By removing data you either tell the others “look, this data was not relevant” or “look, this data was super relevant and I’m being sarcastic” or “you know what, stop being lazy asses and use your own brains to fill in the blanks”. That makes it fancy in that the watchers must guess which one it is you meant.
I think there are some images that legitimately look better in greyscale, from an aesthetic perspective, but I never understood how anything other than aesthetic appeal matters in static visual art. Like, a literary work or a performance art can make me think or evoke feelings, but static visual arts, like photographs and paintings, fall into the categories of “that’s pretty”, “meh”, and “yuck”. I really dislike art museums because of this, as I get everything I need or want out of a picture within a couple seconds of viewing it and then want to move on, but everyone else seems to want to spend several minutes staring at every single piece.
I really need some kind of narrative to get anything out of art.
@APW thinking of grayscale photograph as having “data removed” is not helpful. as a linguist, maybe think of the choice of grayscale as semantic. Grayscale does not have one single set “meaning” though, because there isn’t a single universal photographic language. It conveys different things in different contexts.
I used to feel that way — in fact, honestly, I still feel that way, mostly.
But I’ve recently got really into the BBC radio show Moving Pictures (after I got over my disappointment that it wasn’t another Discworld adaptation) in which every episode spends half an hour examing a single artwork (which is also available in a super-zoomable format on their website) pointing out all kinds of intricate details I would never have noticed and how they fit together to convey what the artist is trying to say.
It turns out there is a narrative in static art, I just needed someone to tell me how to see it.
No, you understand art. Deleting color is bullshit. One famous photographer, Ansel Adams, shot almost exclusively in black and white, which means black and white must be great art. It isn’t, and Adams took boring pictures.
I think that Adams needed to remove color as a distraction because he was more interested in controlling contrast. Rather like modern art more generally seems to be about how much you can leave out and still be able to convey meaning.
Anyway he’s regarded as a Great Photographer, so one at least gets to drop his name and seem arty by association.
Yeah it’s really interesting how lately now that cameras and images are ubiquitous and making high quality pictures has never been so cheap and low-effort, there’s an esthetic of purposefully degraded images. I feel like the whole lo-fi/8-bit/polaroid/glitchy/analog constellation of esthetic directons, while each movement has its own characteristics, points to an engagement with the medium itself that was maybe less mainstream in earlier technological eras. [Personal views][citation needed]
I believe I read something about this some time ago (so unfortunately I can’t dig up a citation, only my paraphrasing). It was referring to black and white movies, but the principle is the same, IMO:
Basically, the light and shadows of greyscale images can be drastically different and change the whole look of a scene, beyond the obvious lack of colour. It’s not inherently better or worse, but it does force both the person doing the composing and the eventual audience to consider things from a different perspective. For instance, the way the edges of objects blend into or contrast with each other can be quite different depending on the colour situation.
And I suppose, the mark of effective art is not whether it’s inherently “good”, but rather if it provokes some sort of reaction from its audience – The asking of “With our modern technology, why would someone deliberately shoot/publish this image/scene in greyscale?” is certainly a reaction – Even if a rhetorical question.
Would the same image draw your attention in the same way if it were in colour?
I majored photography, in college, (early 70s) and love taking the B/W class. It helped you concentrate on composition, contrast, lighting, shadows, etc. It helped make my color stuff better, later. Got a ribbon at the L.A. County Fair, for one of my B/W pieces, too (larger than most STATE fairs!)
Never tried any myself, but I imagine that different distilling techniques and variations in the mash bill might lead to some very subtle differences in taste. Compared to the much greater variation in flavor and character among properly aged whiskeys, I still don’t quite see the point, though.
Old joke ahoy:
When I was six, back in the ’50s, a revenue agent came up to me and said,”Son, do you know where I can find a still?” I said, “Yeah, my uncle has a still.” Revenuer: “I’ll give you ten dollars if you show me.” In those days, when a candy bar was a nickle and a comic book a dime, $10 was a fortune to a kid. I being Irish, sold my uncle out in a second. “OK!” Rev: “Let’s go.” Me: “Where’s my ten dollars?” Rev: “I’ll give you the ten when we get back.” Me: “Oh, you ain’t comin’ back.”
I actually really dig taking photos on my phone. Just. . random bits of building, neighborhood, animals, bits of sky, or nature that strikes me at the moment.
It’s a harmless hobby, and I rarely ever go back and look at the photos myself again later, but I enjoy sharing what I do manage to nab. Just to share a bit of that captured beauty.
There used to be a blind photographer, in New York City if I remember. He’d walk down the street until he heard something loud, such as a crash, an argument, laughter, and would point his camera and shoot. Shot a lot of garbage. Also shot a lot of fine photography.
Sometimes I take pictures of places I go to because
1. I wanna use them as reference for a comic that I REALLY want set in atlanta but unfortunately don’t spend a lot of time in Atlanta
and
2. Because I don’t spend much time in Atlanta it’s really special to me when I go and I wanna take pictures of how neat that place is.
I take tons of pictures too. It’s actually a great art cheat when you make the references yourself. No one can call you out for copy and pasting or tracing your own photos.
FUN FACT: Inio Asano, artist of such manga as “Goodnight Punpun” and “Dead Dead Demon’s Dedededestruction” has gone on record saying he does not, in fact, draw his backgrounds from scratch. What he does is goes on walks and takes pictures. He then scans those pictures into the computer and then turns them greyscale. He then draws over bits and pieces of the background to give it a more natural hand drawn look so it blends with his art better.
