Macro photos of the flowers Jess got me for Valentine’s day last month. A good chance for practicing macro stacking as well.

Model: Nikon D80 /w Nikon 200mm f/4.0 AF-S FX

Shutter: 1/25 sec

F-Stop: f/4.2

ISO: 320

Focal Length: 200mm

Lighting: None

Stack: 5

Model: Nikon D80 /w Nikon 200mm f/4.0 AF-S FX

Shutter: 1/13 sec

F-Stop: f/4.5

ISO: 320

Focal Length: 200mm

Lighting: None

Stack: 6

Model: Nikon D80 /w Nikon 200mm f/4.0 AF-S FX

Shutter: 1/25 sec

F-Stop: f/4.2

ISO: 320

Focal Length: 200mm

Lighting: None

Stack: 3

The following sketches are from my field notebook. They were done while taking a native plants class with Klara Varga in Jackson Hole. In particular, these plants were all found growing along the roadway through the Elk Refuge.

North of the open dunes is North Juniper Hill, the tallest of the St. Anthony Sand dunes at 6,625 ft and a rise of roughly 1,000 feet above the surrounding fields. It’s sandy all the way up to the top. We took two days backpacking, this photo is a cropping of a 360 degree panorama of 21 stitched images.

North Juniper Hill

Model: Nikon D80 /w Nikon 35mm f/1.8 AF-S DX

Shutter: 1/320 sec

F-Stop: f/9

ISO: 250

Focal Length: 35mm

Lighting: None

Stitches: 21

The St. Anthony Sand Dunes west of St. Anthony, Idaho are perhaps one of the hidden gems out here. It took us almost a year to bother checking them out due to all the talk of ATV use. It is true, the dunes are infested with ATV droning on, but by late evening it seems like they die down and leave a little peace and quite. The dunes themselves are quite impressive, we thought we would be seeing some small dunes or patches of sand, instead we found massive open dunes rising 300 feet above the nearby potato fields. The one on the right measures out at about 320 feet and took crawling on our hands and knees to ascend to the peak.

St. Anthony Sand Dunes

Model: Nikon D80 /w Nikon 35mm f/1.8 AF-S DX

Shutter: 1/320 sec

F-Stop: f/9

ISO: 250

Focal Length: 35mm

Lighting: None

Stitches: 14

I was just going through my photos from my return trip to the Southwest which included Arches, Canyonlands, Escalante, Capitol Reef, and Bryce Canyon. For some odd reason, I was not in a big photography mood despite loading up all of my equipment. I left my camera behind on the backpacking portion and only stopped to quickly snap a few panoramas along the way. I’ve included those panoramas below. I find myself wishing that I had taken more time with them. Perhaps with a little more editing in post, I could bring them out.

Delicate Arch, Arches National Park

Model: Nikon D80 /w Nikon 35mm f/1.8 AF-S DX

Shutter: 1/320 sec

F-Stop: f/9

ISO: 400

Focal Length: 35mm

Lighting: None

Isle of the Sky, Canyonlands

Model: Nikon D80 /w Nikon 35mm f/1.8 AF-S DX

Shutter: 1/320 sec

F-Stop: f/9

ISO: 400

Focal Length: 35mm

Lighting: None

Jug Arch Road, Moab

Model: Nikon D80 /w Nikon 35mm f/1.8 AF-S DX

Shutter: 1/320 sec

F-Stop: f/9

ISO: 400

Focal Length: 35mm

Lighting: None

BLM Camping, Capitol Reef National Park

Model: Nikon D80 /w Nikon 35mm f/1.8 AF-S DX

Shutter: 1/160 sec

F-Stop: f/7.1

ISO: 400

Focal Length: 35mm

Lighting: None

Hogback, Escalante National Monument

Model: Nikon D80 /w Nikon 35mm f/1.8 AF-S DX

Shutter: 1/250 sec

F-Stop: f/8

ISO: 400

Focal Length: 35mm

Lighting: None

Perhaps one of the most scenic diversions from I-90 when driving across Montana. A turn off at Big Timber and head south arcing along W. Boulder Road to Livingston. In this instance, I caught a freak ranstorm that was coming down over the wilderness.

