Community Challenge

Hey Guys! Welcome back for another blog post! Yesterday a friend was reminding me of the importance of community. So I thought I'd address that point in this post.

Tim Ferriss often says "You are the average of the five people you most associate with." That's pretty true I think. I have spent a lot of my life surrounding myself with people who created drama, and found myself always caught up in drama, whether it was theirs or my own. Eventually I decided I didn't want to be living a life of drama and I distanced myself from the people that perpetuated the drama cycle. Guess what? The drama died away. I haven't yet surrounded myself with the people that I would more closely like to be identified with, as I haven't met them yet. But what I do do instead is make sure that I'm regularly exposing myself to the kind of influence I would like. This means the books I read, the podcasts I listen to, the videos I watch. And this is OK... But it doesn't encourage me. They don't call me up to exchange ideas, or go out for coffee. They really can't, because they're not actually people, they're merely concepts being expressed through a medium. I can see that associating with the right people would make a big difference, and I can see the value of my friends statement.

But where do I find a community? How do I consciously build up a circle of friends and associates who embody what I would like to be? Well, for starters, I should probably be where they are. Then, I should probably get over the social awkwardness that is only in my own brain and actually talk to them. But what if I don't know if they're the right people? Well... I certainly won't know if I never try to talk to them. Sure, maybe I could find some people on line, get to know them through blog posts, social media, interviews. But when I see these people in real life I suddenly find they really don't compare to the fantasy I've built in my head. So really, my only choice is to talk to them. Nobody said reinventing myself was going to be easy...

Okay. So now I know that I need to talk to them. I also established that I need to be where they are at. But where are they? If I continue in the routines that I've set for myself, I'm never going to find that place. It's time for me to step out of my comfort zone and change my routines. So, I started by looking into the different conferences. I've heard that the best part of a conference is actually the networking and socializing that happens between the panel speakers. It's a lot harder to find conferences than I thought it would be. I kind of had to dig a little. It would have been easier if I hadn't been trying to localize things. I tried to keep my search specific to Canada. This rather excludes conferences such as HOW Design, SIGGRAPH, or the AIGA Design Conference. But I have found there are a suitable number of conferences which happen to be pretty much in my back yard in Toronto. I was only able to find conferences related to Graphic Design, and unfortunately nothing really in regards to CG. I'll have to keep digging for that one at another time. The short list I compiled follows:

FITC - Future, Innovation, Technology, Creativity: This conference already took place in April, but there will be another in 2018. For more info, go to: http://fitc.ca/event/to18/

DesignThinkers Conference: Hosted by RGD (Registered Graphic Designers), this event takes place November 7 & 8 at the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto.For more info, go to: http://designthinkers.com/toronto (There's also one in Vancouver on a different date.)

GTA Photography Conference: This one is rather short notice. It takes place on July 19th, and is only a one day event. It should go without saying that this conference is specific to Photography. For more info, go to: http://gtaimaging.com/conference2017/

Design & Content Conference: Another one with short notice, this 3 day conference takes place July 17-19... And it's in Vancouver, so not quite on my doorstep, but I figured it was worth including anyway. For more info, go to: https://designcontentconf.com

It seems to me that there is probably a resource that I'm missing somewhere in regards to finding a community without going to conferences, so I guess I'm leaving that open for advice from the audience!

--Charlie Griffin

Stick with me, and we'll get wise together. 
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Country Roads

Web of Light

Melting Forest

Deadline Dilemmas

Hi guys! Welcome back to another blog post! Unfortunately some changes demanded my attention this week. My personal hero swept in and saved the day, which is super awesome! But that does mean that I'm pushing the line on that deadline again this week.

