The Minx Mansion Gazette

[agent0013]

Oh wow! Devious Ankles is flawless! Until I scrolled passed the image and read on I just assumed it was her current body!

Party Aftermath is great, too. Those Minxes have never been able to hold their liquor! I feel like there's some shoes and minxes in that pile that I haven't seen before, but I do spot my favorite MH girl in the back, Skelita!

I Can't Take You Two Anywhere is just plain cute. Big eyes peering out from some really nice shoes! The hand positioning on the closest one is perfect. I just love the hands on the MH dolls.

Those are some great composites! First Flower is definitely my favorite of them. Beautiful! Mischief Maker is pretty great, too. I assumed the name was part of your addition, but it was just the perfect plane for you!

I know I've seen some of these photos around before but most of them are new to me. Thanks for sharing!

[ShadowFun]

Bravo for these beautiful and imaginative composite photos!

Thanks again Victor! Maybe Sky will convince me to do another composite again. She can be very convincing…

Oh wow! Devious Ankles is flawless! Until I scrolled passed the image and read on I just assumed it was her current body!

Party Aftermath is great, too. Those Minxes have never been able to hold their liquor! I feel like there's some shoes and minxes in that pile that I haven't seen before, but I do spot my favorite MH girl in the back, Skelita!

I Can't Take You Two Anywhere is just plain cute. Big eyes peering out from some really nice shoes! The hand positioning on the closest one is perfect. I just love the hands on the MH dolls.

Those are some great composites! First Flower is definitely my favorite of them. Beautiful! Mischief Maker is pretty great, too. I assumed the name was part of your addition, but it was just the perfect plane for you!

I know I've seen some of these photos around before but most of them are new to me. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks Pal! It’s been great fun searching back through these old contest entries… a definite stroll down memory lane. In some ways, I’m glad I waited until now to go back and find them. I’ve got a lot of new perspectives!




Sky’s entry into Feb 2020 Cat E Mini Challenge: “Mirrors and Reflections”

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Mistress White’s companion entry into the Cat A challenge : “The Photographer”

The Photogapher.JPG (644.06 KiB) Viewed 262 times

As many of you may recall, I have a bit of a passion for film photography and vintage cameras.

This passion has been somewhat dormant of late… although my pal John has been certainly lighting fires under my butt… lol. These two early contest entries feature my most prized medium format camera… my late-1960’s Bronica S2A with it’s rare Nikkor HC lens.

But this post isn’t about that camera, it’s about my beloved Fujifilm X-T1 digital camera, used to take these photos… and more specifically, about the jpeg images it generates.

In the early days of my journey here on TDF, as many of you will recall, photos uploaded to TDF were restricted to a dimensional size along their longest edge. The full-size jpeg photos my camera generates are just a little too large for this, and the medium size pics are significantly smaller. Consequently, most of the photos I was posting, both on my threads and in challenges… including the two above… were “resized” on my computer or tablet to meet the dimension restrictions.

Whenever I did this, I was creating “copies” of the “original” jpeg images my camera made. For the most part, I didn’t care… at that time, my journey was all about the dolls. But something was always lost whenever I did this… because my Fuji camera uses a unique kind of image sensor, and the on-board software that creates a jpeg image is equally unique.

I realized this some time ago, and started uploading “original” jpeg images in medium size… until the TDF “upgrade” happened. Now I can happily use my Fuji’s full-size images!

Maybe I’m the only one who can see the difference… but that’s all that matters, right??? Getting the most out of an image file is why so many photographers work in RAW in the first place… then process their photos with many different powerful software suites. But my older Fujifilm RAW files have always been problematic for 3rd party software to “develop” anyway. And the jpeg images the camera generates have a quality that has always been praised.

So I’ll say it again, I’m not being lazy when I don’t photoshop doll stands and other elements out of my photos. It’s because I don’t want to lose the subtleties of my original jpeg image. The vintage camera and lens Sky and Mistress White are playing with in these photos are my favorites precisely because of their subtleties.

I can’t describe it to you… or show it to you in a scan of the film shot with this Bronica. But you would see it if you held a slide in your hands and looked at the light coming through it.

Pure magic!

Thanks for stopping by!

[john1972]

This feeling you get with your Digital camera is not only a wonderful feeling you yourself feel
but others in there photo journey sometimes come across as well..
If the photographer does not simply give up and do the "Its all I have" kinda camera thing and settle
for what they have as that seems to happen often in fact .
But the ones that stride to see what is out there and what differences lenses and cameras and sensors
and sensor sizes blah blah can make , Those are the people that often find that something special .
The something special that just screams OH hey now I really like this..
Not everyone crawls on the ground and gets right in the face of there subjects lol..
Not everyone will like the same sensor size cameras or lens focal range..

This is what makes photography so amazing is the wide range of gear and methods as to create there photos
and there own unique style..

