Kevin
By Kevin Sprague
This image was commissioned for a book cover by publisher Houghton-Mifflin. The image is comprised of about 20 layers, built up to tell the story of the novel, a coming-of-age tale about a young baseball player. For the last nine years, my work has reflected variations on how photographs become illustrations. The image is a good example of the way that moving to all-digital capture has informed my work over the last few years.
Like many photoshop artists, my work is informed by layers building up an effect. The move to digital cameras, first a Nikon D1 and now a succesision of nikon bodies digital slrs, created a new way in how I view the act of photographing and the art of illustrating. As digital removes much of the economic imperative from the shooting process, that is, there is little or no cost penalty as there is with shooting film, I have concentrated on creating extensive image-asset libraries that I can easily draw on to help me create my photoshop work.
This shift from thinking about each image as a whole unit, to thinking instead about images as sets or assets means that I have a lot more flexibility when I go to create an illustration. For example, last fall during leaf-burning season where I live, I had gotten a pretty good brush fire going. As the sky darkened as evening wore on, I got my camera and started to shoot the flames, coals and smoke. Over the course of less than half an hour I had taken around 4-500 frames of these elements in every way I could think of at the time. For this kind of asset based library I usually shoot the fine jpeg setting, so even this number of images only comprised a little over a gig. I catalog my take using ivew media pro, batch rename the files to reflect their content and shooting date, and keyword and cpation the files in the IPTC header.
I have a number of asset libraries that I have created over the last few years, and I add to them all the time. I have libraries of skies, water, flowers, leaves, smoke, fire, grasses, textures, rust, stone, and more. Many digital photographers get hung up on the storage and cataloging of their assets. I have found that the most cost-effective technique for managing these libraries is not CD or DVD backups, but simply a grwoing collection of external firewire drives. With 250 GB drives becoming quite reasonable, I use sequential drives to backup and archive my libraries off site.
The only element of the cover image that I did not pull from my libraries were the photos of the ball players and the field. I shot these one evening at our local triple AAA league field, shooting from the stands from behind home plate. I shot around 350 frames in the course of about 2 hours. After selecting the main image showing the relationship of the pitcher and the batter that I needed for the composition, I began to pull in elements that I felt would best tell the story. The title of the novel is "High Heat". This led me to my library of fire and flames, selecting a lick of flame which I set in a layer, set to "lighten" and manipulated in the rubber stamp tool to fit the ball. The art director had asked for an image that conveyed the "gritty" texture of the story. I brought in the rust element along the edges to give the image a sense of decay. The smoke effect along the spine is positioned so that the spine text would have a prominent contrasting background. The sky above the ball field on the back cover is not the original. It was a perfect clear night when I was at the field. I pulled the more ominous clouds from my sky and clouds collection. My major tool in working to combine these elements is the layer mask and a very large, soft brush to create the seamless, layered and transparent effect
Probably the most interesting aspect of how this "asset" approach has changed the work I do is to make it significantly more fluid and intuitive. Rather than having to pore over slide albums looking for a particular element, I can now find what I need for a given effect and have many choices at my fingertips. I can also duplicate a file quickly so that it shows up in multiple catalogs if I feel that it needs to be under both "sky" and "fire" for instance.
On the whole, I feel that in the ongoing (and perhaps nearly over) debate about film versus digital, there is little discussion of the fact that moving to digital capture changes many more aspects of the process of photography than can be addressed by only focusing on image quality. Speed, expense, feedback; these are all elements that make digital capture a distinct form of photography. In my particular case, the advantages of having all of my tens of thousands of digital image files just a mouse click away is changing the type of work I can do, improving the images I create, and speeding up the process, always an important consideration when faced with looming deadlines.
My equipment list:
Nikon D1, D1x and D100 bodies
Mac G4 (the studio has 6 of different builds)
Over a terabyte of firewire storage, all Maxtor drives
23” cinema displays
proofing: Epson 9500
1gb IBM comact flash microdrives