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Gideon

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Everything posted by Gideon

  1. Gideon
    Cute little house and nice figures
  2. Gideon
    Great layout, and nice to know that it is only a hint of the BoBS greatness to come! I'm almost starting to think about going to Antwerp in November
  3. Gideon
    Great scene! I like the fig posing a lot, and the lanscaping is very good as well Some photography advice (rather lengthy since now I'm getting technical ) is however to not shoot the builds at such a wide angle, both because your 18-200 mm lens has a lot of distortion at that focal length which can be seen as the curving of the front edge (although fairly easily corrected in post-processing if you use for example Lightroom) and because the front of the build gets magnified a lot while the back of the build is shrunk due to the perspective. I would recommend backing away at least until you can zoom to 50-75 mm. Since it looks like you wanted this shot with sunlight I'm not going to give my usual suggestion to shoot in the shade (But on your second picture without the harsh sunlight the colors come out much nicer), but you've used a very small aperture which hurts sharpness while you didn't put the ISO to the lowest possible. I would suggest to manually set the ISO to 100 (if that is the lowest on your camera?) and the shortest possible shutter speed, while setting the aperture to no bigger than about f/16. On the second picture on the other hand, the aperture is too large, which causes the front and back of the build to be slightly out of focus. (I generally shoot my builds at around f/11-f/13 to get as much depth of field as I need while avoiding the sharpness loss caused by diffraction if i were to go for a too high f-stop). To summarize: Your splendid camera has a M-mode, don't be afraid to use it! Edit: A comparision of the distortion on different focal lengths (source: DxOMark Nikon AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED mounted on Nikon D300s : Measurements) Nikon 18-200 on D300s @ 18 mm Nikon 18-200 on D300s @ 70 mm
  4. Gideon
    Very suitable building for Corrington! Oleanders will of course not tolerate this kind of time-worshipping idolatry in our settlements, but we can't deny that your time-keeping devices are handy also on Oleander ships to aid us in the navigation
  5. Gideon
    Small house in Breshaun
  6. Gideon
    Nice landscaping and great fig posing
  7. Gideon
    Very good spring atmosphere with that tree Good job with the tower too, especially the wooden section and its floor.
  8. Gideon
    Congratulations!
  9. Gideon
    Excellent exterior, I like the dark red+lbg combination and the level of texturing on the walls Nice interior details as well!
  10. Gideon
    Nice roof!
  11. Gideon
    Nice diorama! I like how you've made those windows "presentable" both from the outside and the inside
  12. Gideon
    As I'm not a Nocturnian I can only state my opinion but that is that I really like the idea of tribes rather than lands on the map (although the tribes are probably more concentrated in specific areas?) I also really like the type of fleshed-out settlements like Skavenport and Shadowmere we are starting to see nowadays
  13. Gideon
    Lovely building and excellent street I like how you show the beams supporting the floors.
  14. Gideon
    Very nice plants, but it's the far side with the fence I particularly like here Only nitpick is that the road could have had some more details.
  15. Gideon
    Thanks! As I said before, if it wasn't for the inspiration from your swamp tree I never would have come up with this tree design
  16. Gideon
    Thanks for the comments everyone! The idea was that this depicts the edge of the mangrove at low tide, so the water is pretty much the clear open ocean water. It was something like this I had in mind: Exactly, the flash on my camera is my usual light source but in this case I experimented with some light from another direction as well. Partly to compensate for the fact that I had for the first time rotated my setup 90 degrees so I no longer had a white wall behind me to rely on for bouncing a bit of flash from the front and not only from above (usually I shoot my pictures with the camera on the right in the room on that picture). Since the old Olympus flash cannot use the more advanced Nikon flash control system, I simply put it as a stupid slave and set it to 25-50 % of what the on-camera flash was outputting. The backdrop can be put up and taken down in less than 5 minutes each so it is very neat. The backdrop itself is a "Tupplur" roller blind from Ikea. I also have a white and a black one, but the gray one is my favorite as long as I'm not shooting gray castles The reason for moving further away and zooming in is that the perspective gets much better then. In this build it was maybe not that necessary, but in builds with pronounced vertical lines the closer you go the more the vertical lines will be "sloping" outwards on each side. By standing further away that slope gets much less. It also helps me getting the whole build in focus, since the closer you go the shorter the depth of field becomes. On a small compact camera that is not such a big issue but with my full frame camera short depth of field is troublesome when I try to get a whole build in focus. The leaves are actually fairly sturdy attatched since I've used a lot of bar 3L, but adding new leaves was a pain since if I wanted to push another bar in some leaf I needed to get my fingers in to hold on the other side of the leave to not bend the leave instead of getting the bar through one of the holes...