When I found out I was blown away. I always thought his backgrounds were awesome and here he is, not only revealing “hey, I basically just cheat” but being VERY open about the fact that he’s cheating. It is then that I realized “It doesn’t actually MATTER that he’s cheating. They’re HIS pictures taken with HIS camera that he sketches over with his art program. And the end result are some stunning backgrounds that draw me in. Cheating is just…part of art. He never claimed to be great at drawing backgrounds, he didn’t lie to us. He just did what he needed to to make this aspect of making a serialized manga more bearable.
I wouldn’t call it “cheating” to look at the world and draw what you see in it, whether directly or through captured images. The art is in the selection and the making.
I moreso mean cheating in the fact that he’s mostly just tracing actual greyscale photographs, but I should add on “cheating” isn’t a dirty word to me in art. Art, in and of itself, is a deception. The entire concept is to leave some scratches of graphite/pigment on a surface and convince everyone “That’s a person!” It’s not. It’s just markings on a wall.
Animation, in the dictionary, is cited as an optical illusion. Which is APT because it is TRICKING you into thinking that the characters on screen are moving, expressing, thinking, feeling people. They’re not. They’re just markings on a wall. But we can make them blink, we can make them walk, we can make them talk even! We can impart SUCH a sense of personhood into these etchings on the wall that we can make people cry or make them angry or filled with glee.
And a part of this is “cheating”. One of the things I learned about 3D animation is, if you’re not making it for a game (or moreso even if you are if the game has a fixed camera angle) you are allowed to constantly cheat and break the models. Swapping out head shapes to match a style, detatching and reattaching limbs, Growing/shrinking parts of the body for forced perspective. The only thing that matters is if the final product looks good. You can bend the character in so many impossible ways but if the final result looks good nobody will care or even notice.
Finding out Inio Asano “cheated” his backgrounds wasn’t a realization of fraud. It was a realization of brilliance. Like “Holy shit! He makes this sound so SIMPLE” and the end result looks beautiful. It minimizes the workload on him to such a degree that he’s able to do a lot of the work a usual mangaka usually pushes onto his assistants himself, which is what probably allows him to compose such interesting shots and consistently phenomenal character art.
Yoto,
I’m gonna tell you this because this is something you yourself have brought up unprompted (it’s just i would never say this if you didn’t make a point of mentioning it) the fact that you haven’t had a girlfriend and don’t know how that would ever happen.
Like i said before, i love the way you express yourself.
but especially when you talk about art, you just sound so passionate. look, i’m not any kind of PUA, i have no idea how to “get people to date you” beyond the simple advice that self-confidence, at least in some areas, matters. and to that end hopefully, let me just point this out, when you talk like that you seem to light up and the things you say are so thoughtful and deep.
Now i don’t know that much about you, but i just hope you realise that you have so much to offer that’s rare and precious and, you know, attractive. that’s all. (and it doesn’t end with your thoughts about art as far as i’m concerned, but this is what is motivating me to write this rn)
Well shucks, that means a lot. I don’t have a lot of relateable interests that are good at breaking the ice. Most of my fascinations are art or animation related. I love talking about cartoons and comics and video games. But I can’t dance, I’m behind on music, I don’t know slang, I work at a Wendy’s. All the stuff I like is stuff your average person doesn’t care about so it’s hard to have these really fun enjoyable conversations with people honestly.
I can’t stand the feeling of getting carried away with my passions only to be greeted with a stone faced and uninterested person. It makes me feel foolish.
My favorite pictures to take are the view from the window of wherever I’m staying when I go out of town. Often the views aren’t, like, “notable” or whatever, because I don’t have “place with an iconic view” money, but I like the little feeling of “this is what the world looks like from here.”
I also think it’s funny how sometimes doing this at home means I have far more pictures of my neighbors’ houses than I do of my own. Which I guess might be common? I mean, how often do people photograph their own house? …Now I want to go take a picture of my house.
I take pictures of graffiti and other types of street art constantly. Not just the impressive flashy spraypaints but also the awkward scratched signatures, the tiny stickers, the silly sharpie jokes, anything that stands out to me as interesting, funny, cute, powerful, pretty, bizarre…
It’s sharpened my attention towards my urban surroundings, and appreciation for the many small ways city people reclaim and utilize public space. It’s this endearing outpouring of gratuitous, illegal, cheeky creativity, it doesn’t let the city be the nice and bland ikea fantasy politicians and boring middle class office-goers would like it to be. It’s an alternative conception of the public sphere to that of the liberal philosophy of privately-owned, publicly-regulated spaces: instead of “respecting private property” like this freaky cult of a capitalist culture we live in assures us we must, it says “fuck that, i live here, i get to write on this wall.”
Yeah I went back and looked at a few images of last semester Ethan and dude is looking at least a shade lighter now. I can’t really back that up with proof, but he’s had better days.
Oh, shit! Hang in there, yeah? That’s some shit-ass luck, I genuinely hope you’re gonna be okay. Sending whatever form of psychic well-wishing is most helpful? Unless you don’t want those, in which case uh, make sure you do everything you can to stick around.
Sending you all my well-wishes for your full and smooth recovery!
Try to get yourself some PAXLOVID as soon as you can. You meet multiple criteria for it. Plus an asthma inhaler if you can get one. They help a lot. And/or hot black tea with honey snd lemon — the theophylline will expand your bronchioles, the lemon will cut the phlegm, and the honey will coat your throat to soothe a cough.
But for real, yo’ — trouble breathing, you just call for medical assistance right away. Hands down. That sh**’s no joke.