The thing is, when you have a deadline, you do your best to meet it. In many ways it's like a promise, you simply never break a promise. I've heard mixed opinions on deadlines. They generate stress, and subpar work. However they also push you to get work done that you wouldn't otherwise have done. Imagine saying to your children, "I'll build the swing set for you." That's a non committal promise. You're saying you'll build it when you get to it. In theory, your children might not need the swing set by the time you finally gotten to building it. Now, if you say "I'll get the swing set built this weekend." You've already begun clearing the space in your mental schedule to allow for the swing set to be built. There may be unforeseen circumstances that make it so you don't finish the setting set on the weekend, but you've certainly made every effort you can. It's similar at work. Recently I had a project with an arbitrary end date around a month in the future. Time went by and I plucked away at the project. I figured I had time. Suddenly I learnt that the project was due the following day. You can bet I devoted all of my attention to the project to ensure it was finished! This is the power of deadlines. They are a call to action.

But what about quality? Won't quality for the project suffer? Maybe. If you've over booked yourself it will, almost guaranteed. Ultimately though, the deadline encourages you to put your attention into the project sooner rather than later. In my opinion, the quality is actually likely to improve. You're not letting other things distract you. You don't start, then stop, then remind yourself where you left off. When it's been so long since you worked on a project that you literally had to deconstruct the project to figure out where you left off, it's often easiest to scrap the project altogether. I've done this, and for some I'm still mourning the loss, years later.

Of course, if you leave all the work till the deadline, you're not doing yourself any favours. In that case, the quality may suffer so much that you might as well have never done the project in the first place. Just because you have a deadline doesn't mean you won't procrastinate. You still have to actually put that focus into the project you've committed to. The deadline is an agreement between all parties that you will do the best you can to get that project done. Note that's "the best you can," and not "whatever you get done in time."

Does everything require a deadline? Well, probably not. But if you want to get something done in a timely fashion, set a deadline.

--Charlie Griffin

Stick with me, and we'll get wise together. 
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In recognition of Canada Day, and Independence Day I have a comparison between fast shutter speed, and slow shutter speed:

Happy Celebrations!

When Words Aren't Enough

Hey guys! Welcome back for another blog post! Sorry this post is so late! Life grabbed me and ran away with me for a few days...

So, the question I left you guys with: What is Graphic Design? Well, if you read the post at AIGA (http://www.aiga.org/guide-whatisgraphicdesign), then you read about posters, advertisements, branding, books, web design and a bunch of other stuff like that. On the surface, that is what Graphic Design is, and again AIGA's post is a very good summation of the topic. And it should be, after all AIGA is the American Institute for Graphic Arts, they are pretty much the foremost authority of Graphic Design. What their article doesn't cover though, is the subjective view on what Graphic Design is, as it is individual and... well... subjective.

If you've been following my blog you may remember I had a post about artists and the passion I feel they should have for their art.  (http://cgwise.blogspot.ca/2017/05/the-passion-of-art.html) Well, Graphic Design is Art. It is the means of communicating the message the artist is empassioned about. In this way it becomes a language, and it's a language which has been around since the dawn of time.

Cave paintings have been found that can be dated as far back as 40,800 years. That's more than 38,000 years before our Current Era(CE). It's long before people began recording history. Aboriginals have long been associated with body paint. Natives of North America would decorate their bodies for various occasions, but each color and symbol had a specific meaning. It was a communication, either to the wearer, other members of the tribe, other tribes, or even the spirit world. The ancient Mayans and Egyptians developed pictures to actively communicate and record various things. These pictures are now known as hieroglyphs. Modern writing evolved from pictographs to become the alphabets that we know today. Pictures have been used as a language, longer than history can say, and that hasn't changed to this day.

We do have a habit of viewing pictures as entertainment, which in turn leads us to make pictures for entertainment. We've got them hanging on walls, in books, on TV, in video games and comics. So many of us hear the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, but we never stop to think about what words a picture is trying to tell us. In many cases now, even the person making the picture doesn't know what the picture says. It's merely a means to an end.

