Tuesday 16 October 2012

Digital image making in the field

I recieved a significant equipment upgrade recently, and now have a laptop that will actually run photoshop. This has allowed me to do something I've wanted to try for a while; take my graphics tablet away from my desk and actually sketch some scenes from like. I was out on the first walk today, taking supplementary photographs, and I took the laptop along as well and made a couple of images, more as an experiment than anything else (the photographic basis of the majority of the images in Vectis is fairly locked down). The results of my first little foray are below.





The first one is a bit of a Hockney pastiche. A big problem I had at first was positioning myself and working out the hand-eye co-ordination. Drawing with a tablet is already a bit strange because the image doesn't appear where you're drawing, but on a screen. When this screen is on a laptop (rather than on an ergonomically placed desktop monitor), and you are trying to look at a subject, it all gets a little complicated. For the first one, I was basically lying down. I think I nailed it a bit more with the second, where I tried instead sitting, with my laptop bag locked around my waist as a sort of makeshift table. There's always going to be a problem based on the small size of the laptop screen, of course, but that's pretty much unavoidable.

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