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Midnight's School Of Photography
midnight445
Posts: 738 New Member
Welcome to Simatography’s latest project, powered by Midnight’s Universe, the school that will
make you sparkle!
Are you ready to learn something new, to feed yourself with detail and dept? Did you have enough with your parents saying that The Sims is just a game and you don’t learn a thing? Wait, have you thought at least once that The Sims is a loss of time, just a game, nothing more? Even worse, don’t you envy those simmers who come up with those flawless interiors, exteriors, sims, machinima, stories or photography? What are you ? A simple simmer? Can you even call yourself a simmer? A simple player? You deserve more, you need your spot, how about an artist? A breath-taking simatographer? A somebody that can bring to life his imagination, a somebody that can burn the ground under his feet?
Well then, it’s time to resuscitate that dead bone of yours, let Midnight polish you, bring out the best of you with his new School Of Photography, powered by Midnight’s Universe and Simatography, put on your man pants and join the Journey!
Portraits, landscapes, rules, lightning, color mixes, sci-fi, nature, photo editing, details over details, photo levels, shadows, emotions, clothes, buildings sets and characters. Everything from A to Z, easy to nightmare, told in small steps so even your great grandmother could understand!
It’s time to put your fingerprint, the sky is not the limit anymore, there is not even a definition for it. Sign in whenever you want, drop out minutes after, no rules just ambition, motivation, socializing, developing a handful of skills and pure simming!
School starts Monday, 4th of July. Are you in or what?
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Every school has it’s requirements to bring you the best quality there is. Please, make sure you have all the necessary equipment.
First you need a powerful camera, which means you need a pretty good computer that can carry The Sims 3 to high settings. All of your Sims 3 settings must at least be at High for taking pictures, make sure to tweak it up. The only setting we don’t need and you can keep it low is the High Detail Lots, keep that on 2 (you may need to higher it up if you want City pictures or level 3 landscapes). We need good shadows, textures, edge smoothing (very important). Keep them high as possible. For more information, check out this article.
Then you need a photo editing tool, I strongly recommend you Picasa 3, not just for The Sims but for everyday use, it’s all you need for your pictures to look flawless. All my photos are touched by Picasa 3, that is all I use. No Photoshop, no gimp, no time consuming advance photo editors. Download Picasa 3 from here, it’s free, made by Google. Check out the quick introduction for Picasa 3, I’m sure you’ll be very good friends with it. Don’t worry, I will teach you the ways of Picasa during the school.
A reminder that most of the forums works with 640x480px pictures, so if you want to publish your work on the forum, especially on the TS3 forum you have to make your pictures smaller.
Atention! Keep the original pictures on High Definition, never resize the original, make a copy and resize only the copy!
Optional!
Create a Photobucket account so you could have unlimited storage for your pictures. Also, to use your files on forums.
Advertise your work, don’t go blind!
Everything you make must be advertised so people could know you. You want to be a real simatographer, right? You want to have your own spot?
There will be times when you’ll shoot over 100 pictures but you’ll show only 4. You have to publish only the best of your Best work. Midnight’s School Of Photography is available on Simatography Forum too, it’s not a must, but if you want to have extra attention, you need to post your work there too. Don’t expect me to do your job!
The upcoming lines will be about the very important cheats you MUST use before taking a picture. I wont accept teaching you the ways of photography if you don’t use these cheats.
First of all, you open the Console with CTRL+SHIFT+C then you type:
HideHeadLinesEffects On (the one that will hide the plumbob, chat bubbles and other unnecessary floating stuff).
MoveObjects On (so you can move any object without limitation, even sims).
UnlockOutfits on (so you can browse all the hidden outfits).
MotherLode (Cha-Ching! 50.000 simoleons for shooting expenses).
TestingCheatsEnabled On (for hidden actions, CTRL+SHIFT+MouseLeftClick you sims/item. Use this cheat to disable autonomy, to keep your sims needs always high during the shooting also to enable further cheats)
BuyDebug On ( so you could use all the hidden objects in the game, you can find these in Buy Mode under the “?” tab. Works only after entering the TestingCheatsEnabled cheat).
MovieMakerCheatsEnabled On (my personal favorite, use almost all animations on any sims whenever you want. You CTRL+SHIFT+MouseLeftClick your sim and select one of the four new actions, you need to discover this tool, it’s pretty big. Works only with the latest Sims 3 patch or The Sims 3 Generations. Also, works only if you entered TestingCheatsEnabled cheat).
That is all you need to have the perfect experience and to become a real simatographer!
If you are running low on computer resources and there’s no way how to adjust your game settings to the school’s requirements, you can still shadows us, participate but you won’t be reviewed, graded or be part of our Wall Of Fame.
I see there’s a lot of movement here, getting excited with my little school of photography, eh? Very good, that means my classes will be pretty populated. Let me tell you a bit about my system. School starts on July 4 and ends September 10 which means 10 weeks of developing new skills. The journey will start with building up your own universe, we’ll start with your character that represents you, on your style, feel and look. We will work on the portraits, backgrounds, tweaks, modern touches and so on. Practically, we will shift between trends, from B&W pictures, sepia to cutting edge color madness. Later on these trends will mix in your own style, you’ll see!
