Posted on July 29, 2002

• Reaction to yesterday’s scaling back of the User Gallery has been, for the most part, sympathetic. I haven’t deleted the all the UG data yet, in fact I still have all the submissions going back for the past couple of years. I’m just trying to decide what to do with it.

  Some folks have suggested that I make the User Gallery members only. Unfortunately I don’t think that would be right. I think it would be inappropriate for me to charge money for access to something which is freely available on the the Net. I don’t think the artists who have submitted their work thus far would appreciate such a move, and I would rather offer my works exclusively in the members gallery. As I said before, I’m still trying to decide what to do with all of the extra submissions.

  Now I think I am going to get back to work on some new wallpapers. I just received my copy of Ozone 3D 2.0 in the mail (still awaiting my registration code), and I bought an interesting SubSurface Scattering plugin over the weekend that I’m dying to learn.

Posted on July 28, 2002

• For a while today I had completely removed the User Gallery from my site.

  Signups have been pretty slow for the past couple of months (due to a lot of pessimism regarding the economy and the state of the world I imagine) and I’ve been feeling pretty down about it. The User Gallery started out as a way to make a little extra money from banner ads and to draw some extra traffic. Then the bottom fell out the banner-ad market and I came to realize that my site will have to survive on signups or not at all.

  Well, it’s pretty hard to get people to sign up when there are 200 freebies available, updated every week. I decided the User Gallery had to go, so I took it down this afternoon.

  After it was gone, though, I found that I missed it. I was always proud to be able to showcase undiscovered talent (like Greg Martin and Ferenc Haraszti). So after a few hours without it, I decided that the UG could stay but only after I pared it down to 40 images which rotate out as new ones are added. The top ten will stay until they are voted out. Hopefully this compromise will work for everyone.

Posted on July 26, 2002

• I did a little more color tweaking on my roses and came up with something I liked better. I hope you agree. You’ll find the new version up on the new images page, and the original I posted yesterday can be found in Pickle Jar.

Posted on July 25, 2002

• Rather than tweak “Fissure” I decided to work on something new. As a result, this afternoon I’ve added another new wallpaper to the gallery. It’s called “Hybrid” and hopefully it is an improvement on the rose making techniques used in “September Rose“. Jessie had a lot of input on the colors so I have to give credit where credit is due. I’m still working on this one so stop back tomorrow if you are interested in the revision.
• I’ve put up a t-shirt design in my Cafepress store if anyone is interested.

Posted on July 23, 2002

• I took some time off last week to entertain my father and four brothers who had driven out from Illinois. It was my Dad’s first real visit to California and I think everyone had a pretty good time. I know I did.

  On Sunday, before they were set to drive off, my Dad asked to see how I worked. We gathered around my workstation and I fired up Lightwave. I whipped up some simple rock formations and he seemed fairly impressed. After they left I sat down, refined things somewhat, and ended up this morning with an image I actually liked. The result, entitled “Fissure”, is now up on the new images page. It’s still in the early stages, but I hope you like it.

  Thanks everyone for your comments regarding image brightness. The majority of you confirmed what I think to be the best course of action: to keep making images like I always have. There’s little hope of me perfectly matching brightness on everyone’s monitor. Some people wisely suggested that one could download a graphics editor (I recommend the freeware Ifranview for the PC) and adjust the brightness, contrast, and/or gamma to fit one’s particular screen. This is probably the only way to please everyone.