A major announcement? The return of photography tips? Free articles? Behind the commissions?

March Activity Update!

Hello and welcome to my activity update! Here you'll learn about the things I got up to during the past month. I'll share with you my very secret thought process behind my photography and how I have approached and grown from the various challenges I faced.

Although this isn't meant to be a very formal article so please relax and enjoy yourselves while you read. I would also appreciate it if you could follow me on both Patreon and Fanbox so you'll be notified for future releases and updates!

Now lets get right into it!

Patreon and Fanbox

The last month was quite hectic so the article this time was delayed slightly. I hope you’ll forgive me! In terms of updates to Patreon and Fanbox, I decided have these articles be free going forward to gain more feedback from the public. I’m looking for ways to improve the format of this article so if there’s anything you’d like to hear about, please leave me a comment below!

I’m solidifying the release of at least one new photoset of unpublished photos for my 10$ Supporters every month. It’s something that I’m confident that I can keep up with alongside everything else after testing it the previous month. I’m still unsure on how interested people are in seeing raw photos, so I’m looking for a better way to present this material.

The big announcement this month is I'm working on getting into teaching photography again! But this time it’ll be done in a video format rather than a text post. To that end I've also purchased a microphone and am now slowly preparing material. I’m still unsure about the production timing but I hope to have it be released before the end of May. It’ll be only for my 10$ Supporters but I’ll be releasing shorter versions for free on my Twitter.

These videos will be in English as I’m not yet confident that I’ll be able to explain things as eloquently if I tried to speak in Japanese. I could… but it would definitely be quite rough of a video and I’m honestly not sure whether people would be interested. Also it’s embarrassing.

Lastly I would like to announce the opening of a new Patreon and Fanbox tier for 2$. This tier is just to provide me with general support to continue my creative activities and I can't really offer much beyond my heartfelt thanks and gratitude, however I hope you will still consider supporting me.

Currently all proceeds from Patreon and Fanbox are going towards improving my produced works. With your support I’ll be able to expand my avatar introductions to also include various clothing made for the avatar as well as possibly increase the number of introduced avatar’s each month. I will also be looking to hire a proper translator to help me localise these articles and the upcoming teaching videos.

For now though I apologise that I’m unable to do more for everyone, but I’ll improve this as time progresses! If you’d like to support me directly do consider subscribing to one of the tiers on either Patreon or Fanbox. I would really appreciate it and you’ll be helping me create more and more of the things you enjoy. If not you can also support me by liking, retweeting or commenting on the things I create on my twitter.

Commissions Commissions Commissions

This month marked the month where I was the most swamped by commissions. I worked on a total of four different world photoshoots this month!

I got in touch with WispyWoo, Artsy Glitch, and Hello I’m Beemo. Three extremely popular world creators who all specialise in their own types of purchasable and customisable worlds.

Wispywoo’s specialty is in creating comfortable living spaces for small groups. Places like airships, cat towers and even a jungle cave have been transformed into cosy spots for rest and relaxation. Following this main theme, their worlds usually takes on either a warm or cool tone and sometimes even a mix of both. You can also spot their signature naturally organic style with the curved walls, draped fabrics and similar lighting fixtures across their worlds.

I shot a total of two different worlds for Wispy this month!

LakeSide Studio

A beautiful little lakeside home built to appeal towards musicians and DJs. As with most square shaped houses, I thought the photoshoot would go rather smoothly as they’re usually easier to photograph. However this time I ran into a few challenges, the first of which being the living room.

It was designed with a rather open space concept in mind, meaning the entire bottom floor itself was the living room, inclusive of the entrance and kitchen as well as transitions to other floors and the studio. Due to its size the challenge was partitioning the elements within, to make interesting scenes while avoiding too much noise in each photograph.

Here you can see me trying different angles with the television as a main subject.