Plenty of rest, plenty of fluids, staying warm, avoiding most caffeine and alcohol, getting a little fresh air and sunshine through the window when you can… all good things to do.
“Coat your throat” is of course nonsense, but honey does help against throataches. Any highly concentrated solutions do: saltwater, chicken soup, Southern sweet tea…
Booster’s line here, for some reason, is making me think back to February of 2021 when I spent a whole day just walking around my college campus and taking pictures of everything, because I both live and went to school in Texas and photographing the place covered in snow was not something I was ever gonna get the chance to do again. I’m not normally a photographer at all, I just suddenly felt I had to capture things.
Tangent aside, I really like seeing Ethan opening up to someone again. I think it’s kind of important to make new friends after you’ve gone through a major life-changing experience, because you need someone to talk to that doesn’t know what you were like before. With people you already knew, it’s hard not to feel like you have to maintain an image of someone you aren’t anymore.
Sometimes you just need to try and capture a moment. I remember walking through the local trails after a fresh snow on a perfect night, and it felt like seeing something I’d known my whole life with fresh eyes.
Not an expert, but JPEG is a lossy compression scheme, whereas from the sound of it RAW is either a lossless compression scheme, or completely uncompressed. The practical upshot is that you can store more JPEG files in a given storage space than RAW files of the same pixel resolution, but the resulting images will have a lower visual fidelity.
JPEG replaces the large numbers for each pixel with a more compact encoding that allows one to guess with reasonable accuracy what the original pixel’s values were. But it can guess wrong, and often does near high-contrast features like the edges between brightness and deep shadow — you’ll see a kind of halos repeating the shape of the boundary. It’s best used for real-world images, not for drawing or painting (but okay for making images of physical paintings).
At the higher compression factors, you can store way more images in JPEG coding than RAW coding. But then there’s less information to do the guessing when you reconstitute the image.
In digital photography, you can take pictures in JPEG format or whatever kind of RAW file that camera uses. (It’s always capitalized like it’s a format itself, but it’s not.) RAW files record all the information the camera takes in for that exposure, and they’re kind of like digital negatives that you have to develop in an editing program like Photoshop or Lightroom to get them to look the way you want. So I was just wondering how much Booster does in-camera vs. postprocessing. Not innuendo, just me being a photography nerd.
RAW is the format that keeps all the original data and allows you to work on the images later. Like, in Lightroom or more professional post production systems. So using RAW makes you either very pretentious or a really good photographer.
JPEG is not only lossy, each time you save it again, you lose more.
I think the reputation of shooting RAW is that you’re either a pro or just pretentious, but it’s actually an excellent way for less skilled photographers to cover their asses. You can adjust the exposure of a RAW file after the fact and usually save a picture that would’ve been unusable as a pure JPEG, since that format flattens everything and discards the extra data. When I have the option, I usually shoot JPEG + RAW.
I really like Booster’s jacket – it’s like cargo shorts for your torso, which is a great idea I’ve never considered. I wonder if they really make those – I need a new jacket for fancy occasions anyway as my dog tore one of my current jacket’s sleeves.
The McDonald’s in my town was the second one countrywide. I remember my dad talking about it as if it was a point of pride. I was too little to remember whether it hit the newspapers (or maybe wasn’t there at all yet?) but it very well might have. Weird times, the early 90s.
Not entirely sure why I’m sharing this.
I remember the McDonalds opening in my hometown, and how excited I was (my parents less so; it was bad enough I insisted on one meal at Maccy D’s every time we went Down South to London). I don’t recall if it made the front page of the newspaper, because I never read the local newspaper, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Of course, almost immediately following my excitement over this, I turned veggie, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This immediately got me to look up these places in Jamaica and then tell my parents about the Little Caesars in Negril for the next time they’re there… like we don’t live by freakin’ Little Caesars central… like that’s what they’re looking forward to eating in Jamaica…
We put him in the hydraulic press and really squished him down. He’s been slowly regaining his dimensions since then. The time lapsed video is pretty cool to watch.
I think pretentiousness in a 19-yo is a natural defense mechanism for growing up in corntown. Especially if you’re queer, trans, or both. Can’t have been easy, even if it wasn’t worst case scenario.
For real. Honestly, Booster just has their shit together and doesnt give a lot of fucks.
I think they got used early to people thinking they’re a freak whether they tried to act normal or not, and realized they might as well be as eccentric as they pleased if they were going to be judged no matter what. They rule.
Booster wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to shoot some black and white film if they were given the chance. Not sure if they’d go as far as developing and printing it themselves, though. (That’s a fascinating rabbit hole with its own series on Technology Connections.)
It’s the stuff everybody used to take pictures and shoot video before digital cameras were invented. It’s higher quality than analog magnetic tape recordings, too.
Nowadays people only use it for artsy or hipster reasons, but until fairly recently when quality DSLRs came down in price on the used market, a 35mm SLR and a good film scanner were the budget way to get started in hobby/prosumer photography.
I was terribly amused by a recent show – Black Mirror or something of that ilk – where someone shooting with a Polaroid, rather than digital, is held up as an arty hipster. Because I’m (barely) old enough to remember when those “instant” cameras were, along with coffee crystals and microwave popcorn, sneered at as mass-market consumer products that no professional would ever touch.
I honestly wouldn’t put it past Booster to get into shooting B&W film and start using the shared half-bath as a 2am darkroom. (Shooting film is fun, tho.)