As for the Medium Format film cameras ..
Well I can assure you my friend that very unique look and feel on those slides you talk about transfers over
into the digital world as well..
I just wish you could shoot some with my Fujifilm GFX and experience the same feeling.
It sure is a really different format and as strange as this may sound I would still to this day get myself
my very own XT-1 as well because I know about this special look you talk about and yes that camera you have
is amazing and without that camera in your hands I am not sure your wonderful photo work would be the same..

Thanks for sharing this story and fun and amazing photos you take and more importantly thanks for your friendship.

[ShadowFun]

The Fly in my Honey

Of course, it could never be always perfect… right?

All this stuff I’ve written about using my pristine, original jpegs “Out-Of-The-Camera” has one tiny flaw… sometimes my camera thinks a vertical shot is a horizontal one…

My Fuji X-T1 has an on-board orientation sensor. But occasionally, if I’m shooting a downward looking vertical shot, the sensor cannot determine which way I’m holding the camera and defaults to horizontal. Unfortunately, I’m not warned of this and there’s no software on-board to see the orientation of the pic, much less change it. I don’t know what it is until I download it.

Simple… right? Just rotate the photo on my tablet. Yeah… not so simple.

Rotating a jpeg photo’s orientation is considered an “edit” by virtually every program out there, and when you edit a jpeg photo, it is “re-compressed” and saved as a new file. For me, there is no way around this. Virtually every shoot I do with the Tiny Minxes has at least one photo in the group that has this issue.

Here’s one from a recent shoot with Cedar, first the rotated one I posted and then the pic as it came out of my camera…

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“Giggle!”

Ok… look closely and try not to be distracted by Cedar’s loveliness…

To my eyes, there’s a subtle clarity difference between the two photos. The original… particularly under magnification… has more depth and richness. It’s not enough difference to make me hate the rotated pic, or make me feel like I need some new and complicated methods… but it’s there.

I hate adding more complications to my shoots and stories. Again, spending time with my tiny Luvs is the most important thing. I’m super happy that the images my camera spits out are REALLY to my liking. If only I had a way to rotate them “in-camera”, it’d be perfect.

I’ve discovered that not all “rotations” are created equal.

I use Apple products, and virtually all my TDF activity is run off my iPad. When I download the photos from my camera using Fujifilm’s app, it saves them to my Apple “Photos” app. Rotating a pic in this app produces a new jpeg with a TON of loss of detail… I hate them. If I move the photos “as-downloaded” to my “Files” app and rotate them there, the new jpeg has far less changes applied to it.

This is the method I use, and I’m pretty happy with it overall. The Files app also allows me to rename the photos without having them re-compressed and saved again. Overall, I find these results good for my workflow and consistent with having FUN.

Sometimes… I’m sad when I see a pic I took of Cedar that will have to be rotated.

But one look at her cuteness and I’m over it!

[ShadowFun]

Not everyone crawls on the ground and gets right in the face of there subjects lol..

Thanks for sharing this story and fun and amazing photos you take and more importantly thanks for your friendship.

You know, I constantly forget what I must look like crawling on the ground shooting pics of tiny dolls. Thanks for reminding me pal!

All this photography stuff is definitely a labor of love. Really looking forward to hanging out this year and burning some film up shooting beautiful dolls and scenery with you! But don’t try tempting me…

I don’t NEED any more cameras!

[john1972]

Not everyone crawls on the ground and gets right in the face of there subjects lol..

Thanks for sharing this story and fun and amazing photos you take and more importantly thanks for your friendship.

You know, I constantly forget what I must look like crawling on the ground shooting pics of tiny dolls. Thanks for reminding me pal!

All this photography stuff is definitely a labor of love. Really looking forward to hanging out this year and burning some film up shooting beautiful dolls and scenery with you! But don’t try tempting me…

I don’t NEED any more cameras!

"You know, I constantly forget what I must look like crawling on the ground shooting pics of tiny dolls. Thanks for reminding me pal!"
What are friends for lol.
And no I wont try and talk you into buying more cameras lol..
But on a good note I did test a lot of my smaller 35mm cameras last season so I know what works well and does not..
I should be able to bring a couple of great smaller 35mm cameras and some tiny girls to shoot this time instead of a huge camera lol

[LoneRanger]

Wow, you are truly a real artist, BRAVO!

[ShadowFun]

Wow, you are truly a real artist, BRAVO!

Thanks pal! You know, looking back through all these composite challenges, I’ve noticed a lot of your entries too. Maybe someday we’ll both find our way back to making them again!

[ShadowFun]

More Composite Insanity

OMG… I found 2 more composite challenge entries I completely forgot about!

So if the “Pin Up” composite I wrote about a couple posts ago was the last straw, the composites I made for the June and August 2020 challenges definitely piled onto that poor camel’s back.

I was heading for a nasty breakdown…


June 2020 Cat D Challenge: “It’s Bikini Time!”