Settings

Model: Nikon D80 /w Nikon 35mm f/1.8 AF-S DX

Shutter: 1/160 sec

Exposure Program: Manual

F-Stop: f/9

ISO: 400

Focal Length: 35mm

Lighting: None

No of Stitched Photos 4

I have taken to experimenting with stitching panoramic images together. The one above is of Bear Lake in September of this year. We sped around the lake at sunset hoping to get to the eastern shore in time for the shot. I ran out of the truck down onto the stony beach and started shooting.

The resulting photo has has had little post work done in lightroom, but was stitched together using photoshop with a dash of content aware fill to fill in where the distortion curved down into the blue sky and took out a chunk of the right-most mountain.

Settings

Model: Nikon D80 /w Nikon 35mm f/1.8 AF-S DX

Shutter: 1/160 sec

Exposure Program: Manual

F-Stop: f/9

ISO: 400

Focal Length: 35mm

Lighting: None

No of Stitched Photos 4

It has been almost one year exactly since I posted my progress in attending the life studies group in Sioux Falls. I did not attend nearly as much as I had hoped last year. Indeed, with heavy overtime through the fall and only a scattering of visits last winter followed by an outright abstinence through the spring and into early summer – I am surprised that I have this many sketches to scrap up and post.

I’ve been attending a life-drawing studio in Sioux Falls over the last year, below are a handful of sketches that came from these studios.

I came across a used macro lens for sale recently. I’ve had an eye out for a macro for some time, but they are one of those specialty kinds of lenses that don’t seem to be for sale used in the same bulk as consumer kit lenses or ultra-zooms. Here’s the results of my first real test of the lens:

Settings

Model: Nikon D80 /w AF Micro-Nikon 200mm f/4.0 IF-ED

Shutter: 1.3 sec

Exposure Program: Manual

F-Stop: f/18

ISO: 400

Focal Length: 200mm

Lighting: None

And for those of you who would like to see it blown up to 100% we can really see the details that macro photography allows:

Eureka! I’ve solved yet another odd puzzle of digital photography: easily making your RAW file look like what you see on your Nikon’s LCD screen.

Perhaps you have just made the leap from shooting with JPEGs to shooting with RAW. You’ve already read up on the various deficiencies of JPEGS: compression, loss of color data, difficulty of editing and the many advantages of RAW: ability to easily manipulate midtones, white balance and apply color filters in post production. Happily, you start shooting in RAW but there is a problem. The unprocessed photos lack the pop and vividness of your old JPEGs.

When you first open your RAW file in ACR or Lightroom there is a brief flicker as  your various in-camera settings (saturation, warmth filters, vividness) are  stripped away leaving you with a rather dull looking low-contrast image. This is because your camera saves a small JPEG thumbnail to showcase on it’s LCD monitor. This thumbnail contains all the post-processing features that your camera does on JPEGs to make them pop for the novice user.

The color calibrated image is on the left while the Adobe Standard is on the right. Note the added sharpness and warmth that calibration brings to the left image.

I used to spend hours messing around with the sliders in Lightroom just trying to recreate the same vivid colors that I saw on my camera’s LCD monitor and all the while cursing Lightroom, Picasa, or Photoshop for gimping an otherwise perfect shot. Only last week did I discover the easy, automated method in Lightroom 3 to bring back the beauty camera’s in-house processing performs. This method is camera calibration. Simply follow these steps:

Open Lightroom 3 and select the photo you want to restore to your camera’s settings.

Click on the Develop tab on the upper-right hand corner.

Below the histogram at the very bottom of the right toolbar is the Camera Calibration toolset

The Camera Calibration allows for manual adjustment of the Red, Green, and Blue values of the image as well as the tinting of shadows.  You will find something odd about this tool, namely: adjusting sliders in the Camera Calibration tool will not adjust the Hue/Saturation Sliders or Tone Curve of the image but rather defines a new “starting point” for post processing the image.

While the sliders can be used to make adjustments, the easiest method is to use the presets under the profile drop-down which for my camera (a Nikon d80) gives the options of :

• List item
•  ACR 4.4 and ACR 3.6 (this is Photoshop’s defaults)
• Adobe Standard (this is the ugly, bland default for lightroom)
• Camera D2X Mode 1, Mode 2, and Mode 3 (more on these below)
• Landscape
• Neutral
• Portrait
• Standard
• Vivid

The Adobe Standard which comes pre-selected for you also happens to be the blandest of all the profile options. I suggest trying one of the Camera Modes, one of which will most certainly closely match with the image your camera displays on it’s LCD monitor. My favorite is Color Mode 3 for it’s warmth and vividness when shooting nature shots, but it can be too warm and too vivid for portraiture or indoor shots and so this gives a good opportunity for overriding my camera settings to select Portrait or Camera Mode 1 on the rare occasions that I am shooting an event. The Vivid profile is also fairly interesting, but I would suggest using it on a case-by-case basis since it seems to blow-out already bright photos.

