At this point in my project I believe I am still well on track. However, this does not mean that I do not have a lot of work to do during the thanksgiving break. As the school week is a less than ideal time to shoot pictures, I am planning on shooting most of my pictures during the break. I have learned, through my mistakes, that it is important to have both a plain background as well as good lighting. A busy background not only looks amateur, but also takes focus away from the subject. As for good lighting, too much shields detail, and too little light adds blur; both making the pictures appear amateur. Obviously, as natural light is by far the best, I will have plenty of time to shoot during break as I won't have to plan around a different schedule. The picture below depicts the radical for "lid,"
and it is a perfect example of having a background that is too busy. I do, however, like the font used, so all efforts were not futile. As for problems so far I do have a few.
1. Although I was planning on shooting all of the pictures on my own, important radicals such as mountain and river, are not available to shoot. So I will either have to take one from the internet or ask a flickr person if i can use theirs. Do you have any ideas?
2. Between the pinyin and the character meaning I need to put a small character with arrows portraying stroke order, this will be hard I may have to create it in photoshop UGH. That's a pain in the ass so I am going to check with some people to see if there is an alternative.
As for other senior project things I have to do, I need to e-mail my outside consultant. Since my project is chinese oriented, and I am ultimately trying to improve my chinese skills, I am attempting to write my letter to her in chinese. That took a good amount of time today as I want it to be as detailed and grammatically correct as possible.