The walls of the buildings were also made of glass, I usually love shooting from outside of windows into buildings as they form a natural frame of the rooms within. In this case though it wasn’t really possible as the windows applied a blur shader on the rooms within. The music room did however end up looking pretty great even with the blur applied.

Here are two that didn't really work out, they were too blur and filled with too much noise so it's difficult to see where to look.

And this is the one where the blur actually worked, the window also created a nice frame within the image.

Comfy Cove

A home built into a cove! and as a bonus it’s also within a crystal cave! I was immediately taken by the cool blue glow covering the area combined with the beautifully contrasting array of warm lights. This combination of orange and blue is something photographers look out for as they are colours that naturally complement one another.

Wispy’s design this time was focused on a look which blends into nature with a home that was carved out from the cave walls. This type of organic structure is usually quite difficult to photograph as it’s mostly made up of curves rather than edges. For example if you were to shoot a square room there are four distinct corners to take a picture of, while in an organic structure there is no defined place where a picture can start or end as the walls are all curved.

When faced with this issue, instead of corners I use objects to define the edges of my frames. If you look closely at my photos you can see I’ll place lights into the corners to catch the viewer's eye before it leaves the frame.

Spot the corner light anchors in the pictures below!

There's also quite a bit of experimentation to search for the angles that’ll fit the space in a better way. This way I can provide the best quality for the photos, though it does take a little longer.

This was definitely the hardest commission of the month. I was pretty happy with how the photos turned out in the end! They were also very well received on twitter by the public which was a great bonus!

My favourite of the set was definitely this boat

Hello I’m Beemo is also another talented world builder but their work features a much more modern touch. Smoother, much more structured buildings with a concrete or marble look. I’d say some of them even lean towards being a little futuristic. They’ve really mastered attracting the appeal of the western audience from what I can tell.

Sunken Serenity

Within the flooded caverns a living space has been neatly built into the cave systems. The rooms featured an open concept looking out upon the underground network of glowing rivers making for quite the view. I made it my main focus to capture the rooms while also showing off these features.

I actually thought the rooms themselves were rather simple, they didn’t have much in the way of furniture and they weren't decorated with large amounts of detailed objects. It was definitely a contrast to Wispy’s and Artsy’s works who prefer filling the space in their rooms to the brim.

Some shots from outside showing off all the empty floor space in each room while also showing off the glowing water's of the river.

This amount of empty space made me take extra care to not include large amounts of dead space in my photographs. For example large stretches of floors or walls that didn’t have any objects in them. Though this also meant that the pictures themselves were quite easy to take as there aren’t many elements to manage within the frame.

When shot from angles like these, you can hide the empty floor space in the room, however the objects like the bed or chair would be bigger of course

I think of the four commissions this world sold the most copies from what I could see from the many times I spotted it in the community labs. I guess this style is the most well received by the western audience.

My favourite shot ended up being this one from the top down, something about the balance really struck me.

Artsy Glitch is truly a special one with an eye for the finest of details. She’s definitely the holder of the best creator for a futuristic cyberpunk esque look. Her worlds feature a deep lore of a thriving cyberpunk utopia, while at the same time being beautifully designed living spaces that everyone can enjoy.

CyberLove Okinawa ˸˸˸ 沖縄

Artsy is definitely the most thorough when it comes to designing her maps, her sense when it comes to designing the layout of each room along with the elements within is among the best in VRChat.

Although this means that there’s a lot of elements to manage within each room like pickups, furniture as well as decorations. However because each element has been methodically placed, the room is already set up as a single scene ready to be photographed. My main job here is to either move around the elements within the room or decide the edges of the photograph.

Like the pictures below, both work but I chose different points as the edges of the frame.

I think overall the main problem I faced was that there was too much to photograph. Too many different places and details I wanted to capture that I ended up taking quite a large photoset.

There was a problem with an interaction between volumetric lighting and the VRCLens camera I was using. This meant I had to switch to using the default VRChat camera instead for some of the photographs, reducing my precision in some areas. I ended up doing two different sets one with the lens and one without just to make sure to deliver a proper representation of the world.

