™, follow these simple steps!
You will need:
Since my spare room is currently doubling as a cardboard box graveyard at the moment, I wanted to use a box I already had kicking around. Ideally I would have liked to use a squarer box than the one pictured, so that the panels are all at similar distances to the items I am photographing, but it’s not completely important. Just make sure the box it at least big enough to put your items in and shoot, without getting edges in the shot.
Because I was using A3 size paper, my box’s largest sides had to be at most the size of the paper. If you need a larger lightbox swap out the A3 for more suitable sized sheets. Please note though that due to the shoddy nature of this box, large sized boxes might have some issues with stability!
Using your steel rule as a guide, start cutting out the faces of your box. You will need to leave a 1-3 cm edge as you need something to fix the tracing paper to, and the box needs to maintain as much of its stability as possible.
Work out which face of your box will be the back; you don’t need to cut this face out.
Cut your tracing paper to size to cover the two sides and the top of your box. You don’t need to cover the bottom, as leaving it open means you can photograph your items on any surface you like (see the blue mushroom photo below, where the box was just sat on top of a map to get a different background). Shoddy Lightbox is thrifty and versatile!
Cut your layout paper to match the inside width of your lightbox. Position it inside so that it forms a nice curve at the back edge of your box. This gives you your continuous background for your photos. Top tip: fix it in place with some tape or blutac, but don’t make it permanant as you may want to use different colours in the future!
Position your light source (or sources) outside the box fairly close to the sides. The tracing paper will diffuse the light, spreading it through the box nicely. Using one, two or even three lamps will get different results so play around. I don’t have any lamps yet, so have been using Vince’s ridonkulously bright torch for now. I could use a touch more brightness, but have been getting some OK results as is, so far.
And there you have it. The results aren’t perfect by any means, but they are good enough to allow me to get some new things up on Etsy. Next step will be investing in a couple of good lamps to get brighter results. Hopefully I can find a good, cheap solution to that too.
Laterz!
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Posted by: skelseh on: June 16, 2010
Amongst all my lovely shipped belongings were my beads and stuff. I had taken down my Etsy shop before leaving the UK, as I packed all the ready-made keyrings and baggy upon baggy of colourful beads into one of the boxes. Now I’m here in Aus, all set up, I thought I’d better get the page up and running again.
I’ve renamed the shop. I thought it was better to have a named shop rather than just “My Shop”. “PixelBeads” isn’t very inventive, but it does the trick. Now all I have to do is knock up some artwork to go with it.
Which reminds me, work are sending me on an Adobe InDesign course next month. Woooo!
Laterz!
Posted by: skelseh on: June 13, 2010
Two things I have learned in the last day of having Television here in our Australian home:
The first point might be because we have only the analogue channels they still broadcast to our aerial, and I’m still not entirely sure where – amongst the chaos of unpacking – the TV remote has got to.
The second point is absolutely true though. At the moment, this channel is showing Russel Brand’s Ponderland; not something I would normally watch but it’s late and I am remoteless. In each of the ad breaks in this show (of which they manage to cram twice as many as in the UK) I think the only products that were being advertised to actually buy were two breakfast cereals.
It’s no longer about parting with your money for products and services, it’s about how you actually live your life.
Even the only two adverts I remember that were featuring products weren’t happy just telling me how awesome their cereals were, they also felt the need to tell me that normal human beings with worthwhile lives actually need their breakfast cereals in order to do all the running, riding, swimming, climbing and jumping that regular people do every day. I.e. why am I sitting on my sofa like a fatass when I could be eating nutragrain cereal and mountineering?
(Probably because nutragrain cereal tastes distinctly like dog biscuits, but you get the point).
It kind of pissed me of for about……………………. that long. I mean, I don’t smoke so can’t quit, I already donate to cancer research funds, I don’t abuse children on a regular basis, I don’t abandon dogs, I’m not army material, and they won’t let me give blood here. I even give homeless people spare change sometimes, though last time I did it the woman in question spent it on a bloody Whopper. Homeless and high cholesterol: great job.
At least product ads apply to most people watching; even for the products we don’t need. Everyone should eat a nice breakfast, everyone needs clean clothes, the majority of people own cars, all women are worried about looking old, and everyone’s homes smell funny. And the best thing is if we decide not to buy said products, we don’t feel guilty about it later.
So when Russel Brand led into the second ad break by saying “Now some people are going to show your adverts to make you buy things” what he probably should have said was “Now some people are going to tell you how you should be living your life“.
…you hopeless, lazy, uncaring, ignorant, self obsessed, worthless individual, you.
Not to be confused with the way marketers now try to sell you a lifestyle instead of a product. That’s a different type of witchcraft altogether, Mr. Jobs.
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Posted by: skelseh on: May 26, 2010
Posted by: skelseh on: May 16, 2010
Life is governed by telephone numbers.
At least, this is an idea addressed by Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. While this idea may seem as nuts as the thought that the Earth is just a giant science experiment run by little white mice, there sure have been a fair few coincidences in my life so far which could be taken as good evidence that it isn’t so much of a daft idea than you would think.
One example of this is my candidate number for my GCSE exams. I’m not going to type that in, because I’m paranoid, but for the sake of this example my candidate number was 4183. Every exam would see a little red card with this number printed on it, sitting on the corner of my ricketly old grafittied desk. As such, it soon became etched into my brain.
A couple of years later, when I was given the mobile number of a guy I had a huge crush on, I was able to remember it pretty easily because I instantly recognised the last four digits: 4183.
A year or two later I was at university, finding myself in dorm room 418.
Up until a few weeks ago, my extension number at work was 4813.
There have been various other occasions where either some of those numbers crop up in order, or all of the numbers crop up in different orders. Perhaps it is because I tend to notice patterns in numbers (and as a result have a slightly scary memory for phone numbers and birthdays) that I have noticed this, but it’s there all the same.
Most people would say that it is just a coincidence, but there are some people out there who believe that there is no such thing as a coincidence. To them, these recurring numbers would mean something bigger and far more philosophical than the 418th room in the building, like whatever the writers were intending to do with the lottery numbers in Lost. You know, before they gave up on a structured plot alltogether.
I wonder what those people would make then, of another weird coincidence I keep noticing every now and then…
In year 8, so at about 13 years old, I went away for an activities week with school. This week was organised for kids of both my year group and the one above, meaning that for the first time we got to know some of the older kids.
One of these kids was “Mark”. I never really got to know him that well, but this was the first time I became aware of who his was. After that though, I seemed to bump into Mark all around school and around town. When working on a closed site in the middle of nowhere during my gap year he showed up at the office – he was working somewhere on site. When I moved to Brighton for University I spotted him on a train to campus – he was at the other uni in the city. When I moved back home and started working in the town I saw him walking to work many mornings.
I see him, and I’m pretty sure he sees me; but the sad thing is that, since we never talked very much on that first trip in year 8 and have only passed each other since, we’ve never said a word.
The other day, whilst cyberstalking friends on Facebook, I noticed in the top right hand corner a ‘friends suggestion’ based on 2 or 3 mutual friends. Sure enough it was Mark. Even from the other side of the world this guy is bumbling around in my metaphorical peripheral vision.
If he showed up in Sydney in a few months, I would be totally unsurprised.