SIGGRAPH

Hi everyone!
It's been a little while, I know.  The long and the short of it is, I graduated Magna Cum Laude from SCAD Atlanta with a BFA in Animation and a minor in Technical Direction!  It feels great, but now I need to start getting out there and find a job!  Honestly, getting the degree was the easy part, getting the job is going to be hard.
One step I am taking toward my goal of working in the film or television industry is to attend SIGGRAPH this year, as I did last year.  Again, I was chosen to be a Student Volunteer, and I am very excited to have this chance.  I will chronicle my time in Vancouver at the conference here, as well as on my twitter account.
Other than that, I am starting a new film project.  Right now it is still in story development and preproduction, but the plan is to enter into production by the end of the summer.  The current working title is "H2O No!" (formerly Snack Attack).

I will be posting more on that project as things progress, and luckily we are getting support from SCAD to use their facilities.  There should be a blog set up soon for it.  I look forward to seeing everyone at SIGGRAPH, and please feel free to drop me a message.

Breaking the silence

Wow... another quarter is already over, and I was so busy I didn't make a single post on here, and yet I didn't feel as busy.  That's probably because I put more effort into making sure I slept most nights, and I did.  I feel much better this quarter physically, as I haven't stayed up overnight AND the following day.  I must say using time management tools and techniques have been really helpful for me, and I have to say Trello is awesome!  It helped me with all my collaborative projects, and more.

I will be updating my senior film blog and will post some more work here.  This is it though, my last quarter- nay, my last WEEK at SCAD!  I loved every minute of it, and I can't wait to get into the "real world" again and put my new talents to use.  I am already planning another film (or two) and will keep updates on the process here.  Hopefully I can use something like Kickstarter to make it happen, we'll see.

... 1 To Go

Well the Winter 2014 quarter has ended, and it appears I am getting some decent grades (2 A's and a B), but what is really exciting me is what is to come ahead.
First of all, my graduation.  I will be graduating next quarter, and as such I have to prepare.  I have ordered a cap, gown, stole, tassel, class ring (custom made by my awesome professor, Matthew Maloney) invitations, and a partridge in a pear tree.  Well... no peach tree, this is Georgia.  So if anyone is interested, the graduation will be May 31st, and will be down town Atlanta (you can find details on the SCAD website).
Other than that, I am working on my senior film, Last Light.  It is coming along nicely, but I have a long way to go.  I helped a bunch of friends on different projects last quarter, including an awesome short by Michelle Ionescue called Leaping Place, and a group project short called Nor:  A Cloud Story.  Now it's my turn.  I watched these students go from scratch to a finished film in 10 weeks, while missing almost 2 weeks of class due to unexpected snow storms.  I also watched my friend Nora take her senior film from a a project with no models, no rigs, and no animation, and complete it in the same amount of time WHILE directing Nor.  That is inspiration right there.  If these amazing folks can do it, so can I.  And I probably don't have as far to go with it either.  So I will be spending a lot of time on my film and perfecting everything I can about it.
When I'm not working on my film or my other class, I will be working on a very important project... I like to call it GETTING A JOB.  Or at least an internship or apprenticeship or something.  I have had a lot of awesome opportunities come up, and this coming quarter has a lot of them hitting me all at once.  The career fair in Savannah is soon, followed by several internship opportunities, and then Out2Launch (sort of a reverse career fair where the students set up booths and the employers go around looking at them).  I have a LOT of stuff to do for this including fixing up my portfolio, and I have to do it all as soon as possible.
So I'll be working a lot this break, although I still plan to have a little fun.  I have to meet with some of my friends to go over changes to my film, and get some feedback on my portfolio, and get my iMac fixed, and my printer, and my scanner...  There truly is no rest for the wicked.

Well I better get back to it.  Right now I'm fixing up some of my older works that I really liked, starting with my Diner.  I'm liking this 1950's feel I got going, maybe I'll do more with that theme.
Oh, and then I have to get a hair cut, and shave, and get a picture... and go to the printers... and get my images approved... and submit for my monitor.......

