This little predator doesn’t even care!

Stealth Moth.

…yes Virginia, that is how I roll (at the office)!

This was taken close to my house in Hammond, Louisiana right after hurricane Katrina plowed through some trees. The sign obviously became redundant.

Philly being Philly. Awesome city.

…speaking of awesome cities, this is New York, one tiny slice of the many views you can see from the top of the Empire State Building. Getting up there is super touristy, but the view is worth it. I could stay up there for days.

Ellis Island. My grandparents came through here from Ireland… setting foot here personally meant a lot. To anyone reading this, if you have a day to kill while in the NYC area, take the tour of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It’s all breathtaking, sobering, educational, inspiring, and helps give you a whole new view of both the statue and the greatness of the people that made it here. They went through a lot, and the on site museum/processing area really makes the historical importance of the place hit home.

I don’t have the names of anyone in this photo, but they were a few of many academics in a bid to get an educational project started up here in Louisiana (the Science Education Center at LIGO). This photo was in the headquarters of the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia.

This pool was in the middle of nowhere, Louisiana.  A family friend was flipping a house that had an amazing pool in the back yard… we made an amazing deal, we had permission to skate it for a month if we’d do the initial cleaning (the pool was to be refurbished so wheel marks weren’t an issue). The pool had been left to its own devices for over a decade, and it was also located very close to a swampy lake that flooded a lot. This meant that a lot of the lake’s animals actually made it into the pool and created an entirely new habitat. The top of the brown line indicates where the artificial pond topped out… we extracted several hundred pounds of sludge, and relocated no less than two hundred catfish from the pool to the natural body of water nearby. In the photo, Small Time Skates owner (and my homie) Kerry Simpson (white T), and amazing skater, artist, and inker of skin Randy Muller.

…speaking of Kerry, this is Senator John Kerry campaigning in Baton Rouge way back in 2000.

Camofrog.

Free to be stuck in traffic, maybe.

Looking down the hotel hall at the Flamingo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Epic gaudiness.

This is Dr. Joseph Meyinsse from Southern University at a meeting in Virginia. My day job has given me the honor of working on some of the same projects that he has (in completely different aspects… he’s a respected administrator and representative of Southern, I’m a computer geek). I really love this photo, and if you ever meet Dr. Meyinsse, you’ll find him to be one of the nicest and smartest people ever. He’s done a lot for education in Louisiana, and he has such a positive attitude every time I see him I get hyped.

This healthy moth stayed on our door for four days. What’s up with that?

w00t!

This was smoke column after  a chemical explosion in Denham Springs, LA. Shot with a Lumix point n’ shoot:

To take professional quality photos, it helps to have professional quality gear, but you can still do a lot with a little these days.
I have a somewhat dated Canon Digital Rebel that I purchased from a good friend of mine at work (thanks for the hookup, Karthik!).

The CMOS sensor in the chip is good enough for the hobbyist or for anything web-related, but not something you’d want to use for wedding photography unless you just really know how to squeeze the most out of the camera. Regardless, after getting the camera I started purchasing lots of lens adapters (or conversion lenses), which are basically lenses that screw into your existing lenses, changing them from normal kit-lenses to panoramic, super fish eye, or in this case, macro lenses.

The macro used here is an off brand conversion lens that does both fisheye (spherical, exaggerated images that pinch on the left and right, sometimes inside of a black halo called a vignette) and macro, which in this case refers to taking large photos of little things. It’s basically a two-piece lens that you can easily purchase for about $30. It’s and easy way to lose a few hours:

For an idea of what these photos represent in terms of size, the object above is a nozzle that windshield fluid squirts out of.

Lead air rifle pellets in a tin, all exposed to too much weather.

Purple people eaters. Check out the water droplets inside the flower facing our direction.

Furry flying seedlings.

A very tiny worm stretching its way out of view.

Even weeds look cool up close.

Some designers are split when it comes to web-based graphics and print media, but I personally enjoy working within the limitations and possibilities with both mediums. When it comes to print, I really like doing the bigger stuff… there are few things that are more gratifying than seeing an image you’ve stared at on your monitor forever become something big, shiny, and real.
The key is planning everything out, and plans can be as different as the design itself.