YES! Booster’s backstory time! I really like how they and Ethan really seem to be starting to be friends. I wonder if growing up in a place where there were only cornfields led they to spend time analyzing the few people in the town.
If i may because you probably weren’t taught about singular they in english class, here it’s an object case so “led them” not “led they” (its the right pronoun just not the right case =) (è lo stesso che in italiano, anzi non so se c’è un pronome neutro in italiano??? Ma per esempio, contrasta “lei/lui va” e “le/lo porta a” =) non so se è chiaro??)
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Greyscale is fancy. No further questions.
Does that make my drawings, of which I do not color out of laziness, Fancy? If so, Bully for me!
Does that further make my occasional color edits of those drawings a stain on your art’s fanciness?
Or does it somehow increase the value of the original because it draws attention to how greyscale the original is?
It’s only fancy if you grayscale the colored image.
Brilliant!
So if you make it simpler from the original image by removing the color data, it becomes fancier?
… I do not understand art at all.
By removing data you either tell the others “look, this data was not relevant” or “look, this data was super relevant and I’m being sarcastic” or “you know what, stop being lazy asses and use your own brains to fill in the blanks”. That makes it fancy in that the watchers must guess which one it is you meant.
…I don’t understand art either, I am a linguist.
I think there are some images that legitimately look better in greyscale, from an aesthetic perspective, but I never understood how anything other than aesthetic appeal matters in static visual art. Like, a literary work or a performance art can make me think or evoke feelings, but static visual arts, like photographs and paintings, fall into the categories of “that’s pretty”, “meh”, and “yuck”. I really dislike art museums because of this, as I get everything I need or want out of a picture within a couple seconds of viewing it and then want to move on, but everyone else seems to want to spend several minutes staring at every single piece.
I really need some kind of narrative to get anything out of art.
@APW thinking of grayscale photograph as having “data removed” is not helpful. as a linguist, maybe think of the choice of grayscale as semantic. Grayscale does not have one single set “meaning” though, because there isn’t a single universal photographic language. It conveys different things in different contexts.
I used to feel that way — in fact, honestly, I still feel that way, mostly.
But I’ve recently got really into the BBC radio show Moving Pictures (after I got over my disappointment that it wasn’t another Discworld adaptation) in which every episode spends half an hour examing a single artwork (which is also available in a super-zoomable format on their website) pointing out all kinds of intricate details I would never have noticed and how they fit together to convey what the artist is trying to say.
It turns out there is a narrative in static art, I just needed someone to tell me how to see it.
No, you understand art. Deleting color is bullshit. One famous photographer, Ansel Adams, shot almost exclusively in black and white, which means black and white must be great art. It isn’t, and Adams took boring pictures.
I think that Adams needed to remove color as a distraction because he was more interested in controlling contrast. Rather like modern art more generally seems to be about how much you can leave out and still be able to convey meaning.
Anyway he’s regarded as a Great Photographer, so one at least gets to drop his name and seem arty by association.
Yeah it’s really interesting how lately now that cameras and images are ubiquitous and making high quality pictures has never been so cheap and low-effort, there’s an esthetic of purposefully degraded images. I feel like the whole lo-fi/8-bit/polaroid/glitchy/analog constellation of esthetic directons, while each movement has its own characteristics, points to an engagement with the medium itself that was maybe less mainstream in earlier technological eras. [Personal views][citation needed]
I believe I read something about this some time ago (so unfortunately I can’t dig up a citation, only my paraphrasing). It was referring to black and white movies, but the principle is the same, IMO:
Basically, the light and shadows of greyscale images can be drastically different and change the whole look of a scene, beyond the obvious lack of colour. It’s not inherently better or worse, but it does force both the person doing the composing and the eventual audience to consider things from a different perspective. For instance, the way the edges of objects blend into or contrast with each other can be quite different depending on the colour situation.
And I suppose, the mark of effective art is not whether it’s inherently “good”, but rather if it provokes some sort of reaction from its audience – The asking of “With our modern technology, why would someone deliberately shoot/publish this image/scene in greyscale?” is certainly a reaction – Even if a rhetorical question.
Would the same image draw your attention in the same way if it were in colour?
I majored photography, in college, (early 70s) and love taking the B/W class. It helped you concentrate on composition, contrast, lighting, shadows, etc. It helped make my color stuff better, later. Got a ribbon at the L.A. County Fair, for one of my B/W pieces, too (larger than most STATE fairs!)
this is your brain on STEM, folks
Booster is not alone in this regard.I suspect that it’s a surprisingly common strategy.
Kodachro~o~ome…
gimme the greeeens of summers
There was a bunch of stuff back around 2010 when the final Kodachrome developing place shut down their last machine.
Since some people in the comments always seem to forget, here’s your reminder in advance: Booster is a “they” and not a “he.
Yes, feed me that Booster backstory.
Honestly I think any hobby would be pretentious if Booster was doing it. They just give off that vibe. They could make pig wrestling seem pretentious.
There goes Booster, Drag racing through mudhole gulch again. What a SNOB!
A was going to say that Booster only drinks the finest artisanal moonshine, but that’s actually a thing. My brother took me to a place that sells it.
They do samples. I tried one and made a discovery: I do not drink moonshine.
Artisinal moonshine seems like it’s missing the point
Maybe it’s trying to miss the point so hard that it creates a new point.
Many things labeled “artisanal” are.
Never tried any myself, but I imagine that different distilling techniques and variations in the mash bill might lead to some very subtle differences in taste. Compared to the much greater variation in flavor and character among properly aged whiskeys, I still don’t quite see the point, though.
