Welcome to PhotoView Fridays.  Is starting on a Thursday when the title eludes it would be a Friday, mean I'm off to a bad start?  It'll be Friday in a couple hours anyway so who cares right?

What is this?

Hopefully this will continue to be a semi-regular forum posting.  The goal/intent of which I'll explain a bit more below.

Why is this?

This is something wanted to do for a while.  Finally biting the bullet.  How's that for a simple answer?

My goal/intention here is to simply be another resource for our community, to help everyone learn more about rendering, and hopefully be more productive. Teach, inspire, share, whatever...  We'll see what happens.

So with that, I bring you the first intallment of "PhotoView Friday".  As with this first one, they'll be quite casual, largely un-rehearsed, probably full of "uhm's" and "ahhs", potentially funny from time to time (who knows), but certainly helpful.  At least that's the main goal.

One thing I don't want to do very often, is type much.  So in the future, expect little to no introduction.  Just "tune in" and see what's in store.  I also figured one good way to decide on what sort of content people want covered is to let you voice your opinion on that as we go along.  Feel free to throw back suggestions on what you'd like to see covered. 

I'd love to do this every week, or maybe every other week.  But in reality, I won't have the "spare time" for that.  So for now, lets see if I can keep this going once a month.  Since tomorrow is the 2nd Friday of March, let's say the 2nd Friday of every month from here on out.  So after this one, look for the next installment of PhotoView Friday around April 8th.

This week I figured I'd start with a sort of random topic.  Anything to get the ball rolling.  So I'll talk a bit about lighting, physical vs environment, and quality settings.  Enjoy.  Hope you learn something. 

Some thoughts for future posts: Using backgrounds the "right" way, rendering liquids, using new features like caustics and displacement mapping, animations, other???  Any other suggestions on how to improve this along the way also very welcomed!

Editors last note: I'm using a new laptop, new version of camtasia, and new mic so I'll try to dial in the audio a bit better over time and speak more slowly...gimme a break, it's late!  I'm rushing