Maya Dynamics

Well this last quarter, I managed to finish strong, with an A in all my classes!  As for my overall grade, let's just say I'm doing very well, but for me it's more about learning the material, gaining new skills, and networking.  I love helping other people with their work, so during this break, I am collaborating with other students to work on different films.  I will have to take a week long break later on for Christmas, but I hope by then to have made a lot of progress of these films.  I don't want to stop there either when the projects are done and the break is over... I want to continue to collaborate on my own projects (or other people's projects) throughout the year and even after I graduate in the spring.  Wow, spring is just around the corner and with it comes my graduation!  I can't wait, but I am eager to learn more.  I guess it's time to get that internship/apprenticeship and find a job!

Besides working on projects this break, I am also learning a few new techniques with different software like Maya and Houdini.  Because my film is going to involve particles, I am trying to learn some particle engines and dynamics in both Houdini and Maya.  While I have done some basics particles and dynamics in Houdini before, I want to see if I can do it in Maya, to keep everything in one package and allow for better integration of the elements of my scene.  If in the end it proves to be too difficult, I will move back to Houdini and find a way of composting the effects together.

So for now, I have a Maya dynamics (not nDynamics) with gravity and rigid bodies that allow me to crash a brick wall with a wrecking ball.  This is only a test, so it is not fine-tuned with any amount of mass controls or whatnot.  Many of the bricks slide unrealistically across the plane because of this, and the weight isn't dialed in so they move a lot, but this is only a test.  I do find it funny that one of the bricks hits the screen; it was completely unintentional.  I'll post more of these as I work on them, and in the meantime I am also working on some new shaders and techniques for a different film.  I am trying to make an ice shader and add subsurface scattering to a character, as well as a rocky texture and a birch tree.

Check it out here.

Book Covers

My next final this quarter is from my photography fundamentals II class, which focused on the digital side of photography, that being Lightroom and Photoshop CC.  Thankfully at our school, we get he entire CC suit for free as students.  Unfortunately, as soon as we graduate, it expires.  So while I have it, I'll use it.

Many of you may already know I am very familiar with Photoshop already.  I used to work at National Geographic doing image editing, everything from retouching to restoration and archiving.  I even managed to do some heavy compositing work for outside customers.  I also worked freelance for several years doing everything from cataloging to wedding albums and more.  So when I started taking a class on the fundamentals of Photoshop, I was skeptical I'd actually learn anything.  Well, I'm sure my fellow students got more out of it than I did, but I did actually learn some techniques and workflows that are very useful.

The hardest thing about this class for me was having to actually take my own photographs for everything.  Usually I'm handed a photograph, which already looks awesome because a professional took it, and I just have to make it look awesomer.  However, now I had to work with my own pictures, and discovered how hard it is to make something look good when it wasn't taken properly in the first place.  Several of these photographs turned out to be a little less than perfect, but that is why I am at school, to get better.  And once again I've learned a thing or two about taking pictures especially with the intent to take them into Photoshop to manipulate them later.

So for my final project, I had to pick 4 of the top New York Times Best Sellers and create new book covers for them.  I came up with 4 ideas, and 2 of them had to be redone (it's hard to go from a widescreen format way of thinking to a vertical book cover format).  The books I chose were Sycamore Row, Ender's Game (I do not support the ideologies or politics of the author), Identical, and The Racketeer.  These are not official, and only student work and I have no affiliation with the authors or the publishing houses or the New York Times.  I researched a little about each book to get an idea of what the story was about (I did not have the time to read the books themselves), and based my pictures off of that.

I will be posting more of my Photoshop work from earlier in this quarter soon.  So for now, Enjoy!

Snow globes

Just in time for Christmas.... oh wait, isn't there another Holiday or 2 between now and then?  Ah who cares about those holidays, we all know the only holiday that counts is the one where people spend the most money.  At least that's what stores seem to think.  Honestly I love Halloween and Thanksgiving, but for my latest project in my Renderman class (VSFX 319), we had to model snow globes.  While one girl in class actually did do a Halloween themed snow globe, I couldn't help but equate snow globe with Christmas.  So I decided to model Santa's Workshop.

The assignment was specifically to learn IBL (Image Based Lighting), which is a way of taking a very specific image (HDRI) of an environment and putting it in a scene, allowing the computer to calculate the lighting of the scene based on the values in the image.  It's kind of like taking an environment and putting it into your scene.  Sounds magical, but it is really not going to look right.  Imagine taking motion capture data and just leaving the raw data on the character and displaying that in a movie... it doesn't look good, trust me.  Animators need to adjust and tweak and fix the raw data into something that looks good and suitable for the character.  Just like that, I have to take this IBL and tweak it, add lights, adjust values, etc. to make the lighting look realistic like the object belongs in the scene.

