neomance
Recollection, Oat Milk and Dynamic Photography - February 2023
Published: March 1st 2023, 7:07:21 am
February seems to have gone by in a flash. It's been quite the hectic month with the launch of the Patreon and Fanbox. I may have underestimated the workload of doing the usual world introductions alongside the new avatar introductions and the weeklyish articles. But I digress, let’s get into the monthly recap!
Soft Seduction
I was commissioned by the amazingly talented Sam~ and Camille~ (Creators of the Soft world series) once again to do a product showcase for their new world Soft Seduction. A cosy romantic getaway that released just in time for Valentines day.
Sam~ and Camille~ specialise in highly detailed worlds usually featuring muted pastel colours and decors consisting of draped cloth. One would definitely find any of their worlds to be a cosy place for sleep and relaxation.
This one was a little different from their usual worlds as it was a collaboration with a Gumroad avatar creator Cupkake. While it held the high quality style and theming known to them, the world also contained various extra objects and portraits made for showcasing the creators works.
S&C mentioned that since it was their first collaboration they were experimenting with different ways to integrate their works without taking away from the immersion of the world.
Photographing the world wasn’t too difficult, it’s always easier to take photos of higher quality worlds as they’re usually quite well composed already. I do usually have trouble when it comes to smaller rooms as the range at which you can shoot a scene is limited.
It’s not uncommon for my camera to be pressed up against the opposite wall in those cases. Or for me to shoot using a very wide angle to try and capture a larger part of the room. The picture above is a good example with me trying to capture the entirety of the bed.
I actually hear the next work they’re planning on releasing is a world called ‘Soft Suite’, I’m guessing it’ll be a sort of spacious and extremely expensive holiday villa of sorts. Look forward to seeing that in maybe about 3 months? For now though here’s some of my favourite shots from this particular commission!
Patreon and Fanbox
It’s now been a month since I’ve started managing Patreon and Fanbox content. At the moment we’ve almost reached the first goal of having enough to pay partly for the monthly booth avatars introductions. For that, if you’re reading this, please accept my heartfelt thanks for your support. I’d like to talk more about upcoming changes to the booth avatar introductions but I'll leave that in its own separate section below.
In terms of future goals for the Patreon and Fanbox, I’d like to reach a point where I can comfortably purchase avatars that cost more than 5000 yen for introductions but I feel that might be quite a far away goal, something like Yoyogimori avatars will definitely be out of the question for a while. I’d also like to earn enough to cover certain monthly expenses like my photography related adobe products and certain living expenses. Lastly but most importantly I want to be able to pay a proper translator to translate these articles to Japanese to maintain the quality across languages, rather than rely on a machine.
With regards to patreon content I’m still refining exactly what I want to have in each tiers. I’m also considering creating a much lower tier at $1 for anyone that just wants to provide general support for my creations, however that’s still up in the air for me. It's mainly because I don't want to make a tier where I can't provide some form of a reward.
I wanted a place where I could share a more personal side of my work and so I created this monthly article for the Fan tier, filled with my opinions on a bunch of random things. It's sort of like a progress diary at this point. I like where it’s heading, even now, writing this is quite enjoyable in a sense!
For the supporter tier I wanted to create things that would be useful for people that subscribed. Mainly I want to help to save people time with the curated lists. Producing the lists has taken quite a lot more time than expected though and I don’t have enough of a response to gauge how much people actually want to see each type of list I create. I’m currently thinking up ways to more effectively advertise the lists when they’re released.
In terms of future planned content in terms of most difficult. I’d like to start teaching photography again by sharing my knowledge in a guidebook of sorts, however due to past experience doing this I know it takes a substantial amount of time to create these types of guides.
For least difficult, would be releasing the pictures of already introduced worlds and avatars to the public. I’m not sure whether to do it in the style of a picture gallery or to add my own personal notes on each world I’ve been to. Of course doing so would increase the production time quite a bit and I’m not sure if there’s a more effective way to present the photos.
All in all, as you can see, I’m still quite scattered when figuring things out for the Patreon and Fanbox, but I’m glad you’ve joined me in learning how to manage all this. If you could leave a comment on the types of content you would like to see, that would also be great!
Re˸collection2
Re:collection was an initiative started by the virtual photographer Rocksuch all the way back in the year June 2021. The goal was to gather together a group of the most talented virtual photographers in VRChat to display their works in a public gallery world for viewing.
As with the name Re:collection2 was the second instance of that initiative taking place over a whole year later having opened early in February. A whole year is a really long time and not only have many new talented individuals appeared since, but the works of older photographers who participated in the first one have now also matured into their own unique styles.
Of course I too was a part of this, I can’t recommend enough that you go visit not only the recently released Re:collection2 but also the one released over a year ago just so you can see how much everyone's virtual photography has changed over time. I'll leave these two links below so you can directly start an instance!