There was an article on Reddit this week encouraging folks to list this early photography blunders. A common one was the “cover every mm” mistakes – where you try to get zoom lens that cover the entire range of focal length possibilities. I know this mistake fairly well, I made it myself.

I started SLR photography in 2008 when, anticipating a Europe trip, I decided to dump my point-and-shoot camera for a Nikon D80. As with any important purchase, I researched the topic to death and often came upon Ken Rockwell’s site.

Here’s the thing. Ken Rockwell is a master of SEO. He will show up on pretty much any photo-related Google search. I think he has some excellent starting advice if you are interested in getting the best vacation and family photos out of your camera. However, I think that his reviews are rather subjective and lack the more thorough and systematic reviews that you would find on PhotoZone (a site, I sadly discovered after my camera purchase) and I do not think his is advice is geared towards someone pursuing photography as a fine art or career.

The $600 Mistake

Being new to SLR photography, I fell into thinking I would need to cover the full range of focal lengths, and I didn’t care for carrying around the kit 18-55mm and 70-300mm lenses that were often sold with cameras. So I started looking at the 18-200mm lens, which today retails for $950. I assumed with such a hefty price-tag, this lens would be an upper tiered zoom lens and at the time folks (such as Rockwell) were raving about how it had replaced their need for all but exotic lenses. 

The truth is, the lens is soft, distorted and never took a shot better than my little point-and-shoot. As soon as I got home from my trip, I bought a prime normal lens and rarely ever put the 18-200mm on my camera again.

This learning experience was not all bad. I did get one thing out of the 18-200mm: I learned that I do not need to cover all the focal lengths. Indeed, I really only need three different prime lenses to cover my shooting needs.

You see, when I got back from Europe I looked through my photos and discovered an interesting pattern. I shot all my landscapes at 18-24mm, I shot everything indoors or medium-ranged at 50mm, and I shot all my telephoto shots at 200mm. Three distinct groups. I really did not need the ranges of 25-49mm and 51-199mm at all.

Today, I’m moving all of my lenses over to three lenses: Nikkor 35mm DX f/2.8 (or Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 when I get an FX body), Nikkor Micro 200mm f/4, and the Nikkor 12-24mm f/2.8. Three lenses at a much higher cost and covering a much smaller range of focal lengths, but worth it because they will take better shots than the 18-200mm ever did.

There’s Still Some Use for a Super Zoom

So my advice to new photographers? I would recommend that you buy prime lenses or if it must be zoom – keep the range of the zoom relatively small. As for the 18-200mm beast? It does serve a purpose. I would suggest renting it for a week. Take it on vacation or somewhere that you will likely make a lot of shots. When you get back graph out your most common focal lengths. A pattern will arise showing what you really need to cover.

Happy shooting.

I spent two goods nights last month working through a series of photographs that I intended for Christmas gifts. Perhaps one of the most challenging post-production works was this photograph I took of a hive in Gallatin National Forest just south of Livingston, MT.

This shot is actually a composite of two different shots. You see, I took nearly a dozen photographs of this hive free-hand during sunset. There was little light and in only a small handful of shots was the hive sharp. The composition for the piece was also a challenge. A number of shots have twigs in distracting locations drawing the eye into the background. Yet, if the hive is centered, it becomes to dominate. The hive had to sit at a roughly 1/3rd mark to really bring out the shot, but this only occurred perfectly in one shot which was not sharp. The solution? I combined two different shots. One, for the composition and background and a second for the subject matter. The image below shows the two originals side by side. The left shot I used for the composition, but I edited the hive from the right shot on top of the left shot.

I used Photoshop to get this effect. First, I opened both images in the raw editor and worked the settings until they had matching histographs. I overlayed the new image on top of the final background composition and masked out the parts of the image that I did not want to use until I had a layer that looks like the shot below:

When I zoom to 100% you can easily see the benefits of combining the two shots. Note how the final work on the left is crisp, while the old hive on the right is blurred:

It’s about time that winter got to these parts. This last week saw about 6” of snowfall over the weekend and a couple extra inches through the week.