By (old-fashioned) definition… If it’s legal, it’s not moonshine, it’s just a rural whiskey….
(This also matches the definition for Poitin (“potcheen”), which is in essence just Irish potato whiskey)
But for it to be legal, the moonshiner must get a license and pay outrageous taxes. So it’s almost certainly moonshine.
Old joke ahoy:
When I was six, back in the ’50s, a revenue agent came up to me and said,”Son, do you know where I can find a still?” I said, “Yeah, my uncle has a still.” Revenuer: “I’ll give you ten dollars if you show me.” In those days, when a candy bar was a nickle and a comic book a dime, $10 was a fortune to a kid. I being Irish, sold my uncle out in a second. “OK!” Rev: “Let’s go.” Me: “Where’s my ten dollars?” Rev: “I’ll give you the ten when we get back.” Me: “Oh, you ain’t comin’ back.”
Flingin’ Flangin’ BevMo sells moonshine in fancy-ass mason jars.
Please! The couth terminology is Porcine Graeco-Roman!
well photography has a lot of filters but at least it’s a proper camera and they’re not like doing some kinda ‘influencer’ lifestyle lol
I actually really dig taking photos on my phone. Just. . random bits of building, neighborhood, animals, bits of sky, or nature that strikes me at the moment.
It’s a harmless hobby, and I rarely ever go back and look at the photos myself again later, but I enjoy sharing what I do manage to nab. Just to share a bit of that captured beauty.
That’s really cool.
There used to be a blind photographer, in New York City if I remember. He’d walk down the street until he heard something loud, such as a crash, an argument, laughter, and would point his camera and shoot. Shot a lot of garbage. Also shot a lot of fine photography.
There is taking photos and there is making photos. Sounds like you enjoy the making.
This is nice. I’m enjoying this friendship. I think both of them need it, especially Ethan these days.
I like this. They’re actually talking.
Yes, this feels like the first time we’ve ever seem them relaxed and we just didn’t know it.
Sometimes I take pictures of places I go to because
1. I wanna use them as reference for a comic that I REALLY want set in atlanta but unfortunately don’t spend a lot of time in Atlanta
and
2. Because I don’t spend much time in Atlanta it’s really special to me when I go and I wanna take pictures of how neat that place is.
I take tons of pictures too. It’s actually a great art cheat when you make the references yourself. No one can call you out for copy and pasting or tracing your own photos.
FUN FACT: Inio Asano, artist of such manga as “Goodnight Punpun” and “Dead Dead Demon’s Dedededestruction” has gone on record saying he does not, in fact, draw his backgrounds from scratch. What he does is goes on walks and takes pictures. He then scans those pictures into the computer and then turns them greyscale. He then draws over bits and pieces of the background to give it a more natural hand drawn look so it blends with his art better.
When I found out I was blown away. I always thought his backgrounds were awesome and here he is, not only revealing “hey, I basically just cheat” but being VERY open about the fact that he’s cheating. It is then that I realized “It doesn’t actually MATTER that he’s cheating. They’re HIS pictures taken with HIS camera that he sketches over with his art program. And the end result are some stunning backgrounds that draw me in. Cheating is just…part of art. He never claimed to be great at drawing backgrounds, he didn’t lie to us. He just did what he needed to to make this aspect of making a serialized manga more bearable.
Oooh, very fun fact! Love that sort of glimpse at the actual nuts and bolts of creation. Cause art is a craft like any other in most respects
Back before modern cameras, some artists used to trace over projected images in a “camera obscura”. I’ve heard Leonardo da Vinci sometimes used them….
I wouldn’t call it “cheating” to look at the world and draw what you see in it, whether directly or through captured images. The art is in the selection and the making.
In the example Yoto gives, this is not what happens. Inio Asano apparently includes the photographs themselves, albeit somewhat modified, in his art.
Maybe “cheating” is not the word you’d prefer but i’m sure you can appreciate what Yoto is saying here
I moreso mean cheating in the fact that he’s mostly just tracing actual greyscale photographs, but I should add on “cheating” isn’t a dirty word to me in art. Art, in and of itself, is a deception. The entire concept is to leave some scratches of graphite/pigment on a surface and convince everyone “That’s a person!” It’s not. It’s just markings on a wall.
Animation, in the dictionary, is cited as an optical illusion. Which is APT because it is TRICKING you into thinking that the characters on screen are moving, expressing, thinking, feeling people. They’re not. They’re just markings on a wall. But we can make them blink, we can make them walk, we can make them talk even! We can impart SUCH a sense of personhood into these etchings on the wall that we can make people cry or make them angry or filled with glee.
And a part of this is “cheating”. One of the things I learned about 3D animation is, if you’re not making it for a game (or moreso even if you are if the game has a fixed camera angle) you are allowed to constantly cheat and break the models. Swapping out head shapes to match a style, detatching and reattaching limbs, Growing/shrinking parts of the body for forced perspective. The only thing that matters is if the final product looks good. You can bend the character in so many impossible ways but if the final result looks good nobody will care or even notice.
Finding out Inio Asano “cheated” his backgrounds wasn’t a realization of fraud. It was a realization of brilliance. Like “Holy shit! He makes this sound so SIMPLE” and the end result looks beautiful. It minimizes the workload on him to such a degree that he’s able to do a lot of the work a usual mangaka usually pushes onto his assistants himself, which is what probably allows him to compose such interesting shots and consistently phenomenal character art.