After playing with your character and use of simple background, we will go even further in building small sets and sharing avatars with other simmers as part of the school. Using other simmers stuff gives us more feeling, the want to make that avatar look better. This will give you the photographer’s mind.
There will be a total of 10 assignment, from easy to nightmare. Each of them will put you in a different position. Also, dragging you deeper into the limitless pool of creativity. All assignments will be neutral, which means it doesn’t matter if you have just the base game or a couple of expansion packs or/and stuff packs. All you need is Sims 3 and the school’s requirements mentioned later today.
About the mods and third party objects, I’m not a fan of them but I’m not here to draw lines. Keep in mind though that some objects are very cheap in texture and too artificial. The key is simple clean and sweet detail. I wont’ even talk about mods. Use whatever you want just keep up the A game.
Let me tell you a bit about how an assignment looks like. It’s simple, you get the week’s subject, some tips and tricks, a lesson or two and a constant example flow. All you need to do is come up with your work, maximum 5 pictures per week, each picture will be reviewed, you’ll have the good and the bad also, a few tips.
What’s up with the Wall Of Fame? Oh, that my friend, will keep you up in the night. Each picture will get a grade, the best pictures gets on the Wall. Being on the wall makes you an international Simatographer, which means that you are on the right road!
All I can promise you is that you’ll have a lot of fun, you’ll make new friends, develop your own style and you’ll become a great Simatographer!
The School will still be open for you but you won't be part of the Wall Of Fame
I would highly recommend CAS world for people who have performance or game loading issues. It might not solve all issues, but it might help for others. CAS world is a very very very small world with nothing in it. You just build a lot for photo shoots like a movie/photography set and it loads quickly.
CAS world can be found HERE
What else can I say other than I hope there will be many others joining in as this will be sure to be very challenging, but also a great chance to learn some awesome tricks to making amazing story quality photos.
You can always submit the pictures, you'll get a small penalty but if the picture is perfect it gets on the wall of fame. Announce the school, catch up when you're back and keep up with your colleagues!
I was also thinking about the time away, I visit my parents in the south for about a week and will be making some road trips to visit colleges my son is interested in, 5 pictures is a lot!
Regardlesss, I am ging to try my best to try it out or at least lurk to learn
The school can help you on maximum 5 pictures per assignment. I suggest all of you to only show the best of your work, this way I can help out more simmers!
So, 5 is a limitation not an obligation. 2-3 pictures per assignment is more than enough!
The classic question, everybody can brag about a thing or two and doesn’t even have to be true and after a short search, Midnight is a storyteller, he likes to write stories about coma guys or desperate girls. School of Photography, I’m sorry, come again?
A picture means more than a thousand words, right? That’s what they all say, that’s what I learned in 7 years of simming. Actually, if you look closer into my stories, you’ll see progress in pictures more than in text. I mean, bigger stories came up because I had the skill or the tools to create better pictures.
What’s a story without a picture? Depending on the writer, if he knows how to drag you into dirt and toss you here and there it’s OK but when you have The Sims, why even bother writing ten pages just to describe a room or a character when you can just throw some junk around and drop a helpless Sim in the middle and just focus on the dialog or his mind.
I choose photography because pictures are all I have, true pieces of my mind, soul and madness. My universe, my living, my true fingerprint, that’s what a picture means to me.
Pictures a like a mirror of your personality. You can see favorite colors, feeling, simplicity or complexity, emotions or memories, bad or good. Also, if you see a couple of pictures from the same photographer you can see what he likes the most, the genre he enjoys, the motivation, his way of thinking.
So, for those who are questioning my skills, here are a couple of pictures from my latest work. See you in school on 4th of July!
ergh, I hate it when my parents say that!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sims 3 Studio back in the day
My Sims 3 showcase
EA ID: svlyn2
Every artist has his style, his little signature or typical madness. Let’s get a closer look to Midnight’s so far creations.
What’s clearly on the table?
Well there’s a lot of Red and Black, Norbert’s favorite colors, then we have black and white squares. There were times when pictures showed yellow and black, pink, green and other strong colors. What we could understand is that he has a strong character, he likes power and enjoys attention, trigger that too much and you’ll have a monster on your shoulders.
We see a lot of detail, dozens of objects, every corner neatly decorated, the lightning always perfectly altered. This could mean a lot of things like uhm, he could be a workaholic, a perfectionist or both!
Characters, the main subjects in all of his work, rich in clothing, makeup and small details. Let’s not forget about the huge community based character he enjoys to play with. Why working with Sims made by you when you could use other simmers avatars, it means more, it gives more. This could mean that he hate being alone, he like to be populated by people, he cares about them, giving them always the best there is.
The madness, the limitless creativity, the unique way of his vision makes The Sims go even wilder. From crude humor to romance, from sci-fi to demonic afterlifes, Midnight really knows how to make it epic. You never know what to expect, you just wait and... Try not drooling on your keyboard!
What could all this mean? He is definitely insane!