Mark Forrester - Independent digital designer and online entrepreneur

A beautiful mid-winter sunset sky, shot from our balcony on Saturday 16th July. Part of a longer series I’m shooting in and around Sea Point, Cape Town that I hope will see the light of day at some point…

Very much experimental, and lots still to learn, but if you are interested in the setup:

• Canon 7D with Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L.
• Shot at f/2.8 Aperture Priority with a 6 second interval between shots. 817 photos – until the shutter speed > longer than the time interval, and it shutdown…
• GBDeflicker used in After Effects to help with perceptible brightness fluctuations.
• Photo-JPEG Compression.
• iMovie for sound and titles.

I’m a big fan on the jazz musos from Cape Town, South Africa, that are taking the world by storm with their exciting live, African flavoured, electronica acts – Goldfish.

Courtesy of a link from SA Rocks this afternoon I discovered their latest music video for “Soundtracks and Comebacks”, animated by Mike Scott of Bru and Boegie.

I used to visit Bru and Boegie almost daily and then, all of a sudden, somehow managed to completely forget about the site. After seeing what Mike has been up to animating music videos, winning t-shirt design contests and even developing a new kids show, I am hugely impressed. Great to see him getting recognized and growing from strength to strength. I’ve most certainly bookmarked the site now.

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My last post entitled “The end result” seems to have caused some what of a stir. The wallpaper I designed for the post is based on a powerful, iconic photo by Michael Yon (see the photo on the home page of his site), an independent war photographer embedded in Iraq. The photo is entitled “Strength and Compassion” and the imagery is that of a fatally wounded baby girl being held by a US soldier after a car bomb explosion in the city of Mosul, 225 miles north west of Baghdad.

For the design, I cut out the composition from it’s original background and carefully drew the soldier’s legs into the image. The end result was a vector sketch filled with a palette of camouflage colours. The wallpaper was available for download.

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For this wallpaper design I found an iconic photo of a US soldier holding the body of a fatally wounded baby. I find this photo extremely powerful, it sums up the monstrosity of war in a single fraction of a second.

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