“Good artist copy, great artists steal.” – Pablo Picasso
Yoto,
I’m gonna tell you this because this is something you yourself have brought up unprompted (it’s just i would never say this if you didn’t make a point of mentioning it) the fact that you haven’t had a girlfriend and don’t know how that would ever happen.
Like i said before, i love the way you express yourself.
but especially when you talk about art, you just sound so passionate. look, i’m not any kind of PUA, i have no idea how to “get people to date you” beyond the simple advice that self-confidence, at least in some areas, matters. and to that end hopefully, let me just point this out, when you talk like that you seem to light up and the things you say are so thoughtful and deep.
Now i don’t know that much about you, but i just hope you realise that you have so much to offer that’s rare and precious and, you know, attractive. that’s all. (and it doesn’t end with your thoughts about art as far as i’m concerned, but this is what is motivating me to write this rn)
Well shucks, that means a lot. I don’t have a lot of relateable interests that are good at breaking the ice. Most of my fascinations are art or animation related. I love talking about cartoons and comics and video games. But I can’t dance, I’m behind on music, I don’t know slang, I work at a Wendy’s. All the stuff I like is stuff your average person doesn’t care about so it’s hard to have these really fun enjoyable conversations with people honestly.
I can’t stand the feeling of getting carried away with my passions only to be greeted with a stone faced and uninterested person. It makes me feel foolish.
My favorite pictures to take are the view from the window of wherever I’m staying when I go out of town. Often the views aren’t, like, “notable” or whatever, because I don’t have “place with an iconic view” money, but I like the little feeling of “this is what the world looks like from here.”
I also think it’s funny how sometimes doing this at home means I have far more pictures of my neighbors’ houses than I do of my own. Which I guess might be common? I mean, how often do people photograph their own house? …Now I want to go take a picture of my house.
I take pictures of graffiti and other types of street art constantly. Not just the impressive flashy spraypaints but also the awkward scratched signatures, the tiny stickers, the silly sharpie jokes, anything that stands out to me as interesting, funny, cute, powerful, pretty, bizarre…
It’s sharpened my attention towards my urban surroundings, and appreciation for the many small ways city people reclaim and utilize public space. It’s this endearing outpouring of gratuitous, illegal, cheeky creativity, it doesn’t let the city be the nice and bland ikea fantasy politicians and boring middle class office-goers would like it to be. It’s an alternative conception of the public sphere to that of the liberal philosophy of privately-owned, publicly-regulated spaces: instead of “respecting private property” like this freaky cult of a capitalist culture we live in assures us we must, it says “fuck that, i live here, i get to write on this wall.”
Lovely.
When I was a youth, I traveled everywhere with a black Sharpie marker. Wall billboard advertisements needed subverting.
God seeing Ethan walking out in daylight makes me realize how washed out his skin has become. Dude is looking ROUGH.
Yeah I went back and looked at a few images of last semester Ethan and dude is looking at least a shade lighter now. I can’t really back that up with proof, but he’s had better days.
Vampirism will do that.
Yes, at last, SUPERNATURAL elements!
YAY?
Well that’s interesting.
Probably not gonna comment for a while, I just got COVID-19.
Almost suffocated yesterday, I’m so scared. 😭
Hang in there! We’re all hoping you get better! Keep us updated if ya can.
Oh, shit! Hang in there, yeah? That’s some shit-ass luck, I genuinely hope you’re gonna be okay. Sending whatever form of psychic well-wishing is most helpful? Unless you don’t want those, in which case uh, make sure you do everything you can to stick around.
I hope you came through it okay, and have a safe and speedy recovery. Hang in there.
Really hoping you get better.
I am so sorry. I really hope you get better soon.
Sending you all my well-wishes for your full and smooth recovery!
Try to get yourself some PAXLOVID as soon as you can. You meet multiple criteria for it. Plus an asthma inhaler if you can get one. They help a lot. And/or hot black tea with honey snd lemon — the theophylline will expand your bronchioles, the lemon will cut the phlegm, and the honey will coat your throat to soothe a cough.
But for real, yo’ — trouble breathing, you just call for medical assistance right away. Hands down. That sh**’s no joke.
Here’s hoping for you!
Here is where you can get the latest available treatment, for free:
https://aspr.hhs.gov/TestToTreat/Pages/default.aspx
Info here on the available treatments:
https://www.hhs.gov/coronavirus/covid-19-treatments-therapeutics/index.html
Here is the CDC’s advice for how to care for yourself at home:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/isolation.html
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/symptoms.html
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/if-you-are-sick/index.html
Plenty of rest, plenty of fluids, staying warm, avoiding most caffeine and alcohol, getting a little fresh air and sunshine through the window when you can… all good things to do.
The USPS is mailing out free rapid tests:
https://www.covid.gov/tests
Kaiser’s page:
https://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org/health-wellness/coronavirus-information
Info on ‘at-risk’ groups that qualify for Paxlovid:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/people-with-medical-conditions.html
Best wishes for your full recovery!
A few more resources for help to stay home safely:
https://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org/health-wellness/social-health/resource-directory/resource-directory
https://www.benefits.gov/help/faq/Coronavirus-resources
Additional stay-at-home support and benefits navigation resources:
https://connectie.org/
https://www.findhelp.org/
https://www.211.org/
Good luck!
I got Paxlovid, fluid and bedrest.
Awe thanks for the support everyone, means a lot. 🥲
Omg Laura 😳
wow 🥰
Oh, hon’, I am so glad you have your Paxlovid and a little space and time to take care of yourself. Rest well, my friend. Stay warm. (( <3 ))
Thanks, milu. 🙂
you’re a gem, Laura! It’s good to know you’re around. i hope you take care of yourself, and i hope you have good friends, because you deserve that.
