Monthly report
March 2022
March, another Month that blasted through. I have yet to find the motivation to start writing and sharing again. Yet, this post will hopefully be the first step in the right direction. I mean, I've been sharing some streams, and a few images these couple of months, but "quality content" it's certainly not. A lot has happened. A lot. I don't even know where to start. Nor do I know if I should start at all.
Here is to new beginnings, a fresh start. A start where I will be documenting my journey. Whether it be through life itself, through web3 development, or what I had for breakfast. I'll be creating for the public once again. As I haven't done so for a long time. It may seem that I've gone idle, I haven't been complete while being off-screen. Just finding the right (and plenty) words made it challenging for me to post anything at all. Not just on paper, it's the same shit with phonecalls, or physical visits to family and/or friends, those habits kinda have been in the shadows as well.
Before you wonder, I'm fine (not dealing with depression anymore :)). Just dealing with a lot that I have to process. And the way how I process things is by simply debating (debating a lot) with myself, and talking about it with others if I need to share. The last thing can be quite draining for me.
The last time when I was struggling with posting again, I was having difficulties with the "tone of voice". Should I write in my "daily" voice, or should I write in my "professional" voice? There is a big difference between the two, which created an error in my brain. That's when I remember that I used to do monthly reports for my followers on my Website/Facebook where I shared everything that I did as an "entrepreneur" during that time with a personal voice. The goal was to make business more personal. And it worked out quite well, everybody loved these reports and started wondering why I have stopped. Little did they know, but I was dealing with depression at that very moment. A handful of people messaged me and asked me how I was doing and if everything was alright. So, let's revive that project, but perhaps, with more personal threads.
And there you have it. After writing these paragraphs it kinda feels relieving. I mean, one quality post once every month should be more than doable.
Photography
I wasn't joking around when I said I didn't do much. Due to corona, the plan to revive my company after depression was kindly thrown into the void. Corona killed a few projects, for 2 years. However, I have myself to blame as well for promoting that I stopped doing photography after those two years. I mean, I received some requests to do photography. I started with rejecting, but ended up with accepting.
Product photography for Bio4Pack
This was the perfect job for me. I love doing product photography. Not the "basic" white background type of product photography, but more the creative ones, where I can create visual concepts and work on their marketing. Bio4Pack is a client of the guy that hired me. We worked together quite well and he was very impressed with the work that I delivered *patting me on the back*.
The idea was to create high-quality stand-alone product shots that could be used for anything (the boring white background shots) and to create visuals that would combine it all and take it to the next level. While the latter is more important, this automatically meant that extra care would apply to the first, and that's where the magic happens; high-quality photography.
Just a little further down for the results
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Everything that you see in the images is my own photographs. From granola, strawberries, to all the different chips. I am not a big fan of working with stock images, and I want to guarantee that I will give something truly unique to my clients when they hire me.
If you're interested in knowing how I created this, let me know in the comments below.
Did you see my new banner?
This banner actually has been dumped in the archive for quite some months now. After seeing the Branding and Marketing plan being executed I thought I wouldn't publish this as a resource for branding/marketing. On the other hand, I can now simply use it to brand myself :)
I like the vibe of the GIF loop. It came out pretty smooth without any glitches or weird transitions. The original video is about 10MB, so I had to turn it into a GIF. The rendered GIF was about 7.5MB. Which is way too big for web browsing. After compressing it, it is still on the "big" side of GIFs, but compared to its size, 2MB is quite satisfying.
Gaming
During the day or late night sessions, we all know it can be stress-relieving, and I need stress relief a lot. Besides, gaming makes me forget to think about things. In some cases, very handy, and in other cases, stupid if you have something important to do. Like cooking. I was gaming with a friend, and we played Anno 1800. If you don't know it, it's quite a time-consuming game, and you can forget about the time very easily.
So we played for a few hours, and my friend had to cook dinner. Apparently, he forgot that the stove with his food in it was still on. Yup, burning that food like a real champion, it was going strong for hours. His reaction was quite funny "What is this smell?", he had no idea what it could be, after wondering for another 30 minutes, he realized he was getting hungry and forgot he was cooking dinner "Wanna know what that smell was? It was my food!". During the game, we are on call constantly so it was quite funny. Luckily no incidents happen. Every time when we start sessions and call each other, I answer with "have you eaten yet?".
With other friends, we play Apex Legends quite a bit. Raz0ul is an old IRL friend of mine and he recently started streaming. After finding out I was wondering what his stream looked like. I honestly think he got what it takes, at least he is going in the right direction. I've been trying to get him on Hive because of our awesome gaming community. He did seem to have an interest in it, but I feel he lacks the time to really dive into it.
More games? Yeah... I'm a big nerd :D. Path of Exile has been my all-time favorite game. It's free, it's complex, it has high-quality content, it is grindy, and it is scaleable along the way. In the screenshot above, I was about to show a friend the poor "drop" that the boss of this specific map gave me. A map is like a side area in the game where you can get rewards of any kind. You can boost this by modifying the map. Oh, man... I'll save you the trouble before I go loco on Path of Exile... But... for those who know about PoE. It was the Synthesized Cortex Map. Currently, I'm running Corrupting Fever (94), which has an insanely fast clear speed and is so much fun to play with.
Art
I've been creating artwork by trying out new techniques. I notice I publish more on Twitter due to the short description that you can add, but even there I fail to post everything that I do. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I need to publish everything that I do. Anyway, it has been so much fun exploring new ways how to create these visuals. I can put everything that I learned over the last decade in the work that I create today.
Check out this throwback, I started this project back in 2011, and I still love it very much. I decided to share it on Twitter to show more of myself to those who are interested in what I do.
https://twitter.com/RubenCress/status/1508396900604694530
Galaxy
For this artwork, I worked with photographs, gradients, and distortion filters. I started with a close-up photograph of a bush that showed the texture of leaves. After colorgrading it with curves, color profiles and hue/saturation, I distorted it with liquify, RGBchannels, and more layers. In the end, I added more adjustments to get this oldschool vintage vibe. Kinda retro.
Submit
When I was fooling around in Fruity Loops Studio, I tried to make my first Techno track. After uploading it onto SoundCloud I had to make a thumbnail. For this artwork, I used Blender and Photoshop. While I'm quite new to Blender, this was a lot of fun to create. Looks like Darth Vaders' helmet if you'd ask me.
If you're curious; let's have a listen.
Palais Garnier
Retouching an interior of Palais Garnier, it never gets bored to me. I remember struggling with color grading these photographs, as the interior is so full with detail and art, it's hard to compliment it the right way. As in, any edit would be great already simply because the interior itself is stunning.
Spaceship
My latest work is a collage of several photographs that I took. As I mentioned earlier, I only use my own photographs and refrain myself from using stock images. On Twitter, I noticed that a lot of artists use stock images to create art, I figured it out recently, as I was always under the impression they created all the elements themselves.
How long has it been? Too long.
Glad to be back my old friends. Thus far, my posts for monthly reports. If you enjoy them, let me know in the comments below what you think. Are there topics in this post that you wanna know more about? Let me know :).
Cheers,
Ruben
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