Re˸collection
https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_4892f3f7-2ba0-47af-aad3-2e7a1b63d0e6
Re˸collection2
https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_a962fe51-9111-40fd-844c-ec82029e9c4d
I have to say, watching my friends and peers grow their own photography skills over the past year has been an extremely enjoyable experience for me. Although a part of me does think that it’s a little bit sad too that we can’t ever return to our roots where everyone’s photos held a sort of innocence and naivety. Even though most of the photos taken back were filled with mistakes, I'm sure during those times we thought they were true masterpieces.
To be honest, being able to participate in the first Re:collection was probably one of the main things that properly included me into the community of Virtual Photographers. To this day I'm thankful for Rocksuch for reaching out to me as I may not have met with many of my friends today If he didn't.
The Best Oat Milk Brand
On a completely different note I’ve actually been trying out all the different brands of oat milk available to me these past few weeks. It started when I was watching a Japanese food creator channel Peaceful Cuisine which recommended the brand OATSIDE in a video about making an Apple Cider Oat Milk Latte.
A few days later while I was out shopping, I spotted it in one of the store shelves so I decided to pick it up. Honestly it was delicious, I wouldn’t say it was more delicious than normal milk but rather it was like finding a completely new flavour of milk. My only problem is that it was expensive, about double the price of regular milk.
Out of curiosity, I began trying all the different brands on the shelves. It was super interesting just how much the taste could change between brands. Most tasted like watered down milk, some were extremely sweet and even grainy, and some came in a form of powder you mix with water, my parents even tried making some using real oats but unfortunately that turned out to be the worst one of all.
But after trying about 12~ brands it came down to only two, the Singaporean brand ‘OATSIDE’ and a local Malaysian brand ‘Oat Merry’. These two stood out the most because they had a delicious flavour that wasn’t too sweet and also weren't too thin giving it a creamy mouth feel when drunk. I’m not sponsored or anything by the way, I just really enjoy this oat milk.
It’s surprising just how many different options are out there for particularly normal foods. Nowadays I always pick up different brands at least once if I get the chance. It does bring the rare moments of having to finish a jam that does taste absolutely horrible though. But true discovery requires venturing down these dark tunnels!
Well I’ve sort of gone off on a tangent long enough! Do give the oat milk brands a try if you see them around. This section probably won't be a regular thing but it’ll be about some other whimsical topic next time! Probably!
Studying Japanese
Japanese is difficult. It’s been about 2 years now since I began studying Japanese in earnest, however in recent times I’ve regrettably not had much time to properly invest into studying. Back in September 2021 I began my journey to master Kanji and for one year I memorised Kanji flash cards on the daily.
In the beginning 3 months It would not be wrong to say It was one of the most painful experiences of my life as I was spending over 10hours a day forcefully memorising thousands of individual Kanji. I would wake up and start, sleep and wake up to repeat.
As the days passed and I started to remember more and more, the number of Kanji per day decreased until a year later where I was only spending about 20~30 minutes a day refreshing the Kanji I'd already seen. And finally in November 11 I decided to stop using flashcards to learn Kanji.
Did this method work? Yes of course it did, out of the 6000 Kanji, I can confidently remember about half and the rest can be remembered in the right context. However I would honestly never recommend doing this, but rather to do a much smaller amount than I did.
Now I’m mainly focusing on listening to conversations among my Japanese friends as well as reading the occasional news article. When listening I frequently run into a problem where I’m focusing too much on trying to pick out individual words that the rest of the sentence gets lost as it’s spoken. Or that my vocabulary and grammar isn’t strong enough to figure out the core parts of the sentences.
When listening for long periods, it drains my mental stamina quite a bit until the point where I hit a limit and pass out for a short period on the ground, some of my friends are very familiar with this occurrence, earning me the nicknames ‘Neru’mance ”寝る” meaning sleep and ‘Oha’mance “おは” from ”おはようございます” meaning good morning. I do feel really embarrassed when I fall asleep like this, and honestly am really thankful to my Japanese friends for bearing with me for so long.
I also have concerns sometimes when I'm listening to conversations. I listen to many different people speaking, some of them have rough personalities and some of them are more reserved and formal in a sense. I'm constantly afraid I might pick up some weird amalgamation of speaking that's unnatural to either side, though I somehow think it's already become that way in a sense.
As mentioned I’ve also started reading a little bit, mostly simple articles from the NHK for kids new site. My goal is just to get used to seeing the patterns of grammar within sentences and increase my reading speed. At the moment my speed is so slow that by the time I reach the end of the sentence, the first part of the sentence has been lost completely, leaving me unable to comprehend what it meant. It’s also similar to listening in that it takes a lot of stamina to read but I don’t really think there’s another way to get faster than to just read more.
Something I realised when speaking to my friends, sometimes when they say something I don’t really catch I respond with either ‘えっ？’ or ‘はっ？’. To me it sounds similar to Eh? And Huh? From English meaning I’m confused or didn’t catch something. But I learnt that that only applies to ‘えっ？’ . ‘はっ？’ seems to have more of a confrontational tone to it that brings a very different reaction in conversations.
Overall while things like my twitter, patreon and fanbox are ongoing, time for studying has become tighter but I still try to slip a little in on a daily basis. Fluency does seem to be very far away dream though.