We also had to use a specific Global Illumination technique, and actually got to play with 2 methods of it.  One uses Point Clouds to calculate illumination and occlusion, while the other uses ray tracing.  The point cloud based method is faster, stores the data to speed up processing later on, and developed by Pixar, but prone to inaccuracies.  The raytracing method is longer, but more accurate.  I used a hybrid technique where I raytraced, and then stored the data to speed up the processing.  It took about an hour and a bit to render these, but it was surprising to see some students with render times ranging from 20 minutes to over 4 hours!

I haven't quite dialed in the lighting all the way yet, and I am still working on the camera focal length (so expect more updates on this one later), but for now, I am relatively pleased with the results of my work, but I'm not going to leave it there.  For now, though, enjoy these three images.  Ho ho ho.

SCAD Generate 2013

Hey everyone!

So I just finished a competition for art students here at SCAD Atlanta, called Generate.  It is a 24 hour challenge where each department gets sponsored by a different company and we have 24 hours to break into teams and create an original work based on their criteria.  They often give prizes, free food, and have a lot of fun.  We had trivia (which we were surprisingly bad at), which helped lighten the mood, and waaaay too many sugary foods.

All that aside, our team was part of the Visual Effects challenge.  But why is an animation major taking the VFX challenge you ask?  Well this year the VFX department added a Technical Direction challenge which was right up my alley.  Our goal was to spend 24 hours making an environment for a character.  We didn't need to include the character, but we did have to describe the character.  We had to include an element of animation and part of our project had to use Houdini in some aspect.  Our character was a woman named Fern who lived in 1945 in Paris, France.  She has been getting lettings from her husband, a soldier in the war, and the last letter promised to meet up with her at the cafe they first met at.  Fern waits for him at Cafe Maison, but he never shows.

Sad, I know, you can blame me, I came up with the sappy details.  And I did a ton of work on this with 6 other students, all contributing their skills to the project.  Nicole and I were the two Houdini artists, so we made a billowy smoke effect for a blown out candle on the table, but she really did all the work there.  I was mainly in charge of making sure the work got divvied out and shaded most of the glass work and such.  I was also the only one who had significant experience in Nuke, so I was given the challenge of compositing the project with literally minutes till the deadline.  I had a TON of fun, and we managed to finish a rather complex scene in JUST under the wire.

While I would love to say more, for now I will leave you with a single still image of one of our two shots.  I know it isn't perfect yet, but with a little more work (and a LOT more sleep), it will look amazing!  Enjoy!

Readressing early work

I am interested in trying to re-work some of my earlier projects.  I was thinking it would be a great idea to remodel, texture, light, and render something I did toward the beginning of my time SCAD, and compare the two images to see how far I've come.  I haven't had the chance to do this yet, and I still have a class or two that I need to take to really make this look great, but I think it will make a great study.

The two images I am thinking about are from my introduction to 3D, "Forms, Space, and Lighting".  Right now all I can do is look at what I've done and think about what I want to do with it.  I think it may be a great segue into developing some more portfolio pieces on my own.

So here are my earlier works, an environment based on the character Harry Dresden, from the series of books The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher.  For those unfamiliar with Dresden, he is an openly practicing wizard in modern day Chicago, who works as a private investigator.  It is adult, smart, well thought out, and entertaining.  Check out the books, and enjoy the images of his sub-basement lab.

Fall 2013, SCAD

Well I took a bit of an hiatus during the summer, but I'm back, and ready to go!  The first day of classes started this week, and it is going to be an intense quarter.

First, I have actually been doing some work over the summer, collaborating with others and planning things out.  I did manage to finish one book, and start another (look at the Dresden Files), finished a slew of games, volunteered at SIGGRAPH 2013 as a Student Volunteer, visited Downtown Disney in Anaheim, and helped my brother move into a new house many states away.  I am currently working on putting together a collaborative short animation to do for fun, but the majority of the work will start next summer, since I now have a huge animation project to continue.

