There is a new
meme going around, started this time by
Gnomeageddon. It's the
Meme of Sixes and is an interesting one. It turns out this has been around for a long time; a little casual link-surfing took me back to February 2009 and a swedish blog and a photo of a
dog cuddling a baby. It's now making the rounds again in the WoW blogosphere and I have been tagged by both Navimie of the
Daily Frostwolf and Karagena the
Reluctant Raider to participate in it. It's so nice to be loved.
THE RULES
- Go into your image folder
- Open the sixth sub-folder and choose the sixth image.
- Publish the image! (and a few words wouldn’t hurt, though I dare say I couldn’t stop a blogger from adding a few words of their own).
- Challenge six new bloggers.
- Link to them.
Of course, those rules are nice. They're simple and easy to do. Honestly, I could have this post done in minutes if I wanted to. But that wouldn't really be in the Battle Medic tradition, now would it?
So let's complicate things a bit.
THE BATTLE MEDIC RULE OF SIX BY SIX BY SIX
If there was a TV show for people who are incapable of deleting things on their computer, I would be featured on the premier episode. We'd call it
Hard Drive Horders: Buried in Megabytes. I have all sorts of files and images that go back years, and quietly get transferred from hard drive to hard drive as I upgrade and then sit there collecting layers upon layers of virtual dust.
Consequently, I have many, many folders on my hard drive with images so picking just one doesn't seem quite right. Picking six would make sense, given the nature of this particular challenge, but that might take this innocent little challenge into deep, dark places of my computer that are better left unexplored. Who knows what one might find while picking through the decrepit ruins of my digital projects from the distant past.
Sounds like fun. Let's get started, shall we?
#1 - World of Warcraft Screenshots folder
Delving into my WoW Screenshots folder reveals a lot of subfolders. For simplicities sake, the source images of each panorama that I do get their own folder, and the sixth one happens to be
Netherstorm. This beautiful panorama was featured in my
Images of Azeroth: Outlands Part 2 post a few months ago.
However, the sixth image in this sixth folder turns out to be probably the least interesting image on my hard drive.
Yup. Nothin' but purple rocks. It's the sort of scene that makes your computer's video card wonder why the hell it's spending its considerable processing power rendering such a pointless, prosaic set of pixels. There really isn't much you can do with an image like this. Well, unless we decide to make it all about the textures instead of the objects. Hmm... let's try making it a black and white and then playing with the cropping and see what we get.
A little bit of creative blurring later, and suddenly we have something interesting and worthy of being featured on
Battle Medic. Mind you, it's still not exactly a Monet.
#2 - Screenshots folder: Six Down and Six Across
Ach! This option puts me right in the middle of an unfinished
Images of Azeroth panorama that I was saving for a later post.
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| Dude, you got your Deathwing all over my Tower. Ewwww. |
One unexpected benefit to having a max-level Shaman at my disposal is the ability
Far Sight. It gives me options for screenshots that I simply can't do on my Paladin. This image, for instance, was done after completing an End Time run and is a perspective that is not normally available to most other classes because it's half-way up a mountain on a completely vertical slope.
Look for the full image in an upcoming post.
#3 - Battle Medic sub-folders
The Battle Medic folder contains the very bones of this blog. Each image that I have created for
Battle Medic, whether used or not, lies here in a state of perpetual readiness. This folder illustrates my image hoarding tendencies perfectly because I literally have no need for any of the images in this folder; the ones I needed have already been uploaded to the blog and are stored online, and the ones that didn't make the post aren't needed at all. It is an interesting archaeological dig through my blog's past, though.
The sixth subfolder of the Battle Medic folder happens to house the raw images from the photo shoot that I did with Ophelie of
Bossy Pally and the Giant Spoon back in June.
Digging through the layers of this folder is a little frightening. One of the fundamental truths that one learns very quickly as a professional photographer is that only about 1 in 10 portraits that are taken is worth keeping. The rest have closed eyes, weird expressions, strange homeless people wandering in the background or some other flaw that necessitates editing that image in favour of another. Randomly picking an image out of this folder could be disastrous.
As luck would have it, however, the sixth image in this folder was one of my favourites.
As a photographer, an image's success depends as much on your personality as it does the subject's; how people respond to you shows up very clearly in the finished images. A laugh is always photographic gold. I like this image because it feels incredibly
genuine.
The image above is the unaltered version and is just how I took it. Below is the finished image once I was done with it.
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Ophelie, probably laughing at my bad Austin Powers impression,
"IGNORE ME DOING THIS! IGNORE ME DOING THIS!" |
#4 - Battle Medic folder: Six Down and Six Across
Like I said, I hoard my image files, and this illustrates it perfectly. This Blood Bowl image was pulled off the Cyanaide website for my post
Encouraging Infidelity: On Burn-out and Blood Bowl, and I did use a portion of it in the article. I certainly don't need the full image any longer, so any sane, rational, non-hoarding person would simply delete it and move on. Not I. I kept it.
But not only that, I ended up keeping
two of them. Because of the way that Chrome downloads files (possibly the only thing I don't like about the web browser), I accidentally downloaded an extra one; this is the second one.
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"Some people think Blood Bowl is a matter of life and death. I assure you,
it's much mor... ARRRRRRGHsplorch." |
And my wife wonders why I need to buy hard drives so often. Little does she know...
#5 - Artwork folder
The sixth subfolder in my Artwork folder lands us conveniently in the place where I store the finished work of my Portfolio. The sixth image in this folder is one that some of you will be familiar with already, as it was featured during my
Images of Azeroth: 50,000 Words series of posts.
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| Sunset in Motion |
Of course, the
actual sixth image in that folder was the printer-ready version of this file which weighed in at a hefty 11 megabytes, so this is obviously a slimmed down version for the blog. I actually gave a 20" x 30" print of this to my sister this Christmas, and it should be hanging on her wall by now.
#6 - Dwarfling folder
This is what most of you were waiting for, I'm sure. Admit it, you're here for baby photos.
Of course, I have a folder of images of the Dwarfling. There are literally hundreds, maybe thousands of images in there. However, the sixth image in the sixth folder is this one:
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| The Dwarfling at 18 Weeks |
Yikes. My daughter loves the camera and, at least in her father's eyes, is very photogenic. This one, on the other hand, is certainly not her best photo. It was taken by her mother and due to the camera-shake and the rather bizarre, doll-like quality of her expression this image would likely never have seen the light of day if not for this challenge. It would have been deleted except, as I mentioned above, I am an incurable image hoarder. It's times like this it can come and bite me in the ass.
Here are a couple of better, non-random images of her to keep you all happy.
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| One year old... |
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| ...and cute as hell. |
PASSING THE TORCH
And in keeping with tradition, I hereby pass the torch along to these fine folk.
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