My first sketch this week was an attempt at a train locomotive. This sketch did not turn out very well. I erased it, and started over with a more general sketch of a train yard that I found.

A second sketch was done while my girlfriend worked on the computer. Sitting across from her, I sketched her hand over the mouse. Both of these sketches I did with a 0.5mm drafting pencil with standard softness lead (around HB). This is softer than I am typically used to working with, but I find that the lines are more expressive when sketching quickly and I enjoy the effect when not working on a more precise drawing.

This week’s pick from my random sketching – an attempt at sketching Seattle’s famous Space Needle.

For Christmas this year I sketched Calvin & Hobbes themed gift tags using Calvin’s many snowmen as an inspiration.

I discovered the Daily Sketch Reddit this week and have added thirty minutes of sketching off their prompts to my daily routine. One of the nicer sketches this week was that of Krampus the mythical christmas demon of central Europe.

I started working through my library of photographs lately in order to sort out (through hundreds) the chaff from the wheat and begin trying my hands at post-production. I typically stick with a rather traditional methodology. I make adjustments to the raw file, but stick away from more elaborate composition effects.

Settings:

Model: Nikon D80

Shutter: 1/10 sec

Exposure Program: Automatic

F-Stop: f/5.7

ISO: 100

Focal Length: 170mm

Lighting: None

Continuing my summer photography, I present a series of photographs taken while roaming the trails at Jewel Cave National Monument. These are but a small fraction of the wildflowers that grow through the summer season in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Settings:

Model: Nikon D80

Shutter: 1/1000 sec

Exposure Program: Aperture Priority

F-Stop: f/2.5

ISO: 100 Focal Length: 35mm

Lighting: None

Settings:

Model: Nikon D80

Shutter: 1/60 sec

Exposure Program: Aperture Priority

F-Stop: f/8

ISO: 100

Focal Length: 35mm

Lighting: None

Settings:

Model: Nikon D80

Shutter: 1/320 sec

Exposure Program: Aperture Priority

F-Stop: f/1.8

ISO: 100

Focal Length: 35mm

Lighting: None

I have a long backlog of photographs from this past summer that I am beginning to work my way through and will be showcasing the best of over the next few weeks. I have a goal of attempting a showing of my photography in the Sioux Falls area sometime in the next nine months. I have had friends over the years doing showings at places like Black Sheep Coffee as well as at my alma matre, Augustana College and I hope to select a few prints to really work through in photoshop, professionally print, matte, frame, and display. The above photograph is a bouquet of wildflowers that I gathered along the Hell Canyon Trail in South Dakota for my girlfriend. This shot is taken indoors with on-camera flash at night. The flash readily illuminated the bright blue tones of the flowers while giving the room a nice black backdrop.

Settings:

Model: Nikon D80

Shutter: 1/60 sec

Exposure Program: Aperture Priority

F-Stop: f/8

ISO: 100

Focal Length: 35mm

Lighting: On-camera flash, auto-mode

I am a rather shy person when it comes to photographing people I don’t know. Food, provides a good substitute. Particularly since food can be positioned and set out to take advantage of both artificial and natural light. The above photograph was taken at noon using natural light filtering in through my dining room window. The arrangement takes advantage of the strong diagonals created by the stone table and the red rose mirrors the tones of the hearty bowl of Russian borscht that I had prepared some weeks prior.

Settings

Model: Nikon D80

Shutter: 1/500 sec

Exposure Program: Aperture Priority

F-Stop: f/3.2

ISO: 200

Focal Length: 35mm

Lighting: Natural Light

I again returned to Jewel Cave’s Wild Caving Route with my camera to take photographs of the route. I find that the NPS Library for the route is rather sparse requiring our brochures to consist of photographs of visitors during tours rather than set photographs designed to illustrate the challenges of the route itself.

To get the equipment into the route is no easy challenge. The pelican cases are bulky and heavy. The plastic tends to cut into my side, throw me off balance, and generally turn an easy trail into a nightmarish pain. In order to minimize the time needed to carry the equipment, I opted for a shortcut. I traveled backwards on the route to a chimney (the “diving board”) that dropped down near the rope assist. I lowered the equipment down on rope then after the shoot climbed the chimney and deposited the camera at the end of the route.

The shots were taken as a rapid-fire mode since the exposure time at 1/10 on my 35mm prime lens at f/1.8 meant that quite a few came in blurry. The cave was lit using spare caving lights rather than flashguns due to the flashguns overpowering the shadows in the room. I shot some 48 shots over the extend of two climbs with only a handful of the shots coming out.

