If you’re here now, you probably already know who I am. If not, hi! My name is Chris. I also go by ExVee some places. I really like taking photos of toys. That’s the basic starting point for this whole thing, so let’s talk about what I want to do here.
First up, as I like taking toy photos, I want someplace to put them and share them, and I want to do that in an environment where I have control over how they’re presented, organized, and the quality they’re published at. Especially that last one. I’ve put more and more work in to getting the best quality out of my photos, and it hurts my brain if I have to post them somewhere that will automatically degrade that quality with recompression at the time of upload. I also want to have freedom to shoot more than one kind of thing, which largely rules out contributing to some other existing entity. Not to mention that in that case, I kind of lose any say or control over the pictures once they’re submitted, and that’s something else that nags at the back of my mind sometimes.
Because I’ve spent so much time and energy on this subject, I’ve been able to learn and gain experience relevant to this particular area of photography. It’s taken me literally my entire adult life to get to where I am right now. But while I had to spend twenty years figuring out from my own experimenting and picking up random snippets from other photographers when I hit some issue I couldn’t figure out how to solve in order to advance, I think the same kind of process can be related much faster with a resource devoted to the topic. That’s my other goal. I want to share what I’ve learned and help anyone who’s interested be able to go from zero to fantastic without spending decades on the task. I’m going to be talking specifically in context of photographing toys, but the principles will apply just as well to most anything you might find yourself putting in a micro studio environment, and the basic stuff I’m gonna talk about applies to practically everything, because it’s fundamentals of how cameras work. I’m coming at this from a specialist viewpoint, but it’s also a jumping off point to even more.
The final thing I want here is a place to just talk about toys when I have something to share or monologue about. I’ve written about toys for a long time too, and I also podcast a bit where I also mainly talk about toys. It’s just something that’s part of my brain, and I often find myself wanting a better platform than Twitter to go on about this or that topic. And so we’ll be seeing some of that happen here and there. At the least, it might be an interesting read from time to time.
I do have some other vague ideas I might like to pursue down the line, but for just starting out, I don’t want to quickly over-extend myself. Plus I have a bad habit of coming up with great detailed plans and never following through on them, so in the interests of more things actually happening eventually, it’s definitely better for me to not let myself get too specific, and definitely not talk about them in advance.
So, welcome to the site! Thank you for visiting, and I hope you’ll be back often to see what latest thing I have to offer.