tanisnikana

I wanted to capture the most glaring bits of modern suburbia, of modern infrastructure, in a crunchy and appealing frame and contrast. I was also hassled by a cop while I took this.

Thanks for seeing my work!

I’ve been seeing these signs pop up everywhere, sometimes in the most unexpected places.

They help.

Thanks for seeing my work!

When I set out to completely scrap my default Cinnamon-on-Linux-Mint experience, I decided I wanted something that felt like a fictional OS from a video game, like you'd sit down at someone's computer and see some BS operating system that you'd kind of understand but it definitely doesn't resemble much of what's real.

So:

Linux Mint 21.3, running Cinnamon. The dock on the left is Plank Reloaded, and the top panel is just a Cinnamon panel, with left-formatted date cause I haven't seen a major OS put stuff like that up in the corner. Both dock and panel intelligently autohide and are a dream to use. The little turtle emoji pops a somewhat custom applications menu, accessible with the Super key, both on dock and panel.

The system font across all elements is Inter, the most beautiful display font I've ever seen: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inter, and it just brings a certain elegance that the stock Ubuntu font is sorely lacking.

The theme is Semabe Grey Glassy, with the transparency tuned quite a bit for my personal taste, the mouse is Future-Cyan-Cursors, the dock icons are Mint-Y-Dark-Pink but with a modification for the turtle emoji, and the Linux Mint boot logo has been swapped out for you-know-exactly-what. The wallpaper is a moderately edited asset rip from Life is Strange: Double Exposure, and that blep turtle I fell in love with was as a mural on a wall in a bar, and since there's no clean photo mode, I could prolly just go find it (and I did!).

I hope you enjoyed looking at and hearing about my semi-fictitious TurtleOS!

Despite how a lady at the bookstore “struggled with” my pronouns and bounced off “he” several times before settling on “they” cause apparently she couldn’t bring herself to say “she.”

Shit’s hard out there.

The architecture of the Oregon Coast is always interesting to me. It’s a subtle biome change that has a lot of consequences in how a building looks–seeing houses like these just over the coastal range would be very rare indeed.

Also structurally, I’m really fond of this capture, it feels like a sandwich between heaven and earth and humanity gets the middle fifth of the image.

Thanks for seeing my work!

1/80s, f/5.6, 300mm, ISO 100

Oregon Zoo

Portland, OR

~~stupid long horses~~

Amazingly enough, the zoo let me bring a tripod in, as long as I had left before noon, once it got busy. I took this time with few people and no crowds to take some pretty good photos. I'm starting to get the hang of this!

Thanks for seeing some necks!

I had been going back and forth between the coast a lot, and I got to be the passenger for one of the trips. With a piece in mind about hurtling through the trees at sixty miles per hour, I had turned the shutter speed to two seconds (too much blur, can’t tell what stuff is) and settled on a single second. Holding the camera as steady as possible in a bouncy car was difficult, but I like the result! There could be a little man dashing through the trees, trying to keep up with the car.

Thanks for seeing my work!

A scene I came home to: my wife had just finished playing a journaling RPG about attempting to preserve a library from ransacking hordes in the distant past, involving both blocks and cards. And I saw it all, and the scene composed itself. Nothing was disturbed in the slightest.

I just think this is very pleasing and cozy to look at.

Thank you for seeing her game remains!

Shot with my phone just that night, alongside my Rebel T7.

Sometimes it’s nice to sit back and let the phone do the editing.

Thanks for seeing my city!

In the third day of having a camera, there's a few things I learned

• I cannot believe I had my tripod with me, and went handheld for many shots, believing that an ISO of 3200 would be enough to cut out my natural hand shake (no, it just cuts out everything that's not grain).
• And I cannot believe that I didn't just shoot everything from that tripod (though I got a few good shots with it, and never changed the ISO to something lower with a longer shutter and wider aperture)
• And that even for a lot of night time shots, once the camera's mounted on the tripod, even depressing the shutter button causes a bit of camera shake, which, to me at least, merits a two-second pre-timer so my hand can get away first.

Just a few short days ago I was in awe and wonder about the stuff I could do with a proper camera. And now I'm really learning how to use it in a variety of conditions! I suppose the same is true of any upgraded tool, you've got to get used to it first, and figure out how it differs from the old tools, and then grow and expand from there.

I kind of liked the way I arranged Portland, a bit, suggesting a drawbridge and a castle palisade.

Thanks for seeing my vaguely cyberpunk castle town!

Sure, it’s a moon I captured on a slightly hazy night, but I wanted to really test out my tripod and telephoto lens and capture something my cell phone would just repeatedly fail at. Ended up going with a one-second shutter after a two-second timer so my hand wouldn’t mess with the tripod balance, and with ISO 100, I had a long enough window to capture good detail on the moon, at least as much as my 75-300m f/4-5.6 telephoto lens would allow. There’s bigger lenses that do more daring stuff, but this one is mine.

Thanks for seeing some really big sky cheese!