Hi all!

Phew, I have been MAD busy with P2L and the Predatorstuff.com website (AvP-R was recently released in theaters so everyone has Predators and Aliens on the brain), but I hope everyone had a great Christmas and I wish you and your families all the very best in the new year. I would especially like to thank the P2L crew for all of their very hard work in the past year and I look forward to working with you guys in 2008! We’ve got a lot in the planning so it should be quite the summer.

Anyhow, I wanted to share with you guys a fun little experiment I did this morning for a photo review… I wanted to try something with small detailed backdrops on one of my kits and I think it came out pretty sweet so I thought I’d share this with you photography buffs to try it out. Here’s how it turned out:

You can check out the rest of the pics from this experiment in the Predatorstuff Gallery.

It was a fairly simple trick, but I love how dramatic it looks… first thing you need to do is find your backdrop images. I went on DeviantArt and did a search for “1920×1200″ and it showed me a list of TONS of high resolution wallpapers and artwork. I picked out a few that I liked and printed them with my inkjet on some Cannon Matte Photo Paper (It’s important to use a matte finish, not glossy or high gloss or you’ll get shines and reflections from your lights) with my borderless printer. I let them sit for about 30 minutes to ensure they dried completely and I started to set up by photography table, light tent and lights. I then placed a light at the back of the tent and pointed it forward towards the camera. I used a clamp to position the printed backdrop upright directly in front of the light fixture and you immediately get this cool backdrop effect where the darks stay black and the lighter areas of the print out are glowing brightly with clean diffused light. Then I just place my kit in front of the backlit backdrop and it’s photo time!

The only limitation is that by printing on a 8.5″ x 11″ you only have a tiny backdrop, so I couldn’t get complete kit shots, but I managed to pull off some very nice close-ups. The end result was the Predalien standing in front of a fire or explosion in a very natural looking photo without any post editing in Photoshop. Why mess with photo editors if you can do it straight with the camera?

Anyhow, that was my little experiment today and I thought it came out pretty cool… I’ll need to order some large prints from DeviantArt so I can have larger backdrops and use them to photograph larger pieces. Give it a try to spice up your photos, it’s a fun way to spruce up your product and macro shots.

Dan

Happy 4th Birthday Pixel2Life

Pixel2life.com was officially launched at 8PM January 2nd, 2004 and here we are a few hours away (posted early for those in diff time zones) from celebrating 4 fantastic years.

Happy 4th Birthday Pixel2life, to all our Staff, our members, tutorial contributors, supporters and advertisers not forgetting our spammers whom have all made this site an official success.

Special thanks to all the past Staff who spent many many hours coding/moderating and helping this site grow to what it is today on behalf of Pixel2Life thankyou all.

Thankyou Dan (Faken) for giving us the greatest tutorial site on the planet and thankyou for the 4years. <img src=”style_emoticons//flowers.gif” style=”vertical-align:middle” emoid=”:flowers:” border=”0″ alt=”flowers.gif” />

On behalf of everyone here at P2L, I would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas (political correctness be damned), Happy Holidays and all the very best to you and your families in 2008! I would also like to thank all of our members, visitors, partners and affiliates for another great year and I look VERY forward to an exciting new year of releases and innovations that I am sure you guys will love!

And finally, I would like to thank our dedicated team of staff for all their hard work and dedication to this website. Without you guys this site would have closed up shop 2 years ago.

Thanks so much everyone, hugs for everyone!

Dan

PS. Thanks for the nice xmas graphic D

About a year ago, Nick started working on a project of his called WiiMedia. Instead of starting small, he decided to go big right away. He tried to include all possible features, content and sections for Wii users. This also led to adding a second website to the mix called WiiNode.

To make things simple, WiiMedia contains all non-user related content while WiiNode is centered on the user. WiiMedia indexes all the Wii and Virtual Console games, savegames, reviews, news, downloads, mods and yes, even tutorials. WiiNode provides a complete profile for all members, setup tournaments up to 64 players, interact with your Wii console using the Connect system and a community forums. While it may seems like a bunch of content without any relation, everything is indeed related.

For more information and screenshots, please check out the original post here on Pixel2life.com

Well being a community site as well as a tutorial resource, its sometimes hard to please everyone. Thats obvious from the different site upgrades that have happened within the past year or two. One of the most important things is that you guys get the most out of it and all the tools available to you give you the most benefit.

Anything that you would like to see happen? Long term or even short term, just post them here, or feel free to contact us.

What about features and tools? Anything new that you would like added, changed, removed?

Anything you find hard to use? Hard to find? etc. Is it user friendly? Easy to access?

I am just getting some feedback on various things from the members of the forum.