Wow! Over a month since my last post. Time as a Park Ranger get’s away from me during the summer. I want to be underground in the cave, above ground on the trails – everywhere with a camera and back at the apartment working on my art.

This last week I worked on sketching from screen captures of various music videos. The one selected for the blog is a sketch from Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” Now, I must say that Gaga is not really my typical fair (I’d more of a Progressive/Post Rock fan with a long playlist of Yes, Coheed & Cambria, or Godspeed You Black Emperor!). Nevertheless, the directorial work in Gaga’s videos is astonishing and I’m blown away by the aesthetic detail and complex imagery conveyed through the likes of Gaga/Klein’s Alejandro, Gaga/Francis Lawrence’s Bad Romance, and Gaga’s Judas – I must commend the music videos for taking it quite a few steps beyond the normal fair and more over for their creepy design that’s remeniscint of Guillerno del Toro’s monster designs in *Pan’s Labyrinth *.

In some other semi-related news to my sketches, I’ve begun work on storyboarding a comic book adaptation of The Saga of the Volgsungs which will be my next work now that the first chapter in Ivan at the End of the World is coming to a close. I decided that I needed to work on my plotting and what better way to do then to steal a page from the bard and go rooting through old myths with established track records.

When I started the process of storyboarding Volgsungs I was imagining myself keeping the artwork rather similar to it’s Norse origins. However, as I began my music video sketches, I began to imagine the work taking a much darker “cyberpunk” feel – an adaptation that would set the work in a much more futuristic fascist state. The project is rather exciting to me, yet will be a long time in coming with all my other (see above!) summer side interests.

Not the best sketch ever, but I had to get something up for the week. Work on the comic continues to dominate my time, so I had only a few minutes in the week to work on any kind of sketching. This one is a quick draft of a canal bridge based off a photograph taken in southern Michigan.

I am back from a long break from web-posting due to settling back into the day-to-day routine of being a Park Ranger. The job takes a lot out of me, and I find little time in the evenings to work on projects. Yet, after four years of this, I think I have found how to take this job in stride. After a grueling day running around a cave, talking endlessly to visitors, and editing brochures – I get home and immediately shift gears to drawing, writing, and editing. Nevertheless, there is never enough time to get to everything, hence the drought of updates.

One task I was assigned last week was to photograph the cave’s natural entrance for a future exhibit. The sculptor for this exhibit needed example shots of the cave entrance so I was sent into the field with my camera and tripod to get shots of the entrance. My new tripod (a Manfrotto 055XPROB with a 229 Pro Head) works great for doing composition shots. The above is actually four separate shots taken with a telephoto lens (200mm) from the opposite canyon wall then edited together in photoshop. The tripod was precise enough to keep a level plane between shots making the editing procedure a piece of cake.

Here’s Cpt. Howell and Sam, the “villians” of my short-lived “Dreamscapes” webcomic.

I’ll be moving back to South Dakota over this week so I’m pre-posting comics for the next two weeks and hoping that they will all go live at the appropriate times. Thursdays will be filler-art days for the next two weeks due to the move as well.

This week’s filler is a character sheet where I was trying out different expressions for Ivan while trying to see how accurately I could redraw the shape of his head. I’m still not satisfied with the character of Ivan both as a character as well as his overall design. He might suffer a fate common to Mark Twain’s unloved characters and fall down a well.

I realized yesterday that the “Writing” link on the portfolio was broken. A quick fix for all those fans who want to continue reading my Kierkegaard thesis.

This week’s sketch journal is a little late due to the Easter holiday. I traveled south to Indiana to visit relatives over the weekend (but mostly to play fetch with their dogs, I do miss having a good lab to play fetch with). I promised myself to spend a great deal of time sketching on the trip, but alas promises soon fade. One item I did work on was gestures for comic book characters. I find that I have a very limited range of gestures in my current work, so I set out to draw as many different gestures as I could think up.

I’ve been very busy working on the script and sketches for my webcomic this week, so I had very little time to extra sketching on the side. So here’s a graphite scribble composing a couple different people I know into a single caricature.

My second week of sketching focused on perspective using a rustic-era shed that I photographed in Olympic National Park. The sketch is primarily contour lines, but I hope to ink and shade it later this week which will improve upon its present “rough” look.