That’s so sweet of you to say, milu. I’m grateful to hear you say that. Thank you for your kindness.
“Coat your throat” is of course nonsense, but honey does help against throataches. Any highly concentrated solutions do: saltwater, chicken soup, Southern sweet tea…
How is it nonsense? It’s what I’ve learned all my life.
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/sore-throat-remedies-that-actually-work/amp/
Having a little layer of honey over the raw mucus membrane can soothe them and protect them from further irritation. Am I missing something?
Best wishes for a swift and safe recovery!
Shit, I hope you recover quickly and well! Stay safe.
Oh no! Wishing you strength.
Get weller! Hah. 🫁✊️
I hope you’re doing better now.
You would be missed.
Keep in mind: it’s SARS-CoV2 that should be scared. We’ve got its blueprints now….
Sure grayscale is swanky, but have you ever shot in rich sepia tones?
Arby’s at a gas station is the best reasonable facsimile of Buc-ee’s, prolly
Sepia tones are superior to greyscale, cosigned.
Philistine.
Buc-ee’s bathrooms alone show you are wrong.
Booster’s line here, for some reason, is making me think back to February of 2021 when I spent a whole day just walking around my college campus and taking pictures of everything, because I both live and went to school in Texas and photographing the place covered in snow was not something I was ever gonna get the chance to do again. I’m not normally a photographer at all, I just suddenly felt I had to capture things.
Tangent aside, I really like seeing Ethan opening up to someone again. I think it’s kind of important to make new friends after you’ve gone through a major life-changing experience, because you need someone to talk to that doesn’t know what you were like before. With people you already knew, it’s hard not to feel like you have to maintain an image of someone you aren’t anymore.
Sometimes you just need to try and capture a moment. I remember walking through the local trails after a fresh snow on a perfect night, and it felt like seeing something I’d known my whole life with fresh eyes.
The real question: JPEG or RAW?
Is … Is that innuendo of some sort? I really don’t know I don’t know anything file types or photo editing.
Not an expert, but JPEG is a lossy compression scheme, whereas from the sound of it RAW is either a lossless compression scheme, or completely uncompressed. The practical upshot is that you can store more JPEG files in a given storage space than RAW files of the same pixel resolution, but the resulting images will have a lower visual fidelity.
JPEG is lossy, you say? ☝️✌️✌️👉
Do I look like I know hwhat a JPEG is? I just want to print a picture of a danged hotdog!
JPEG replaces the large numbers for each pixel with a more compact encoding that allows one to guess with reasonable accuracy what the original pixel’s values were. But it can guess wrong, and often does near high-contrast features like the edges between brightness and deep shadow — you’ll see a kind of halos repeating the shape of the boundary. It’s best used for real-world images, not for drawing or painting (but okay for making images of physical paintings).
At the higher compression factors, you can store way more images in JPEG coding than RAW coding. But then there’s less information to do the guessing when you reconstitute the image.
RAW is propane, JPEG is butane. Got it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QwucZK1BCj4
In digital photography, you can take pictures in JPEG format or whatever kind of RAW file that camera uses. (It’s always capitalized like it’s a format itself, but it’s not.) RAW files record all the information the camera takes in for that exposure, and they’re kind of like digital negatives that you have to develop in an editing program like Photoshop or Lightroom to get them to look the way you want. So I was just wondering how much Booster does in-camera vs. postprocessing. Not innuendo, just me being a photography nerd.
You asked!
RAW is the format that keeps all the original data and allows you to work on the images later. Like, in Lightroom or more professional post production systems. So using RAW makes you either very pretentious or a really good photographer.
JPEG is not only lossy, each time you save it again, you lose more.
I think the reputation of shooting RAW is that you’re either a pro or just pretentious, but it’s actually an excellent way for less skilled photographers to cover their asses. You can adjust the exposure of a RAW file after the fact and usually save a picture that would’ve been unusable as a pure JPEG, since that format flattens everything and discards the extra data. When I have the option, I usually shoot JPEG + RAW.
@True Survivor haha, it does sound innuendo-y now that you mention it
“So um, what’s your aperture like?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know, naughteh boy”
“Can you do RAW with this thing?”
“um, sure. We do need to have The Talk first.”
“Shades of gray, color?”
“I get you *wink wink* “shades of gray” *wink wink wink wink*
… And yes, i love wearing a collar how did you know???”
“It all started at this secluded pond near my house, where i first got into newt photography”
I really like Booster’s jacket – it’s like cargo shorts for your torso, which is a great idea I’ve never considered. I wonder if they really make those – I need a new jacket for fancy occasions anyway as my dog tore one of my current jacket’s sleeves.
It’s probably a Photographer’s or Fisher’s jacket and/or vest.
Willis tends to base characters clothing on real life clothing he finds online or in stores, so it’s probably real.
When I was a teenager, a McDonalds opened in town, and it made the front page of the newspaper.
The McDonald’s in my town was the second one countrywide. I remember my dad talking about it as if it was a point of pride. I was too little to remember whether it hit the newspapers (or maybe wasn’t there at all yet?) but it very well might have. Weird times, the early 90s.
Not entirely sure why I’m sharing this.
Which country?
Second one countrywide/early 90’s… I’m guessing ex-communist bloc nation?
That was my guess as well, after my initial confusion.