This quarter at SCAD, I am taking a Models and Shaders programming class, which teaches Pixar's Renderman, and i am super excited!  I also have a Photography class; always a good way to expand your horizons and get a different view of lighting and composition.  Finally, I am taking Senior I, which is actually the second out of 4 classes dedicated to working on the senior film at SCAD.  The first class was Concept development, followed by 2 quarters of production (Senior I and II), and finally finishing with Post-Production.  I am also helping a few others with their projects, trying to get more lighting and texturing/shading behind my belt.

Since we are starting actual production now, and I already have some people interested in helping with my project, I am using a free online tool called Trello to keep organized.  It works on any web browser, plus it has apps for my iPad and iPhone!  If you are ever working on a project, especially a collaborative one, check it out!  It even connects to Google Docs and Dropbox.  I am also creating a new blog to chronicle the development and production of the short.  I have added a new tab to my blog, but you can also check it out at LastLightFilm.blogspot.com.

So for now I will leave you with a picture of a lantern I've been working on for another senior project by Michelle Ionescu.  I'll post a link when I get one from her.  I mainly focused on the glass, getting a bumpy frosted glass feel.  Enjoy!

Shaders and Textures Final (TECH 311), part 1

Another sleepless night, but that is expected during Finals week at SCAD.

Today, I have for you all my final from my Shaders and Textures class.  In short, this is a class that teaches how to make objects looks really cool with textures and a realistic reaction to light.  So you'd think the final project in this class would involve making some photo-real objects, but it isn't.  In fact, it is quite the opposite.

Our final was to use a non-traditional shading technique to make something that looks 2D in a 3D world.  We aren't talking toon-shaders, but something more advanced.  Our in class assignment was to make it look like a drawing, and still have a reaction to light.  As you can see here, the sketchy pencil marks really help make this scene look drawn, but it is in fact 3D.

So for my project, I decided to do a painting.  Specifically, I wanted to make an homage to one of my favorite artists, Vincent van Gogh, and his most famous painting, Starry Night.  In order to make this project, I got the assistance of my beautiful wife to help me literally paint with Acrylics (because I don't have nor know how to use oil paints) onto Bristol board and scanned into a computer.  I then manipulated the scans, adjusting colors and tiling the images and such.  From there, I input them into Maya, did a lot of adjustments, and placed them inside various procedural textures which add a lot to the render to make it look like more than just a bunch of flat strokes.  The scene I chose to do is, in fact, a direct homage to Starry Night, which is not as well-put-together as I would like, but I will play with that later.

I am also working on animating this scene with a camera pan through the painting.  I tried this already, but I forgot to bake in some of the textures, which messed up the sequence.  Once I fix this as well, I should have a pretty cool short flying out of a painting.

So for now, enjoy my rendition of a 3D Starry Night.

And now... SLEEP!

Soul Front

Hello again everyone!

I just wanted to tell you all about a project I've been helping out with for the ITGM (Game Design) guys.  Some of them approached the production club, looking for help with animation.  That's one of the nice things about SCAD is that you always meet students from other disciplines, related or unrelated to yours, and can collaborate to make a better project than what you started with.  For example, photography students will often meet with fashion majors to take pictures of the models wearing the fashions, to not only fulfill requirements they both need, but spread publicity for each other as well.  Well the same is true, maybe even more so, between Animation majors, Visual Effects majors, and Game Design majors.  While the game design guys aren't all in this building as often as animation and Visual Effects are, they do have their own little gaming lab where they test out games, and they have several classes in this building, so they are often around.

So the long and short of it is that a group of game design majors came looking for animators because they knew their animations weren't that great, and didn't have that time to finish the animation with them more important programming and testing they had to do.  That's where I stepped in.  With help from 2 other animators (Raymond and Andrew), we were able to put together new animations for all their characters.  With 4 characters, 7 animations each, plus tweaking and additional animations, we had a lot to do.  We haven't quite finished yet, but the animations are almost done.  Right now all the blocked in motion is there, and some tweaks are needed, but so far we have what we need for them to continue.

The game is called Soul Front, and it is a real-time strategy game where you control 3 characters (out of a choice of 4 archetypes) that you match up against another player (or a computer) with the same set up options as you have.  No out-leveling opponents here.  This is actually designed to be a mobile platform game, to work on the iPad and I believe Android.  Specifically, I coordinated the animations, working with Raymond and Andrew to decide what each character should do.  I then animated throw animations for each character, stunned/dazed animations for all of them, the attack and victory for one of them, and will probably be doing tweaks on many of the animations already finished in the future.  I will give more details about my role in this when the game is closer to a release.