Because of it’s 30% extra brightness, the full moon of March, 2011 was dubbed the “Super Moon.” This was some night photography I couldn’t pass up! This composite shot was taken from the shadow of Stonington Peninsula’s lighthouse looking eastward over Lake Michigan. The moon rose promptly at 8:15 as a bright orange ball and climbed over the lake. I took each of roughly thirty shots from my tripod, but a strong wind and cold ruined many of the takes.

The final result is a composition of two shots at different apertures. The first shot is adjusted to capture the clouds and details of the night sky, but this leaves the moon as bright as the sun. The second shot, taken from the exact same position but with a smaller aperture, captures the fine details of the moon’s craters. I edited the moon out of the first shot and replaced it with the detailed moon of the second shot to capture an appearance that accurately reflects the experience of seeing the Super Moon.

A second difficulty is the colors. Taken with long exposure times, the moon comes out bright orange. Yet, we associate the moon with whiteness (rather than bright red like a sunset). If we want the moon to look closer to how we associate it, we must apply a cooling filter to the image to adjust out the red tones and replace them with the blue tones we normally associate with the moon. The result is the picture to our right.

The process of working on the comic continues and today I present my draft sheet for the character of Don.

I tried on this sheet to experiment a little with his design. For one, out of all the character’s Don was the most complete out-of-the-box. He is based on a statue of Don Quixote that my drawing professor at Augustana had us draw. Indeed, many of these characters are based on weird statues he had us draw. Thus, when it came time to draw his character sheet, I decided to experiment. I colored in his mustache, removed the bandeliers and tried for a more realistic shape to his breastplate. In the end, I think I liked him just the way he was.

A second bit of experimentation comes in the inking. Previously, I inked with brushes, but I decided that I ought to be more discerning with them. For example, Tamar Curry’s Lumia’s Kingdom (whose artwork I admire) tutorials show him inking with dip pens. I love dip pens for my scenery look, but kept to brushes for characters and organics even though I find brushes much more difficult to use. On this sheet, I went with dip pens throughout, and the result? The lines look less confident on the larger images and far too uniform. Yet, in Ivan’s character sheet (coming up next!) I discovered that the brushes really do work – I just need to double or triple the size of my character drawings. Pens work well for the fine details of the backgrounds and smaller depictions of the characters (less than 1” tall heads), but once I get into having 2” - 3” tall heads, the brushes look much more graceful and overall 9” tall characters seem to be easier overall to draw.

A friend of mine (Alex Stommes) started keeping a sketch journal last summer. His plan was to post a sketch every day to the journal. The idea of this process was that it would encourage an active involvement in the art and a deadline to produce something each day. I found the idea intriguing and the results quite superb. By the end of the summer he improved immensely, and he continues to post new material regularly.

I wanted to start my own journal, but with my all my ongoing projects keeping a daily journal would require far more commitment than I could muster. Nonetheless, I still want to try, so I’m starting a weekly sketch journal. Every Friday, I will post something that I’m working on and hopefully this will encourage me to draw something each week (even if it’s just furiously scribbling at 11:30 PM on Friday night).

I returned to drawing in my final year of college following a half-decade hiatus. Akin to my photographic work, I tend to focus on space and atmosphere. The interconnections of parts forming into textures, brisk ink lines and sharp architectural shapes with muted or monochromatic colors fascinate me.

In recent years, I have taken to community figure drawing sessions to enhance my skills outside of still life. I aspire towards integrating illustration, and particular sequential art into my narrative storytelling.

After five years of hauling it through caving expeditions, European bicycling trips and countless backpacking expeditions, my Nikon d80 seems a nigh indestructible tool.

My photographic work, a hobby I picked up during a college trip abroad, focuses principally on nature and those spaces that I think capture the revelation of the the sublime in a particular space.

As such, I tend to work mostly with natural lighting using prime lenses to compose my observations.

My photographs have been featured in a number of National Park Service publications related to Jewel Cave National Monument and in advertisements promoting the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Below, I have selected a small collection of some of my favorite shots from the last few years.

If you actually read my blog entries you might begin to notice a very nice pattern to them. It begins “I promise to start updating!” Soon after making such a promise, I look at the comics to come and realize that they suck. I drag my feet on releasing them. I dabble with just starting over. I draw some character sketches. I “practice” my inking. So very many excuses, and fortunately, so very few readers to complain!