Indeed, my Watsons, Poland it is
I remember the McDonalds opening in my hometown, and how excited I was (my parents less so; it was bad enough I insisted on one meal at Maccy D’s every time we went Down South to London). I don’t recall if it made the front page of the newspaper, because I never read the local newspaper, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Of course, almost immediately following my excitement over this, I turned veggie, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My local McDonalds was about the twentieth ever built. It had a sign saying “Over 500 Hamburgers Sold!”
I cannot tell you how fuckin hype i got when a Little Caesars and a Starbucks opened up here
This immediately got me to look up these places in Jamaica and then tell my parents about the Little Caesars in Negril for the next time they’re there… like we don’t live by freakin’ Little Caesars central… like that’s what they’re looking forward to eating in Jamaica…
I’ve mentioned how shrunk Ethan looks before but now I’m noticing what’s been bothering me: he also looks like he lost HEIGHT. He’s shorter??
We put him in the hydraulic press and really squished him down. He’s been slowly regaining his dimensions since then. The time lapsed video is pretty cool to watch.
well, at least they’re both getting fresh air
I imagine it also has to do with his posture, someone grieving isn’t gonna go out with their head held high and chest puffed out, so to speak
Booster is actually kinda tall. They were sitting down, but they’re only just shorter than Joe.
With that reference, then being similar height to Ethan is actually not that far off.
I think he’s just slouching. Looked like he had pretty good posture before
I’m kinda liking their rapport.
I am liking Booster more and Dorothy less
I didn’t expect this
To Mr. Willis (response to alt-text):
I- what??? Gas station Arby’s? 🤨
I’ve seen a lot of truck stops with an Arby’s as an attached fast food place.
wooh Booster backstory
I think pretentiousness in a 19-yo is a natural defense mechanism for growing up in corntown. Especially if you’re queer, trans, or both. Can’t have been easy, even if it wasn’t worst case scenario.
For real. Honestly, Booster just has their shit together and doesnt give a lot of fucks.
I think they got used early to people thinking they’re a freak whether they tried to act normal or not, and realized they might as well be as eccentric as they pleased if they were going to be judged no matter what. They rule.
IMO, there have been hints they don’t – not completely – but they’re good at masking and deflecting.
All the rest, I agree with.
/em stumbles over theirself to misgender Booster before anyone else can.
I like the dynamic of these two. They seem good for each other.
Booster wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to shoot some black and white film if they were given the chance. Not sure if they’d go as far as developing and printing it themselves, though. (That’s a fascinating rabbit hole with its own series on Technology Connections.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO_19bP3P5g
(If you watch some of the same YouTubers I do and are wondering why the guy in this video seems vaguely familiar, he’s LGR’s brother.)
What’s “film”, grampa?
It’s the stuff everybody used to take pictures and shoot video before digital cameras were invented. It’s higher quality than analog magnetic tape recordings, too.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rVpABCxiDaU
Nowadays people only use it for artsy or hipster reasons, but until fairly recently when quality DSLRs came down in price on the used market, a 35mm SLR and a good film scanner were the budget way to get started in hobby/prosumer photography.
I was terribly amused by a recent show – Black Mirror or something of that ilk – where someone shooting with a Polaroid, rather than digital, is held up as an arty hipster. Because I’m (barely) old enough to remember when those “instant” cameras were, along with coffee crystals and microwave popcorn, sneered at as mass-market consumer products that no professional would ever touch.
Oh yeah, I ‘member instant cameras.
Looks like you can still get new instant film from the Polaroid formerly known as The Impossible Project. Kinda neat, but 8 exposures for 20 bucks.
https://www.polaroid.com/en_us/products/color-600-instant-film
I’m sure there’s even more expensive, artsy, instant film deliberately made to look like you’re shooting with 40-year-old stock…
I honestly wouldn’t put it past Booster to get into shooting B&W film and start using the shared half-bath as a 2am darkroom. (Shooting film is fun, tho.)
Grayscale! I had no idea the HP LJ II I saved was an art apparatus now.
PC LOAD LETTER
<a href="https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=4954" And that's why artsy photography never caught on in Cubetown.
Oops.
And that’s why artsy photography never caught on in Cubetown.
YES! Booster’s backstory time! I really like how they and Ethan really seem to be starting to be friends. I wonder if growing up in a place where there were only cornfields led they to spend time analyzing the few people in the town.
If i may because you probably weren’t taught about singular they in english class, here it’s an object case so “led them” not “led they” (its the right pronoun just not the right case =) (è lo stesso che in italiano, anzi non so se c’è un pronome neutro in italiano??? Ma per esempio, contrasta “lei/lui va” e “le/lo porta a” =) non so se è chiaro??)
Yes, it’s clear. Thank you very much for this explanation♡.
Interspersing this dynamic with drama and awkwardness to make it seem all the more charming and pleasant. A shrewd and oblique tactic, Willis
If the photos are “just for me” why are they showing them to other people? Or are people barging into their room and demanding to see pictures?
If you really want to be sophisticated, you go sepia tone.
True geniuses use cyanotype.
I like Booster’s turn of phrase “so I’m thought of”, not “so people think I am”. Makes them distinctive
my partner got into black and white because it’s cheaper to shoot
agh this was not supposed to be a reply
It is also much easier to develop in the darkroom when you are just starting out.
Yeah, he’s doing caffenol developing and you can’t really do that with colour anyway.
It’s kinda disturbing to see this character so starved and bony
yeah. he was broad before
He looks…. thinner.
I can’t quite decide if pretending to be artsy and pretentious is better or worse than actually being artsy and pretentious.
Different state, but I feel called out by that “Arby’s at the gas station”. XD