Graphic Design steps away from that trap and intentionally puts a message into the picture. We look at every element we use, from letters, to colours, to shapes and ask how we can convey our message. Absolutely everything created through the lens of Graphic Design is intentional. There are no accidents. But there is room for interpretation. That interpretation is just like the way we interpret the spoken word and don't always understand what the speaker meant. Sometimes there are unintentional messages in the work, just like there is in speech. And of course there's always the conventions of different cultures.

In short, Graphic Design is the art of  language as art.

--Charlie Griffin

Stick with me, and we'll get wise together. 
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Rosé Rose

Maple Leaf Gardens

Hidden Depths

Big Mistake

Hey guys! Welcome back for another blog post. This week I was going to look at Graphic Design and what it is, but it turned out to be a reflection on the most important lesson I've learned in life. I decided to leave it. Who knows, maybe it will help some of you.

When I was in high school I made a big mistake. I chose to stop learning. I had vague aspirations to be a teacher, or a computer programmer, or starting my own business. I settled on not being a programmer, because I didn't want to spend the rest of my life learning new technologies. I decided not to be a teacher (yet) because I didn't want to graduate, go back to school, graduate, go back to school, graduate, and finally go back to school again. I was offered a full time job, and I figured I had it made. I could have free time, and money at the same time! (Boy, was I wrong!) I didn't need university or college because I would probably go, and then come out to be flipping burgers, or do a job like the one I already had. I'm not saying that pursuing secondary education was what I needed to do. Where I got the education wasn't in question, the fact is I chose to stop learning. I think this is the same as choosing not to live. At least it was for me. I stopped living and let life happen to me instead. This greatly limited my opportunities, and my awareness of what is actually out here in this great wide world. My idea of work places was rather black and white. There was manual labour, or there was office work. And since I didn't want to go back to school, office work was nothing more than a pipe dream.

Naturally, as life continued to live me, I learned anyway. It's a rather unavoidable thing to do.  Eventually I made the choice to start reading about my interests. Not as a conscious act of learning, but because it was interesting. But of course, this meant that I was learning. I acquired a variety of skills and interests. It sounds rather cliché, but I think the biggest lesson I learned was realizing that there is so much in this world that I don't know. Now I have something of a hunger for learning, and an actual desire to go back to school. (gasp) Quite the turn around! After a lot of soul searching, personality reviews, failed projects, and ultimately a car accident that had me off work for a few months, this hunger eventually led me to Graphic Design. And also the realization that work environments aren't anywhere near as black and white as I've made them out to be.

So where am I going to go with this? Time will tell. I might take on the question of what Graphic Design is next week. The answer to that seems quite subjective, but until then AIGA has a fantastic article discussing the facts of this question:  http://www.aiga.org/guide-whatisgraphicdesign

I hope that helps!

--CGWise
       aka Charlie Griffin

Stick with me, and we'll get wise together. 
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Radiant Breakthrough

Fronds For Life

Micro Landscape

Technicolor Pathway

Do you want to see my entire portfolio? Or maybe you want to order prints? Now you can at:

http://cgwise.deviantart.com

Building a Toolbox

Hey guys! Welcome back for another blog post. This week has been a week of reference pictures for me. I've started a project which involves a building. There's a local building that I saw a few weeks back, and when I saw it I thought I should make it into a 3D model. So, now I'm tackling that.

I made a special trip out just to take pictures of the building. I spent around an hour walking around the building getting all the shots that I wanted; or at least the best I could do. Of course the difference in how it works in your head and how it works in real life is always bigger than you realize. And so was the building.

I was lucky. There is lots of open space around the building. But... since the building was so large, that wasn't as helpful as I had thought it would be. So, after taking the pictures, I've now spent my time stitching the pictures together.

The amount of variance in scale and lighting surprised me. The lighting of course, could have been solved by using last week's Exposure Triangle. I didn't know the camera particularly well, and was dealing with the sunsets imposing time limit, so I didn't take the time to figure the camera out. Also, given these pictures were purely reference, I wasn't too worried about it. It did create a marvellous example of how the exposure settings really impact the image, and it illustrated the potential hazards of leaving the camera on auto mode.