  17. Gideon
    Great initiative! I made some attempts to keep my parts of the wiki updated during my first year of GoH, but the lack of interest in the wiki in general made me not continue that. Considering how much content has been generated during the first few years of GoH, a wiki is however very much needed...
  18. Gideon
    Ok. Well, I assume some kind of voting will happen sooner or later in any case. Now I have some more time to catch up on all the great entries
  19. Gideon
    Thanks! Yes, the idea with the hanging roots is that they will be submerged at high tide. If I had put more time into this build I would however have tried to make more of the tails reach further down, as it was now I added the hanging tails afterwards which was a pain with my big clumsy hands...
  20. Gideon
    Thanks! The idea was that this is at low tide, so at high tide the water is almost up to the leaves. It's not the lighting setup which is the most important thing here, a good backdrop, a cheap tripod, taking a few steps backwards and using the zoom on the camera and using dim natural light can give you at least as good pictures. Only problem for me is that I always do all my shooting (and building) when the rest of the family is asleep, and natural light is not an option then... Thanks! The number of dinosaur middle tails (40378) are somewhere around 65, and some more tail ends (40379) hanging from the canopy. But I have no idea how many leaves and bar 3L went into the canopy, but a fair share of last year's LUGBULK amount at least I got the idea for the mangrove after seeing Blufiji's excellent tree trunk using the same technique in a swamp in Historica.
  21. Gideon
    Nice trees! I agree that it's a bit unexpected to find vikings in BoBS, but it's actually an interesting thought if early explorers to North America would have met descendants of the vikings who had settled on Newfoundland 500 years earlier
  22. Gideon
    Expedition into the Mangrove This is my Challenge I category B entry. Gideon de Bothnia is leading an Oleander expedition to a newly discovered island, with a small detachment of marines sent by his brother Alexandre who is a high ranking officer in the Oleander fleet. In the great push for exploration, most people don't seem to mind if the national resources of the navy are "borrowed" by entrepreneurs who are trying to make personal gains from the exploration. After all, it's all for the glory of Oleon! Much of the shores of the new island is covered with thick mangrove, but finally they have found a gap in the mangrove where during the low tide they are able to land with one of the smaller ship’s boats. Now they can make their first footsteps on this virgin soil, but now the members of the expedition anxiously wonder if they are the first to land on this island or if someone has come here before them? More pictures: For those of you interested in how I shot this, here is another "behind the scenes" shot. This time I tried to play a bit with off camera lighting with my old Olympus FL-50R and a cheap umbrella setup I bought a while ago.
  23. Gideon
    Oh, I did not know that there was such a rule for this contest (and I'm fairly sure I should be able to vote ) But why would that rule have been a problem since the voting was done openly? Any invalid votes could have been easily removed before counting them. An automatic poll would probably be harder to limit to certain voters.
  24. Gideon
    Excellent build, I especially love the hut which looks very similar to the kind you see all over Sweden (and Norway?) nowadays I of course also should point out that ice effect is probably the best I've seen!
  25. Gideon
    Is it just for me or did the Frozen Beyond voting topic disappear? I was planning to start looking through all the entries to make up my mind but now I can't find the topic again? I'm pretty sure the topic was http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=121602 but that just gives me a "Sorry, we couldn't find that! You do not have permission to view this topic."
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