My excuse this time? I am working on the script and the background. When I began to write up the background, I found myself really getting into it. Suddenly characters had purpose, the world had a map, and the plot flowed out. However, I noticed some problems. First, much of what I wanted to do with the characters ran contradictory to what the comic already established. If I continued posting the present line of comics unedited, I would only push myself further from my plans.

Instead, you get more filler art and this week’s entry is the Gnome.

Who is the Gnome? Well he is a gnome of course! In appearance, he is a short, angry little earth spirit who was quite fed up with the big people of the world bumbling into his affairs. Already, the comic establishes that his manners are rather lacking and he is fond of arguing.

The Gnome was the first character whose design came together. I started with a big circle for the nose, then the rim of the hat above, then drew tuffs of hair sticking out from beneath, forming a circle around his face. The Gnome’s body extends out from the edges of the beard to make a barrel shape. His cloths are rather traditional. Whenever I imagine Gnomes or Dwarves in their casual wear it’s always in the form of big boots, baggy trousers, and a tunic of some sort. In the case of this dwarf his tunic is a kosovorotka, a traditional Russian shirt known for its skewed collar. Out of everyone, the Dwarf has been at the End of the World the longest, and so his clothing is ragged and patched from many years of use.

Continuing the series of character sheets from the past two days. . .

Today, let’s look at the 1200DPI scan of the character sheet. The higher-resolution scan resulted in a 75MB TIFF image that crawled even my design rig to a halt. I put the 1200DPI scan through the same process as the 300DPI scan, but this time I found a surprising change when it came time for live-tracing. The Illustrator traced the image correctly without my fiddling with the threshold! I still had the nice smoothing effect that live trace gave to my inks, but with the higher resolution it kept the finer details of the faces and smaller arcs. It also enclosed more of the spaces making the live paint process a much smoother operation that required only a minimum amount of readjusting the automated gap finding.

So my conclusion? Scan big!

I continue the parade of character sheets from yesterday.

Recall that I mentioned scanning the sheet at both 300DPI and 1200DPI, the result of the lower-resolution scan is what we will examine today. After scanning the sketch, I opened Photoshop and adjusted the levels (Image > Adjustments > Levels or Image > Adjustments > Curves) to give the inked lines a rich black look. Then I placed the image into illustrator and set the program to live trace. The benefit of live trace is two fold. Illustrator inks much better than I. The results smooth out many of the “shaky hand” errors, closes up gaps, and gives the image a much more unified tone. It also allows live paint, which turns coloring the work into a paint-by-numbers process of picking a swatch color and then clicking to fill the spaces inside the contour lines – much less time consuming than shading with ink washes.

Three problems immediately became apparent.

First, fine details such as the faces disappeared. This required a good deal of fine tuning of live trace’s “threshold” option. If I pushed the threshold too high the thicker lines became massive black smudges that lost much of their details, but if I dropped the threshold too low smaller lines disappeared. The result was a balance of the two extremes that failed to adequately capture the details of the original inking.

Second, live trace smoothed over much of the finer line arcs. This is most noticeable on the two center characters. The profile version loses the arc that defined her upper lip, creating what looks like a single curve from the tip of the nose to the chin rather than two smaller arcs. The face of the forward character loses definition in her shape. The original image showed the left-side of her face having much sharper angles.

Third, and this became evident only once I began live painting. The loss of finer details meant that many of the lines no longer connected to create enclosed coloring areas. The live paint process thus became much more tedious as I had to either fine tune the gap-fill, or go into the pen tool and move many of the lines closer together to enclose gaps so that I could easily color.

The solution? Quite easy, but I’ll get into that tomorrow. . .

Let me begin my series of filler sketches by going over some character sheets. In the past months, I’ve sketched the characters over and over again. Some character like the Dwarf, or Don came naturally to me. I sketched them down once, thought them satisfactory, and went on my way. Som and Ivan, however, never felt right. Occasionally, I get a frame where I think “yes, this is right. This is what Som should look like.” More often, I flounder about and the only connection from one frame to the next is that she’s the only female caste member. Thus, this week I present a series of character sketches created as I tried to nail down her design.

I spent a lot of time sketching Som because some part of me wants her character to look right and wants her to have the right appearance and a consistent look from one frame to the next. My lack of proper life-drawing skills shines through with her character. While Don and the Dwarf can get away with being abstract boxes and bulbous shapes, I wanted the characters of Som and Ivan to have more realistic proportions which entailed a less abstract approach to their characters.