Scale has been the true issue though. Because I was walking around the building, and always trying to include as much of the building as possible in the shot, I was not always the same distance from the building. When viewing the pictures individually, the difference is only noticeable if you're looking for it. Stitching them together digitally on the other hand, reveals how distant things truly are. It also revealed strengths and weaknesses of my software.

Some time ago, someone I respect declared that The GIMP was not for him and that he was going to use Krita. So I decided to try it out. I liked the ability to easily draw squares and circles and the like. That is definitely something that The GIMP is terrible at. However, in this situation I was wanting to scale a layer to match it up with another one. Krita seriously failed there, while The GIMP excelled. The GIMP allows for scaling to be done visually with the drag of a mouse. This makes it possible to scale the image within one operation. In Krita, the visual method did not seem to be available, so I had to adjust the height and width numbers, hope I was right, and wait to see the results.

In the end, I settled on using The GIMP. It was software that I knew, and it made my work flow easier. Now I know The GIMP is my preference, and I can shelve Krita for now. But don't take my opinions on software as your own. Try different software and find what works for you. I've been using The GIMP for years, and Krita just a couple of times, so my opinion is biased. But at some point, I'm still going to have to actually try Photoshop!

--CGWise
       aka Charlie Griffin

Stick with me, and we'll get wise together. 
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Holy Halo

To Blur or Not to Blur

Hey guys! Welcome back for another blog post! This week I found myself wondering about ISO. If you've been following this blog, you may remember I mentioned ISO during my Green Screen Adventure, and while I had come across advice about ISO, I had never actually had the chance to truly figure it out. That left me wondering what exactly ISO is, and what does it stand for? Until now, the only ISO that I knew of was the International Standards Organization, and that didn't relate to photography or video in any way.

I was wrong. That's exactly what ISO stands for: International Standards Organization. Specifically, in photography and videography, it refers to the international standard of measuring the sensitivity to light for film and digital sensors. In the case of actual film, each film was calibrated for a particular intensity of light. This was beneficial for capturing images in different situations from nighttime to daytime, from indoors to outdoors and everything in between. This also enabled more creative license on how pictures could be taken. When photography was in its infancy, the photographer needed to know everything about his camera and how the light entered the unit. It was a far cry from the point and shoot technique so many people employ today. Photography was something taken seriously by those using the camera. Those that practice photography as an art today, aren't much different. And the measurements and settings aren't any different either, they're just Standardized now.

So that's cool right? Some trivia to... well, what good is trivia? What does ISO actually mean? Well, to properly explain that, I should really get into the Exposure Triangle. It's pretty important, and the things in it are very closely related.

Naturally there's three specific things that make up the Exposure Triangle: ISO, Aperture, and Shutter Speed. Each of these things controls the amount of light that reaches your film, or digital sensor, but they do it in different ways.

The ISO is the amount of light that your sensor (or film) is calibrated to receive. (A point of note: The size of your sensor is arguably more important than the amount of megapixels. A 10 megapixel camera with a large sensor will take cleaner pictures than a 10 megapixel camera with a small sensor.) As I learnt with the green screen, the higher the ISO the more noise in the image, the lower the ISO, the cleaner the image. That sounds like a clear argument for always using the lowest ISO possible, but that's not desirable either. If you have your ISO set low, say 50 or 100, and you're taking a night time picture with no flash, then all you'll get is a clear picture of black. In other words, the clarity of your image depends on the amount of light available. If you're taking a midday picture, then a low ISO will work well. If you're taking a night time picture without a flash, then you're going to want a high ISO to be able to see details in the image. Things to keep in mind for ISO: How much light is available?  And how grainy do you want your image?

