Quick heads up for perspective and people

If you are taking pictures of people while standing, it may be a good idea to try and lower your point of view just a bit, especially if you have a really wide lens. If you are sitting in a table with friends, then you really don't need to pay any special attention.
If you are standing and trying to snap something with a wide lens, then most people have the tendency to point their camera a bit downwards to have as much of the object as possible in the frame.
That will distort your perspective; it will make your subject appear as if it's being sucked towards the center of the since the top of the subject will be closer to the camera's focal plane than their feet/bottom part.

By lower your view point, you'll be able to frame your subject with the camera in a more level position in relation to your subject and avoid as much as distortion as possible.

Maya tip (possibly for other 3D modelers as well)

Made a 3D model that has lots of angles and or complex geometry that makes it hard to select elements?

Or you need to move around your model a lot to select the edges or vertices that you need?

Well if you have made a proper UV map, just load the UV editor window and select away. Easier to do so in there for lots of elements because of the unwrapped model.

Pictured above: Simple model of an ogre's club. The edges were selected in the UV editor; since all the teeth had their UVs overlapping each other's to save texture space, selecting the edges took a couple of clicks.

Dear weather...

...wtf was wrong with you at noon today? (or as a friend said once: "haven't gotten the memo"...)

White balance (shouldn't really be balanced.)

I'm sure that most people have seen at one point (either on the news or up close) someone holding a piece of white paper and a camera man aiming his/hers camera at it.

Their aim was to calibrate the camera's "white balance". You see, this is important because if they don't set a point of reference for what is considered white, the colors will be off depending on the lighting conditions.
Our brain does it as well, only in a much much more sophisticated and automatic way that we don't even notice it. (One way of noticing it is to stare at point with a bright color on it and then quickly look at a white wall. Colors will look funny for some time, and that is because our brain was compensating for the light conditions of the place we were staring at, and glancing at a different place, it keeps doing that compensation for some more time. This is even more noticeable if looking at an LCD screen and then looking at a wall lit by an incandescent light (or any light with a different temperature than the LCD screen).

A camera doesn't really know what it is looking at, so in order to make more sense we need that white balance, to get the colors straight. The sensor received some light spread out in a range of wavelengths and then the camera is using that "white balance" point as a reference to map that light to colors that will look normal to us.

The problem is that it will try to make white look white all the time; while things may not have looked like that when we took the picture. White balance is more of a scientific equation thing rather than how the scene made us feel when we first saw it. We tend to associate warmth with red/orange and cold with blue... A camera though will try to make the colors look as neutral as possible even though that piece of paper might have looked a bit orangey.

Setting the camera in auto white balance is ok for the most part, especially when you just want to take a snap of something to have as a reference, but when you want something to evoke a certain emotion; then it's a nice idea to change that white balance setting on your camera. Just go outside in a sunny day with no clouds, set the white balance in auto or "sunny" (so that the camera will try to set "white" according to the sunlight) and then set the white balance to "cloudy" even if it isn't just to see the difference.
You can make a winter's day have a summery vibe and vice versa. 

Color swatch

Color swatch... saw those guys just hanging there and thought they made a nice pair. Click for a bigger version in case you can't read the RGB.

Making things interesting

Most of the time photos are important and dear to the one taking them. It doesn't matter if the photo is blurry, shaken, crocked, eaten by a dog or whatever. That picture however is only special to the persons in it and/or the one that took it. So what could someone do if he/she/it wants to take a photo of someone and keep it interesting?

Since I'm no expert myself, I try to keep a couple of things into consideration when taking photos. Things like colors, light and shadows, perspective and patterns. Of course not everything will be present in the scene most of the time patterns. What I'm trying to do then is to think of the scene and how it would pop out, what element would make the scene show itself, because sometimes having everything in there (or giving attention to a lot of elements) may ruin the photo by being too busy.

For example if a scene has a nice interplay between light and shadow, it may be nice to tone down the colors to give more importance to the lighting. Or perhaps there is a prominent pattern going on with elements in the scene but the perspective is not exactly right. Do something; don't just stand where you were when you saw it. Go out of your way, climb something to go higher or drop down on the dirt if it's going to give you a better perspective. Try not to show things from the same angle as you saw them, simply because others would have also seen them from that angle (And this is not me being great at taking photos, it is just something that I've picked up from someone else that knows what he is talking about. When you think about it, you were walking on the same path someone else just did. So what you are seeing isn't really all that special when taken as something “new”). You see a flower that looks great? Don't just stand over it and take a photo of it. Chances are people have already seen it a million times. Drop down to its level as you may be able to get light through its leaves or petals or find a small insect there minding its own business. Go upside down, see if you can make a pattern with the grass around it…
Is there something you want to take a photo of and its angles or perspective aren't jumping out enough? Get close to it by walking if you can and zoom your lens out to its widest angle possible. You won't be doing it so that you get more stuff in the frame, as you widen your lens and you get more breathing room, you can also get closer to your subject. That would make things look exaggerated. If you want to “squash” something (perspective wise) use your lens's narrowest zoom setting and take a few steps back. Wide angles exaggerate perspective, narrow squashes it.
If something isn't contributing to the scene, don't be afraid to change it or take it out to make the rest pop out.

By dropping to the ground - even for this cliché image - the sky is visible in the frame, making it easy to get silhouettes. Plus, the viewpoint is not the same one as the one that someone would have when just walking by.

Faces everywhere #5

Grrrrr. I'm firewood, fear me!
(click image for larger version) 

New upload at artflakes

So I got around into uploading a new image over at artflakes.com ...
(It was this or a different version of this one, so naturally i keep thinking which one i should have uploaded)