Currently I produce one to three table top displays for national, regional, and statewide conferences, which are very similar to trade shows (with booths, networking, etc).
When I work in larger dimensions, I try to fill as much space as possible without losing the message inside a barrage of imagery… as with any design project, the artwork should push the message and make it easier for the viewer to digest.

Here are a few sample pieces, detail shots, and descriptions:

This is a four-panel work-in-progress shot (right, center, left, and center banner) that went to print about a year ago (as of this writing). Most of the art on the site panels was created  in Illustrator, but everything was composed in PhotoShop (at scale, 300dpi). The general height (not including the center banner) is 22 inches, printed on foam board with a gloss finish, and velcro’d onto a four-panel fold up backboard (the center piece takes up two panels). Once velcro has been attached to the back of each panel beforehand, set up and breakdown of this display literally takes less than three minutes:

One thing to keep in mind is that during trade shows or events like the ones these displays are used for, people are constantly moving. The goal is to create something striking, and not be dependent on handing out free trinkets with your name on them (pens, mousepads, etc). Remember that like billboards, too much text will make people look the other way… with displays, people will read bullets, but rarely paragraphs. Displays should be outlines, and usually the table top should have supplementary material (pamphlets, even photocopied documents) that expand on the points made visually.

The “Battered, Unbroken, Ascending” display below is my favorite for two reasons, the first being that it was the most personally-charged, and secondly because I was allowed full control over the visual assets. This display was shown at an education related conference soon after hurricanes Katrina and Rita… for those of us here in the state, the storms are scorched into our minds forever… but for a lot of people outside of the gulf south, what happened really is still sort of an abstract tragedy.

This was printed on one sheet of polystyrene (22″ h, 90″ w) and composed in PhotoShop at 300 dpi. The PSD file for this was done at scale, and weighed in at over 8 gigs in size. Every time I nudged something, it took my old machine between five and 10 minutes to render the new image. File size strain is one of the biggest problem for large format printing with raster files, but it’s all about the end goal:

Here’s a detail on the left and right sides of the display… of note, the different pieces of paper on the left were regular household items that I ripped apart and scanned in at roughly 1,200 dpi, then artificially weathered and distressed in PhotoShop. The paper pieces were scanned in at such a high resolution because they needed to appear large on the display… had I scanned them in at 300 dpi, they would have been printed at their real-life actual size (tiny scraps). The paper products used (from top to bottom) were a paper bag, a sheet from a steno note book, a chunk of cardboard, and envelope, some corrugated cardboard, and a paper towel:

The same display in use:

…the logo on the table skirt is a design I developed nearly seven years ago, in this case the table-skirt vendor simply needed a vector file (.eps).

One last display, simply because the ones presented so far are basically the same, they both attach to a paneled backboard (though with the long one-piece polystyrene print, the four panels become one curved surface).
On this project (San Francisco, 2006), I opted out of using the altogether. I had a basic idea in my head… I wanted to create something that the panels would hang from instead of being stuck on to.
I went to Lowe’s, and initially built a framework with PVC pipes (right there in the isle), but the weak plastic caused instability, and I knew there would be no way to use them to support any weight whatsoever. Luckily, Lowe’s had steel pipes, elbows, T-shapes, and bases. So again, right in the isle, I constructed a booth-like frame that looked just like the one I’d made with PVC, but this time it was incredibly stable. I bought spares of the smaller pieces, and even came up with alternative ways of putting the frame together (in case we were put in a corner or in the middle of the room):

…I was really excited about the way this one came out. The graphics (aside from some photos) were all vector, and the little airplane flying up in the center panel was a 3D model created in Animation: Master, exported as a .3Ds file, imported into Swift 3D and then rendered as a vector image. One of the funniest things about this display is that people were approaching me, asking me where I’d bought the blue “feet” for the display. All they really are were some little one-dollar garbage cans that happened to be shaded pretty similarly to the table skirt!

Here’s one last shot with a detail of the steel on top:

Each of the panels had two holes poked in at the top, and were literally strung up around the pipe with steel wire I’d bought at a craft store. Although this display was very successful at drawing in people, I probably won’t do another one like this for an out-of-state conference because dealing with over 100 pounds of pipes is a real drag (when you consider that you’re also packing other work materials, personal luggage, and the fact that you have to get it all back home, too).

