Mark Forrester » Digital Art

Sea Point Sunset

Mark — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 08:15:57 +0000

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.

Soundtracks and Comebacks

Mark — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:26:07 +0000

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.

Judge his amazing illustration and animation skills for yourself, all the while listening to pure aural bliss.

The actual end result

Mark — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 09:39:20 +0000

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.

Over the weekend I was contacted by Michael Yon’s attorney advising me that displaying the photo on my blog, as well as creating an “unauthorized reproduction” of the photo was infringing on the image’s copyright. By placing my own copyright on my design in the form of a website address the design was improper and illegal. Furthermore, I must remove both the photo and my design from my site.

I understand why the copyright has been placed on the photo and how it guards the photo from uses which are inflammatory, political or commercial in nature. I also understand I am guilty of not leaving a reference to Michael Yon’s photo from within the image, only the blog post I display it from. I am not questioning if my design infringes on the copyright. I am just questioning the complexity of the copyright on the photo.

Michael says: “Interest in the war is waning back home, I’m told, which may explain the thinning ranks of reporters over here. Ironically, with fewer reporters here every day, it’s even more critical to keep the few sources of news on the ground working. Please continue to spread the word about my work and please support this site by clicking here.”

In today’s world with social media being such a powerful marketing tool would it not make more sense to change the wording on the design (as I recommended to Mr Yon’s attorney) and use the design to further the viral campaign for Michael Yon’s work.

This to me would be a far better solution with much better rewards for Mr Yon’s courageous work.

The end result

Mark — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 12:16:31 +0000

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.

~~Unfortunately I have lost the url of where I found this photo so I cannot reference the photographer.~~ Thanks for the url John.

The photo was taken by Michael Yon, an independent pro-war photographer embedded in Iraq.

The end result

This image has been deleted from the site. The reasoning can be found here.

Download:

~~Soldier and baby girl wallpaper (1280 X 1024 pixels)~~
~~Soldier and baby girl wallpaper (1280 X 800 pixels)~~
~~Soldier and baby girl wallpaper (1024 X 768 pixels)~~

For the geeks out there that want to know how I made this wallpaper: I imported the photo into Adobe Illustrator CS3 and used the trace tool to convert the image into vector paths. I then used the pen tool to perfect the paths and draw the soldier’s legs. I filled the paths with a selection of colours. I then copied my vector image into Adobe Photoshop, applied an outer glow to the image, and dropped a recycled paper image layer on top of the vector image layer. I set the recycled paper layer’s color mode to “Overlay” and voila.