#BOOTH_Avatar紹介
I decided on the hashtag! If you’re a follower of mine, you might notice the similarity to my world introduction hashtag #VRChat_world紹介. I wanted something to cement that the posts were a showcase for the avatars. I still feel that it’s not quite there yet in terms of the structure. I contemplated making it similar to my world introductions with the ‘Avatar’ and ‘Author’ tags but I felt that it was too long for a post of that style. I might do a poll to see which one people like more.
I want to start accepting requests from creators to introduce their avatars on my twitter. But at the moment I’m not sure how to go about announcing something like that, I’m worried about people thinking I’m trying to get models for free and such so I’m currently just purchasing them off booth directly. Behind the scenes I’m actually quite worried about public opinion when I’m producing anything, which is why this Patreon and Fanbox has taken so long to even begin operation.
One of my main goals with the avatar introductions is to bring out great works from the smaller creators too. At the moment I’m only introducing the already popular models but eventually I’d like to branch out to finding the hidden gems overlooked within the avatars released each month. Usually I’m able to find these types of avatars when a big event like Vket or Avatar museum happens as that’s when I’m able to try them on to gauge its quality. But beyond that I’m not sure how to find out when new avatars get released besides camping the booth pages or hearing about it on twitter so that’s another thing I’m keeping in mind.
QuQu’s Necomaid and Peke
This month’s avatar introductions were the cute New Necomaid and the cool Peke from the QuQu avatar store. There were many challenges faced during the shooting of these two avatars though I also learned quite a bit due to it!
With Necomaid, I finally got to shoot a 'cute' style of character. I wanted to run around in all sorts of cute poses while taking pictures of myself but unfortunately I ran into many difficulties. The biggest one being, the skirt. I've never actually worn a skirt on any of my avatars, and especially not one this big.
The skirt was quite rigid making seating poses look awkward as I could not lift my knees above the skirt height as the skirt would bend or clip in a strange way. It also wouldn't conform to the knees in a natural way while seated. If you look closely at any of my Necomaid pictures, you'll see the skirt is always fully spread out! In the picture above I'm actually seated properly but it's hard to tell. All of my poses are from a standing position.
This limitation did lead to me pushing my body to an extreme to get different poses from different angles. This created both the flying battle maid scene where the skirt was in full bloom as well as the scene were the legs were visible from under the skirt (I tried to find a low angle for this photo because the avatar creator marked that white band around the leg as something he loved)
Necomaid is definitely the cutest avatar I've ever taken pictures of. Even though she was cute I still let some of my cool nature slip into her demeanour which is very obvious in most of my photos. I told myself No! You're trying to take cute photos! But I guess my personal nature won out in a sense. It did create this contrast between cute and cool which gave life to some of the pictures.
"I want to pose like a ninja" those were the words that went through my head when I bought Peke. And it bore fruit to some of the most painful and dynamic poses I've ever done on any avatar. If any of you don't know, holding these poses isn't easy at all, you need extreme amounts of stamina to hold your body parts in the air long enough to take a good photo.
I had a general idea of where I wanted to take photos of a ninja scene but after putting on the avatar I realised instantly there was a problem. Her clothes were... Modern!? They didn't fit the style of older more traditional ninja clothing but instead looked like an outfit out of the Persona series held in present day Japan. You can see in the photo below, this world was one of my first choices for a Ninja shoot but the clothes didn't match in the slightest!
I went to various worlds after that, jumping from neon cyberpunk cities to old dojos but I could not find any world that fit the clothing. In the end I figured out what fit the avatar best was a concrete urban style of background, one that wasn't too futuristic or too old.
I had quite a bit of fun messing around with different types of colors using the Persona series as inspiration. The most successful photo as well as a new editing style was created from this, where a dynamic pose is paired with bright lights and saturated flashy colors fitting of a phantom thief.
These two avatars are actually the first purchases supported by you reading this article right now! Being able to shoot more avatars has pushed what I know about photography to it's limits and thus helped me grow as a result. I hope to do many more avatar introductions and bring you more interesting photography like this in the future!
Conclusion
Thank you for your patience reading this article to it's end! It’s only the first month of producing this type of content so everything is quite new to me still and subject to changes. However, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this article nonetheless! For things I have planned for the future!
I'd like to update my Patreon and Fanbox to include proper descriptions on what can be found within as well as add pictures on each of the tiers! Basically some upgrades.
I'll be releasing a gallery on world and avatar introductions that didn't make it to twitter. I'm not sure yet whether it'll be an extensive article like this one but we shall see.
I want to get back to writing a proper guide on how to improve one's photography and maybe help newer virtual photographers grow their work to new heights!
Lastly I'd like to talk about life philosophy, there's many people around me including myself that may get lost at times. If I can provide even a few words that can help push them along, I'd like to do so in the future!
Now you've really reached the end. Thank you for bearing with my long windedness! And thank you for supporting me this past month! I'll continue doing my best to produce more things for you to enjoy in the coming months!