Perseus: Caught in the Light

 

 

After a hiatus from the hobby for about a year, it seems Perseus is the doll to draw me back in again.  His new face-up has inspired me to take photos of him; it feels like I've fallen in love with him all over again. Like the rest of my little resin tribe, he is now an example of the best of my work after 7 years of pracice, rather than being one of my first.

Hardware snobbery

I've had my first ever submission rejection from a group on deviantART; it's a bit of a surprise, having been on dA for over 6 years now. The grounds for rejection?

The photo was taken on my Blackberry.

That was it. Because I didn't take it on a "proper camera", it was deemed a "snapshot" - artistic merit such as composition etc was not considered at all.

Interrestingly, the other photo submitted at the same time was accepted - despite the fact it was taken on a camera with lower specs than the camera on my Blackberry (2.1MP vs 3.2MP). On technical merit, it was inferior to the photo that was rejected.

It's like having a painting be rejected because it was painted using synthetic brushes instead of sable ones. It's basically hardware snobbery, pure and simple. It's missing the point.

Photography isn't about who has the more expensive kit. It's about knowing what to do with it. That $10K of equipment in your hand is worthless if you don't have the artistic talent to compose the perfect image.

From now on all photos I upload to dA will have the EXIF data stripped out. The quality of my work will speak for itself.


The worst thing about this? It's not something I can "improve" upon, skillwise; the only way in the moderators' eyes I could improve the supposed quality of my work would be solely through spending a large amount of cash. Which upon reflection speaks far more about their close-mindedness than about my skills and talent. Rejection still hurts though. :-/

Bringing home Kai

On Friday I'll be making the final layaway payment on Kai (KisakiSama's Kaitou); it feels weird to think that in a couple of weeks or so, I'll be holding in my hands the very first BJD I ever saw, on the fourth anniversary of the day I saw him and first got into the whole BJD scene. If I hadn't seen his photo on wtf_inc, of all places, I might never have gotten into this whole hobby. I wouldn't have 14 dolls (soon to be 15!); I wouldn't have an Etsy shop (from which I've made my first sale), I would never have created the obitsulovers community on LJ, and Arkadian Dreams wouldn't even exist.

Can't begin to describe how I feel right now. "Excited" doesn't even come close!

This is a dream come true. I am so looking forward to Kai's homecoming.

I think Eric is too. ;-)


In other news, I've now switched the blog over to Blogspot where it will be found from now on. This will not affect those of you who read the LJ, but those who read the blog should update RSS readers and bookmarks accordingly.

Making a name

It seems I'm making something of a name for myself in the doll world for my handsewn outfits; I put up the latest outfit for sale on ebay last night, and before I had a chance to spam it everywhere like I usually do with my auctions, it's been snapped up by a US buyer for the Buy It Now price of £40! It had one watcher and about 30 hits on the auction within an hour of my posting it last night, and this morning I came down to find it had sold overnight. I'm just waiting for the payment to hit my PayPal account before shipping it out.

It's very cheering that my hobby is starting to pay for itself like this. I'm also rather glad that I'd already started work on the next couple of outfits - I finished the blue corset last night, and the black and gold Chinese brocade corset just needs a final row of topstitching. Most of the work in these outfits is the corset, followed by the skirt. If I can keep up this momentum, I should have another two complete outfits up for sale by the end of this week. I think it's time I started looking into woven labels with the "Arkadian Dreams" name on for my outfits. :-)

So, yes; a nice start to my week!