A lot of Som’s clothing is based on Robert Henri’s paintings from the turn of the twentieth century. There is something very sensual about how the woman hold themselves in Henri’s work. They exude a kind of self confidence that makes them seem powerful and seductive. Certainly, this doesn’t fit the personality of Som. However, there will come future female caste members who might embody more of that spirit. Nonetheless, the dresses of that period are so gorgeous in their complexity. I saw Henri’s painting of Jessica Penn while living in Seattle last spring and I instantly wanted to find some way of incorporating that dress into the comic, and behold this Monday, I made it in!

The character sheet above is done on standard sketch paper of 8-1/2” by 11” with a 4H pencil then inked with a size #0 Winsor 7 sable brush using Indian ink. I scanned the image in at 300DPI and 1200DPI using a flatbed scanner. I give these details only for the more technically minded, but take note of the DPI, as I found significant changes to the end result based on my initial scanning resolution.  Progressing from right to left I drew Som facing forward and than profiling the page. The Jessica Penn dress makes its appearance, but I imagine it will rarely be seen since most of the comic takes place outside and so she will be wearing her traveling cape through most of the comic. This is quite convenient as the dress is more time consuming to draw. I am happy with the results of the profile images as well as the drawing on the far right. Nonetheless, I am unsatisfied with the front-view cape image as she appears to be scowling, an effect I didn’t want to create.

Settings

• Nikon D80 with a 35mm lens (52mm equivalent)
• Shutter Speed 1/6s
• Aperature f/22.0
• ISO 100
• Filter Circular Polarizer

A friend and I went out to St. Onge, SD last weekend to capture some photographs of the old abandoned buildings out that way. After a hundred shots, I got home, unloaded them into Adobe Bridge and found this massive spec of dust on every photo. I checked my filters, checked each lens. Took a dozen practice shots. I found no dust on any lens, filter, nor saw it in the view screen. Which left only one place: the sensor.

Now they say you shouldn’t try cleaning the sensor yourself. Supposedly, you can break it with just a casual touch. I don’t have the money to replace the camera, nor the money to send it in, so I chance it. I lock the shutter open, take a small bulb-brush and, holding it just above the sensor, begin to gently blow on the sensor. I close the shutter. I take another test shot. Camera works. Dust is gone.

A pity. There’s a giant hunk of dust in every one of those photos. And quite a few (like this one) turned out pretty good. Guess it’s time for photoshop.

Last night, I took my first stab at cave photography while on a caving trip with two friends into Jewel Cave. Out of 61 shots taken that night, only two felt “okay.”

Settings

• Nikon D80 with a 35mm lens (52mm equivalent)
• Shutter Speed 1.3s
• Aperature f/11.0
• ISO 100
• 2 Vivitar 283s with a firefly 2 flash

Jessie Ketchum models on the canyoning portion of Jewel Cave’s Wild Caving Route. A slave flash fired by Vicki Bierwirth from below lights the corridor beyond Jessie while a secondary flash, held at arm’s length from the camera, provides fill for Jessie. I would’ve liked a secondary assistant, and perhaps a third flash to light the fifteen foot pit that Jessie is straddling. A more active pose, perhaps with Jessie moving towards instead of away from the camera, would have enhanced the composition.

Settings

• Nikon D80 with a 35mm lens (52mm equivalent)
• Shutter Speed 1/60s
• Aperature f/8.0
• ISO 100
• Vivitar 283 with a firefly 2 flash and on-camera flash

Again, Jessie sits on the canyoning section of the route, but this time looking upwards. I instructed Vicki to aim the vivitar at the ceiling above Jessie while an on-camera flash provided fill light. Although I like the effect of the lit ceiling, the on-camera flash gives Jessie a flattened look and failed to properly light her, leaving her too dark against the lighter ceiling. I used photoshop to highlight Jessie out of the foreground and lighten her, but this only further reduced the depth of her shadows.

Photos of the moon seem to rarely turn out. They’re either out of focus, too bright, or too dim. Last night I climbed up Little Devil’s Tower in Custer State Park and after fidgeting with my telephoto for some time captured one good image of the moon.

Above is the result. I took this cropped shot of the moon on my Nikon d80 using the Nikkor 18-200mm zoom lens fully extended to 200mm, a 1/60s shutter speed, f/11 f-stop and set on ISO 100. The result is my first sharp image of the moon.