Weird bug where the afterimages of my avatar appeared where volumetric fog was used in the world.

Despite that the photos turned out great although I doubled my workload doing the editing. I’ll probably settle for only using a single camera in the future if I encounter the same problem again. It really depends on how different the world looks in each.

My favourite of this set was shot through the roof which was transparent one way allowing for this angle to be captured.

Playing the dog and witch

This month I got to introduce the very cute dog Mamehinata and the pure witch Fiona!

Mame really is too cute isn’t he! He’s so cute that even taking a picture of just his face alone would be enough. I actually started off taking photos of Mame with this in mind, doing energetic poses like jumping into the air as well as generic cute poses.

But while I was wandering around I had an idea of trying to capture the moment of a dog waiting for his owner's return which led to the picture below.

This tweet exploded and it made me realise just how important the story is to a photograph. And so this became my main focus for the month, to create stories within my photos.

Creating stories within your photos isn’t as easy as it seems to be though. You’d have to decide on many things before you can create something worthwhile. What story do you want? Is the story strong enough for a photograph? Which location to shoot in? Does the location fit the avatar? What pose should I do? This all happens before the photo has even begun to be taken. Though I definitely gained quite a lot of new experiences over the month due to trying all these new things.

My main thoughts when shooting Mamehinata were. What kind of actions would a dog do? I thought of things like attacking cats, chasing cars, visiting the vet and playing fetch. I realised the closer I got to acting like a dog the better the photos would be.

Honestly it was a strange realisation at the time and it made me question my actions constantly. But it didn’t stop me from crouching into a hunting position to attack a cat plushie. This turned into one of the most successful photographs I've ever taken. This pose was also the most painful to hold and get right as I had to wait for the tail to swish into the right position.

Here's the process of the edit from default to base edit to shadowing and brightening with masks

I also realised that stronger, more specific stories are more easy to photograph as I could visualise them more clearly in my mind. For example ‘getting into a car to go visit the vet, the dog was scared for its life while sitting between the gap in the seats’. When compared to ‘a dog jumping in the air’.

These two sentences bring the photo to life in your mind, but one is much more specific than the other. The latter has a variety of meanings: where is it jumping, why, how, etc., and the photo is more open to these various choices. You might think that the more choices you have, the better the picture, but actually the opposite is true: the more factors you can control, the more you have to manage, and the harder it gets.

Fiona was the next subject to photograph, after photographing Mamehinata I wanted to create photos containing stories of a witch’s daily life. I had her pictured in my head as a sort of travelling adventurer that specialises in alchemy and research.

The studious look her glasses gave her, the enormous hat with its beautiful white flower and her slightly transparent dress, I was looking to accentuate these features. I also thought about whether I needed poses since I was going for a natural look as if they were performing daily actions. In the end I settled on a mix of both, they also all ended up being cool poses mainly because I had no idea how to pose as an adorable magical girl.

It always a cool pose in the end, one day I promise to pose like a sparkling magical girl

I had a little trouble with the model itself, the hand grip in particular on the staff wasn’t correctly placed so it looked strange in the photographs. I tried fixing it in unity but I wasn’t able to move it due to a strange bug. I settled on just leaving the spot where the hand holds the staff out of the pictures, though this did limit me somewhat.

I tried also taking pictures of Fiona just as a girl instead of a witch, mainly it was because I ran out of ideas for witch narratives.

By the end of the second week I honestly wasn’t fully satisfied since I didn’t capture as many interesting narratives as I wanted. There were a few good ones but most of them came out pretty average to my standards. Still, It was a great experience being able to shoot a character like this and I'll definitely be more prepared If I want to do it again in the future.

Conclusion

It really ended up being quite a long article... The April update will also be out within the next two weeks or so and I hope to have the first photography tips video out soon as well. Until then, thank you so much for your patience and for reading this article to the end. Also thank you for continuing to support me and my work!