Sky - On Anime Beach.JPG (1.02 MiB) Viewed 183 times

“On Anime Beach”

I decided to put Sky into an anime beach scene… how hard could it be??? Holy crap… what was I thinking???

As mentioned, I don’t have a bunch of fancy apps, programs or skills… I did all my rendering and cutting by painfully tracing Sky with my mouse. I imagine nowadays, there’d be an app I could click and… POOF! Sky is a cartoon babe.

But not me… I decided to just blunder on ahead. And when it became obvious that the stupid amount of hours I had spent on this were going nowhere, I scrambled to finish SOMETHING in time to enter. Here’s my source photos.

IMG_3080.JPG (716.05 KiB) Viewed 183 times

Ugh… so much rubber stamping… my brain hurts remembering this!

Of course, I didn’t learn my lesson and decide to try something more attainable in the future. At this point in my life, I was still trying to satisfy my creative urges with computer wizardry.

My next composite debacle didn’t wait long to arrive…


August 2020 Cat D Challenge: “The GREAT Outdoors”

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Vaella in “Dragon Catching”

The Elves and Minxes were starting to multiply by this stage in my Doll-Life, and I sought to work some of their backstory into this entry.

Vaella was my newest Elven Minx, and I had great plans for her. I’d also received her “dragon armor” but hadn’t anticipated that NONE of it would fit her tiny S26 body. I scrambled to put some of it on her and pose her for this shoot… in which she’d be trying to capture Graoully.

Grafting Vaella into this photo of these caves was not something I hadn’t tried already… and failed at. Here’s my source photos…

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I personally shot this photo of a cave I visited… it’s scale and proportions are deceiving.

I shot this photo specifically to attempt to composite a photo of an erotic model into it. This was one of my more elaborate attempts at shooting a scene to put a model into. I even shot a photo of myself standing on the ledge I put Vaella on in an attempt to give the background some scale.

But none of that mattered… whether with Vaella or the models I tried to composite in, the results just looked proportioned wrong…


So what have I learned??? Something I hope!

First and foremost, I’m no graphic artist… lol. Secondly, until making a composite sounds like FUN again, I’m going to abstain. But my most important takeaway from all of this is that I’ve discovered that photographing my dolls in the world is like making a “live action” composite photograph.

I don’t have to reach very far for examples…

Nudie Beach 10.JPG (4.7 MiB) Viewed 183 times

I’m having much more FUN “compositing” my Tiny Luvs into the “Real World” than any virtual world I could ever find!

Thanks for stopping by!

[agent0013]

It might be taking you a lot of time for these, but the results speak for themselves! You went to the effort of capturing a lot of the hair in Dragon Catching. You ignored the strays on her head which is fine but you went to the effort of keeping the fuzz of her armor and that really sells the image. You could definitely fool people into thinking it's a real image largely because of that detail. Did you manually get in there with an eraser or do you have a trick? If there's a trick I want to know it! That's a detail I usually give up on.

[ShadowFun]

It might be taking you a lot of time for these, but the results speak for themselves! You went to the effort of capturing a lot of the hair in Dragon Catching. You ignored the strays on her head which is fine but you went to the effort of keeping the fuzz of her armor and that really sells the image. You could definitely fool people into thinking it's a real image largely because of that detail. Did you manually get in there with an eraser or do you have a trick? If there's a trick I want to know it! That's a detail I usually give up on.

AARGH! NO No no… I don’t wanna remember!

Seriously tho… the exact details of my methods now are fuzzy. I definitely used multiple layers of varying transparency, and created cutting masks by increasing contrasts on interim layers. But yes, also plenty of eraser… ugh. Stupid amount of work for a few hairs.

I’m reminded of something from the bonus material provided with the Blu-ray of Peter Jackson’s 2005 King Kong. They were shooting Naomi Watts being chased through the jungle on a huge soundstage. The shot was good, so they continued following the action for a few seconds. Unfortunately, they caught some of the stage in the background… through the leaves.

Techs had to manually photoshop out all that background shown in tiny slivers behind each leaf in every frame…

Keep those composites simple!!!

Thanks for dropping by pal!

[ShadowFun]

A New Ferny Friend!

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Sami is loving our new addition!

Some of you may recall photos in the past here at the Minx Mansion that had plants in them… including one of a majestic Staghorn Fern. Unfortunately, I lost all my plants to a tenacious mealy bug infestation. My favorite plant, the big fern, was impossible to rid of the bugs. When it became hopeless to save the fern… I decided a “scorched earth” policy was my best solution.

It’s been well over a year now since I’ve had any houseplants. Even though I missed them, it wasn’t enough to start over… maybe that time has now come. I’m going to start with my favorite plant and see what happens. Given the right conditions, these ferns grow quite large.

I bought a tiny one to see how he’ll do with some Minx loving care!

Good Luck baby fern!