There's another word of mystery that I've been coming across: F-Stop. This turns out to be the measurement of Aperture, the second member of our Exposure Triangle. F-Stops are seen as things like f/16 or f11, and refer to the amount of light coming through the lens. See, the aperture itself is the opening of the shutter. When the shutter is more open, then more light comes through, when the shutter isn't open as far, then less light. It's similar to your eyelids, the more open they are, the more light comes in and vice versa.  Just like your eyes, if the aperture isn't open far, you don't have as much depth perception. This means that getting the cool effects like focusing on an object up close and having the background blurred out (bokeh) is largely dependent on your aperture setting. Conversley the aperture setting can be set so things in the distance are in focus, and so are things in the foreground. Thing to keep in mind for Aperture: How much focal length do you want?

The last element of our Exposure Triangle is the Shutter Speed. Simply put: How long is the shutter open for? This can be a tricky one to manage, because the longer the shutter is open, the more blur you're going to get. To counteract that you may want to use a tripod or an image stabilizer. The flip side is the lower the amount of time it's open, the more crisp the image is. For instance, when taking a picture of a bird in flight, if you have a fast shutter speed, you'll be able to see the birds wings frozen in time; but, if you have a slow shutter speed then the birds wings would be a blur. Things to keep in mind for Shutter Speed: Are you trying to capture action? Do you want blur in your image?  Do you have a tripod or stabilizer?

These three things together make up the Exposure Triangle, because they all affect exposure. This means that if you adjust one of them, you're likely to want (or need) to adjust one or both of the others.

In conclusion, the things I've learned from this is that my phones camera isn't as amazing as I thought. Now that I know about this, I just don't feel my phone camera is adequate anymore. :( Though, I have a better grasp on taking photos, using either my phone or an actual camera. I did take some pictures with my phone after reading about this. Here's one:

Reflection For The Day

By the way, since I mentioned it but didn't really explain it, an F-Stop is literally a stop in the sequential list of available aperture settings. Generally one F-Stop will represent double or half the amount of opening compared to the stop beside it. This is similar to the stops used for Shutter Speed.

I've only just scratched the surface of my photography learning. I recommend checking out my sources for further information.

--CGWise
        aka Charlie Griffin

Stick with me and we'll get wise together.

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"To learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know." - Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
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Sources:
https://digital-photography-school.com/iso-settings/
http://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/photography/articles/72927.aspx

Inching Forward

Hi guys! Welcome back to another blog post! In previous posts you've seen many photos that I've taken. They've been edited and manipulated in a variety of ways, and so at the barest minimum, these count as CG. They're significance in regards to CG comes more from style, presentation, direction of the eye, and of course, they can be used as textures! Textures, of course, are in high demand among the CG community, and are a significant part of why I started taking pictures. I have some that I have kept just for textures, but the others, I played around and manipulated.

I have found that I can take pictures of landscapes and natural elements pretty well. At least in my opinion. But the best way to keep your skills sharp is to test yourself with new things, or things that you know are a challenge. So this week I tried a couple of new things.

I have found that taking pictures of animals or people is particularly difficult. I haven't yet figured out why, but I just can't find the pop factor with them. Below you can see one of my attempts in this. It's a better quality picture now than the original photo, but I can't really say it's something that I want to keep looking at. It's a cute dog, but really it's a "pass the eyes over, and keep on going" picture...

Branching out into a different form of digital manipulation, I decided to try out the Oilify technique. I'm quite pleased with these results, but they're still just nature scenes.

Into the Veil

Cloud Walk

Path to the Bright Side

Andrew at BlenderGuru put himself on a mission to improve his skills, and seems to regularly rekindle this mission. I have to give him credit for inspiring me to do the same. I can legitimately say that I wouldn't be the artist I am today if it hadn't been for him. So, while I sincerely thank him for this gift, I also call all of you to action. Look at your skills, whether it's art or otherwise. Are you the best in the world? Not likely...There's always room to grow and improve. So find the skills that are truly a passion of yours and work with them. Amplify them. Bring yourself to new heights. It's well worth the investment.

-- Charlie Griffin
                       for CGWise
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"To learn and not to do, is really not to learn. To know and not to do, is really not to know."

- Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

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