While it is still in the works and might not be available for download yet, you can see their blog at SoulFrontGame.com.  Please check it out and make sure to check their Facebook and Twitter pages too for more updates.  I will also update here when the game is available for download.

Finals already?

Hi all,

My lack of recent posts isn't a sign that I'm giving up, but it is a sign that finals are (already) here.  I have some good stuff to show, plus I'm working on taking more pictures this weekend and some more digital art.  This quarter has seemed to go by so fast, but I guess that's normal.

So for now, I am waiting to go into a museum for a class trip to look at renaissance art (yay!) and I'll post more this weekend.

Stay tuned!

Photo Preview

Today I have for you a preview of my final project in my photography class.

The final project in this class is to take a photographer (or other artist), and either try to mimic their style and work, or improve on it.  Since I would rather learn from others, and not show them up, I chose to mimic a photographer.  After much searching, my wife and I found Michael Eastman.  Michael Eastman began taking pictures in 1972, and his work is really impressive!  He has done a series of different subjects, from Americana to horses to abstract to Cuba.  His images have a certain aesthetic appeal I really like, and I find that his study of reflective, refractive, transmitting of light in a city at night is intriguing, bordering on abstract, but with a certain sense of place.  You look at things you see everyday in a new way, or at things people never notice at all that's right in front of them.

Usually his images are of textures and play of light.  I have to wonder how he gets into all these places, but I really enjoy his work.  I spent the better part of a weekend (with some planning beforehand) taking pictures around Atlanta.  Here is a preview of some of these images.

I will also be using a similar aesthetic to follow is Vanishing America series, contrasting the big city with rural country.

In the end, I have to pick a grand total of 10, so that's around 5 for each study.  But what I really care about in this is keeping consistant with te aesthetic and building some good photography samples for my demo reel.

Enjoy!

Beginnings of a film

Today, I want to briefly talk about what the rest of my time as SCAD is going to be dedicated toward.  While I will still take pictures in Photography, Lighting, and so forth, I have to make a senior film, a project that showcases my work.  As thus, I have started working on a story that allows me to focus on lighting and compositing.  I have been working on some updates this this as well, and hope to have some of them in a new animatic before too long.  I want to add a particle effect to the main character, as well as reworking the story a little for a better flow.
Until I have the time to get these changes in here, this is my current animatic.  As soon as I get the changes in place, I will post a new one, and will probably be posting a new blog dedicated to the film as well later on.  So for now, enjoy this short animatic.  If you have any questions or suggestion, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Diner

So you remember yesterday how I showed you all a sneak peak of my project for today... well I finished everything and it looks great!  I plan to do more with this though, but I am satisfied with where I got it for now.
In this scene, I modeled the background, the bottles, the cups, the plates, the ketchup  the salt and pepper shakers... pretty much everything except the chairs (which you can barely see), the bottle caps (which I adjusted for my scene), and the flatware (which I also adjusted).  All the textures (with the exception of the photograph in the back) were made by me.  With the exception of the labels, they are all procedural.
This project was specifically designed to show reflection and refraction, which is why almost everything in the scene has some of this on it.
In the future, I plan to adjust the plate thickness, adjust the brightness of the glasses, add some wear and tear, model a booth, fix the background, and give it all new lighting.  I also plan to take this into Nuke, and do some post production composite work on it.
Again these are all NURBS (which the exception of the table and salt shakers, and the things I didn't model), which are really underrated.  NURBS can be used for so many different things, and or really great tools to use, I am surprised more people don't use these.  I would like to learn for Subdivision modeling on my own, but for now, NURBS are doing a fantastic job.  I am also really pleased with the way the table came out and the Coke bottle.  The ketchup was also fun to do and very effective.
So enjoy my newest render.  I will post more when I make edits to it in the future.

Now I'm hungry...

Material samples

I'm late!  But I did spend most of the night working on things.  No worries, i will have 2, TWO updates today (a-ha-haa).

So here is a new sample of textures I made.  Some of these are actually works in progress (as some of my previous posts actually were).  These show fresnel effect, different metals, and a car shader (all custom made).

Oppa Film Noir Style

Heyyy.... Jeff Bailey....

