"I want all the young present-tense storytellers (the old ones have won prizes and are incorrigible) to allow themselves to stand back and show me a wider temporal perspective. I want them to feel able to say what happened, what usually happened, what sometimes happened, what had happened before something else happened, what might happen later, what actually did happen later, and so on: to use the full range of English tenses." There's lots in here. I think it might be good; it is definitely interesting, and worth returning to.

"...my feeling is that the barriers to verismilitude in video games aren't technological-- lighting effects, texture work, mocapping-- but /technical/. They're matters of technique, mastering the extant toolset in order to produce the novelistic details that make for the feeling of authentic transport. Game design doesn't need a better camera, or a holodeck. What it requires is old-fashioned artistry and imaginativeness, an obsessive and nerdish Flaubert who will come along and show us how games work."

"If I had but one backdrop to use for portraiture I would choose a simple roll of white seamless paper. With one roll of paper you can create many options. For the rest of the week I’m going to break it down for you. We are going to look at getting it to pop to pure white, making it various shades of grey, getting it to go black, gelling it to any color in the rainbow, and doing very easy and quick changes in post production to further the visual options available to us when using such a simple background." Fantastic tutorial.

"Trying to over-explain the cause of a disaster often detracts from its more tangible impact. ... Instead, Faliszek says, it is more effective to create resonant gameplay experiences that players will remember, particularly if the setting in question, such as a zombie invasion (or a tornado outbreak, for that matter) is already familiar." Why games don't always need tangible villains.

"When he has mastered tone, and with it exposure and development, he knows the most difficult part of his technique and practice, let him then proceed to picture-making." Emerson's Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, 1889.

Online magazine mainly about pro advertising photographers. Looks like it could be interesting.

Wonderful excerpt from Grecco's book. This is all on lighting portraits, with some fabulous examples and (even better) technique notes and diagrams. One to return to.

Guilty of half of these (at points). They usually didn't matter - but I'll be some more in mind for the future.

Really nice - simple implementation, clear explanation of results, and it calculates hyperfocal length for you. Hyperfocal length is really useful to know, folks.

For a weekend when I have time to kill

It was here I learned to use Unsharp Mask, and here I learned to stop using it (I'm using High-pass Sharpening, ever since Ben mentioned it). He writes really well, though, and gave the best explanation of USM I've ever read, so I must dive into his other

We bought a cheap espresso machine at the weekend. I'm not covinced I'm getting the coffee compact enough yet, hence this.