One very important note:
Although I do the layouts, designs, and concepts for projects like this, I don’t do the actual printing. I have a friend at the main Kinko’s in Baton Rouge (on Airline Highway) named Gia… we’ve been working together for over six years, and she’s awesome. She treats print like a craft, and she’s a great designer and artist as well. Glad to have her as a friend and frequent working partner. Whenever you any large print jobs on this site, my friend Gia’s the one who made it go from digital to tangible. She understands the art of printing, even when it’s production stuff.

This is a really old piece that wasn’t so much designed, as it was a series of experiments that I hobbled together.
I mention “mixed digital media” in the post title because it should be noted (to the non designer/techie) that there are nearly as many digital approaches to art creation as there are in the analog world. Inside our computers we can paint, sculpt, construct, and modify anything just like we can in real life.
I’ve come across some people (proficient in some of the traditional hands-on genres of certain artistic disciplines) that were  under the impression that doing stuff on the computer is just “easy,” as if the computer just makes stuff up by itself.
Truth is, if you can’t draw in real life, you’re not going to be sketching masterpieces on your machine any time soon.
Granted, while in the digital realm we have the luxury of hitting “undo” to correct past actions, when you consider that you have the power to adjust each and every pixel inside an image, it’s easy to spend hours simply making adjustments that only you would know about. In many cases, creating art from the ground up in a 100% digital environment may take as long or longer than making the same piece by hand… just for different reasons.
So, digital mixed media:

As one can plainly see, the image is divided into three irregular sections (from top to bottom):
1. Arial (bold) written out to say something that I thought sounded cool at the time, a 3D Studio Max model (color, render and text in 3DS-Max).
2. Another 3DS model, rendered at three angles inside of Swift 3d (it converts several 3D formats into vector images/animations). The background for this section is a collection of made-in-photoshop textures, colors,  and manipulations layered on top of each other.
3. Though I don’t still have it on me, this bottom panel was a photograph I’d taken of a stack of quarters. I attacked the photo with nearly every tool in PhotoShop until it both no longer looked like change, and fit with the other panels.

I’ll be sharing pics and talking a lot about photography in the future, but as far as my own photos are concerned, I decided not to create a photo gallery. Rather, I decided to put them on the main page of the site… the images are randomly generated from a library of about 150 photos (and growing by the day).

I will feature photos here in the blog, but I’ll dually add them to the library on the splash page. As I mention in another section of the site, if you see any photos you’d like to use, feel free. Often times I can even provide a larger resolution version if you prefer… the only thing I really ask for is that you let me see what you’ve done with it, whether it’s been used for a flier or a website, I just like seeing stuff being used in ways I probably never will. You don’t have to tell me, but it would be awesome if you did. Again, I still have most of the photos on this site in higher (or plain super high) resolution. Just ask!

I only charge for commissioned pieces, not pics I plan on sharing anyway.

The assignment: Create a cover page for a program pamphlet.
The limitations: The cover should be done in black and white, as the pamphlet may be photocopied multiple times as well as sent over the fax machine.
What I don’t want to do: Make a boring cover, use clip art, or miss a chance to make something fun.

Solution:
1. Ask a student worker at the office to pose his arm and hand in a few different positions and start taking photos.
2. Grab a white sheet of copier paper and another sheet of paper with a lot of contrast. Take a photo.
3. Bring both pics into PhotoShop. Knock out a hole in the paper rippage, desaturate both photos them so they become greyscale, then increase the contrast a lot.
4. Clean up the images, trim away the edges, and cut the student’s worker’s shoulder and upper arm into two pieces (so part of him is inside the hole, and part of him pokes out).
5. Draw a thing that fits the layout in Illustrator, then import it into Photoshop and chip away parts of it (where the thumb is located).
6. Throw some words behind it, drop it in Word, and you’ve avoided all of MS-W’s limitations.

The three main segments of the process for this image: photo for (some) anatomical accuracy, vector line art, and PhotoShop for the color, shading, and magic:

Same Photo, just edited (color/contrast corrections, and a smile replacing a lack thereof):

…this was never used for anything, just a proof of concept. Except for the corners, the mouth in the smiling photo was created with the airbrush and clone stamp tools in Photoshop.