Exploring SLR photography

For the longest time, I've been a fan of photography and photo editing software. Something about all the different functionalities and the advanced processing involved still fascinates me to date. Back in the days, 2013 and later, I used to run a YouTube channel - LEDmatrix, for those interested - with highly edited gaming videos. Apart from video editing, creating thumbnails for these videos also required photo editing skills, which I taught myself. I still have quite little knowledge compared to professional designers and photographers, but I know the basics quite well and, while scratching some walls and banging my head here and there, am quite comfortable with achieving semi professional results in my editing app of choice, Affinity Photo (1).

When one of my flatmates and friends one day had the brilliant idea of renting an SLR camera kit from his university and set it up in our attic free for us all to use, I immediately was into the idea and wanted to realise a long-standing dream of mine - professional photo shootings!

While my perception of modern fashion has quite changed in the last couple of years, mainly for environmental reasons, I am still a fan of creative and expressive photography. When I had started this website, I had the idea of the "Home" page being like a warm welcome into my dream residence, with everything there from studio to writing room to a saloon with a fireplace. I had this idea in mind of me welcoming my curious guest, and then offering them all kinds of choices where to head first.

After that, I had the idea of me sitting in a chair, in front of the warm fireplace, giving the guest another option: Of staying with me, and letting me tell them about all my recent works - in other words, the latest additions to my website.

Turns out it's all not that simple if you're using a quite basic website builder from some random company. But I wanted to integrate this armchair-pose of me. But I didn't have a studio for taking a picture of that. Nor did I have an armchair. But I had the internet and Team Fortress 2.

"Magnificent!" *snort*

- the Spy from Team Fortress 2

So I did the obvious next step and photoshopped my dear backstabbing frenchman into a room I built out of royalty-free textures in Affinity Photo. Now that my friend had set up the studio though (he even had an armchair!), one thing came to the other and we started taking loads of pictures, trying to get as close as possible to the Spy motive. The result...

"Perfect!" *snort*

- the Phil from Polylight

Of course, this could have been way more sophisticated, but I'm quite proud of it anyway. Now I wrote so much about YouTube and so little about the creative process behind the actual collage that I'm thinking about some kind of video or at least a rough overview of what I did. It's quite cool actually! Maybe I'll find the time for it in the coming days.

Now it's way too late though and I've gotta work tomorrow, so I'll end this entry here. Have a nice time!

Phil