Nothing new to report on, tired of the old journal. Holidays are nearing, the end of school for the semester is upon us and with it comes the absolute shit storm of assignments. Oh well, makes life interesting.

LAY OFF THE VIGNETTING. This is an issue, it appears, when I go back through my gallery and find too many fucking vignettes. I like them, sure. I like them sparsely, done well, subtle ways to draw your eye away from the corners of the image and into the main focus. But too many people don't know how to use vignettes properly and you get that strange, uncomfortable black oval around an image that just makes it look awkward in ways pictures aren't meant to.

Tell me. Biggest pet peeve that people do to images?

I GET THIS FEELING, when I'm leaving comments for people, that I'm kind of overdoing it when it comes to criticism. Constructive only, mind you, but who am I, a lowly newcomer to the deviantART family, to say who and what could happen to make an image better?

For starters, and just for other people's reference, I am the deviant formerly known as ~mustuseffigy. After a lot of ignoring and forgetting and otherwise just not using the resources laid out for me, it became run down and bunged up with old material that was no longer a part of who I'd become. Along with a name change that was required for my own sanity (go placidly, my dear chums) and a new bid for epic skills, here we are.

I'm currently a second year student in the Applied Photography program at the Wascana Campus of SIAST (Saskatchewan Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology) and it's crept up on me in the past month or so how much I've improved over the past year thanks to it.

The majority of first year is spent in the darkroom, processing film, making prints (both black and white and colour) and just generally being tools when loading film into the Wing Lynch. We've earned an incredible set of skills that makes our digital work ridiculously better than it would be had we not had to learn about colour correction or contrast in a print.

I may sound like a pretentious little bugger when I leave a comment and I'm sorry if I come off that way because it's not at all my intent - we're trained under the rule of constructive criticism and the only way to really improve is to be told exactly what areas need improvement.

If anyone has any constructive criticism for me, I welcome it. Hell, I would be eternally grateful to anyone willing to point out how I could improve my images.

So yes, I probably sound like a douche about a lot of things, but I do know what I'm talking about most of the time, I promise.

And hey. Just because it's suggested doesn't mean you have to follow through.

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Check out these artists!

From the deviant formerly known as mustuseffigy, here we are starting fresh. Free from old, bad pictures, free from friends and subscriptions and God knows what else. Clean and empty and time to start anew.

So here we are. Welcome aboard.