*Ahem*  Sorry about that, Psy got in my head just now.
So you're back for another round of Pixel of the day?  What will you see this time?  More ants?  Another soda bottle?  More cats?  (Doesn't the internet have enough of them?  CAN the internet have enough of them?)
No... not this time.  Today I will present to you a simple picture of I made last quarter mimicking the Film Noir style of the 1940's and 50's.  In other words, black and white, hard light, lots of dark shadows, with dark and serious themes.  This used models all of which I modeled myself.  In fact, I modeled these for a previous scene for the character of Harry Dresden, which was a fun project, and I may update with better lighting for a future submission.
So for now, enjoy my Film Noir inspired image.

Vita Magus

Yet again, another dose of your daily pixel.

Except this time, I don't have a picture to show you.  But I DO have a website to link you to.  It's not just any website, it's another blog.  Why another blog?  Because it is the official blog for a short animation:

Vita Magus.

Vita Magus (pronounce it however you want) is a short animation made in 2013 by 13 students at SCAD Atlanta, as a collaborative project.  This was an official class, but a voluntary one we were all interested in.  I can say I learned a lot about myself, and things I still need to work on.  It was a very challenging quarter for me, but I managed to get through with good grades and a completed film so everything turned out great!

With only 13 people on the project, we all had to wear many hats.  We had 2 directors, an art director, a technical director, a production manager, a lighting director, and several leads.  All of us worked in multiple roles, some of us in multiple leadership positions.  I would like to thank Karen and Andy who were our directors and did a great job, Leo who got us through a lot of sticky situations, Jeff who kept us all organized and on time, our professor, Becky, for helping us realize our potential and allowing us the chance to make this film on our own, and to everyone in the crew!  Without everyone's individual work, we never would have finished on time.  Great job everyone!

Vita Magus is a story about an aging street magician who looses sight of what's important in life.  It takes a little girl to remind her of the little things that matter.  We all loved working on this film, I just wish I could have dedicated more time to it, but 3 studio classes tend to eat up what little time I have.

So please make sure you visit the official blog and learn a little more about the film.  Right now the film is not available for public viewing, but I will be sure to announce when it is and link to it.

One more thing, I now have an official Facebook page for Pixel of the Day, which you can get to by visiting www.facebook.com/pixeldaily.

Till next time, Keep Animated!

Houdini -- It's magical!

So I'm a few minutes late, big deal.  I'm still awake, so it's still Wednesday to me. :P

Today I will briefly talk about Houdini, a program made by a company called SideFX.  "But David, what is Houdini" you ask?  To put it simply, it is a 3D package (program) that uses nodes and a nearly non-destructive workflow.  This means you can create a complicated scene with a variety of complex objects, and still go back to the very first shape you made and change it, without messing up anything else, and all the changes you make go down the line and affect the final outcome.  It is nearly non-destructive, because you can go back and mess with your work at any point in the history of making that object, except certain things you do WILL break your setup.  Regardless, it is a wonderful program, and it is mainly used in visual effects for things like particle effects and dynamics and the like.  It can be really complicated, and I haven't gone into all of that yet, although I have touched on particles and dynamics.
So this scene here is one I created last quarter.  It is a still life of an image I shot myself which uses a single light source.  I wanted to copy the image as closely as I could, but I feel it is still a work in progress.  Hopefully I will have an update to show everyone before too long.  So for now, enjoy my still life.

Macro Lens

OK, so I got another photograph for you today!

Recently, I was assigned an assignment in my photography class focusing on Aperture.  For those who don't know what that is, it controls the Depth of Field, or how much is in or out of focus.  So I took a TON of pictures, because I really like to take shots with a relatively tight Depth of Field.  I'm pretty sure for my 10 image assignment I took about 450 pictures.  Because I was feeling adventurous, I decided to get out my Macro lens.  I got this for Christmas a little while ago, and I've been meaning to try it out.  So finally I got the chance!  In short, a Macro lens lets you take pictures of tiny objects really close up, and still be able to focus on them.  It also takes the Depth of Field and drops it down to an extremely finite amount.
So here is one of the pictures I took for class.  The images is of a teeny tiny ant hill between the bricks in my small patio.  It was so small, I almost didn't see it.  I took many more pictures, but this one had the strongest Depth of Field.  My next project is on composition, so wish my luck.
Enjoy!