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David Mac

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This site is written unashamedly in the first person. This reflects the fact that this is a very personal site.

I do not consider myself an artist ....... a creative artisan, certainly. I work as a movie cameraman and thus my role is to give flesh and atmosphere to a director's vision. It is an interpretive role that requires sensitivity to needs other than my own and the ability to use my own creativity to add the extra dimension of visual interest and mood. Some of my work here reflects this. It is for the most part rather literal and photographic and much of it relies on playing with 'light'.

An Englishman living in Brussels, Belgium, married to a Viennese, and having two multi-lingual sons, I view myself as a European. Between us our family speaks five languages. By reason of my work, I've had the good fortune to travel a huge portion of the world, both developed and remote. The son of a photographer, I was, by the age of eight, already taking photographs and starting to use a darkroom. A liberal school background that combined heavy emphasis on the arts, alongside the disciplines of advanced mathematics and engineering drawing, led to rather diverse abilities which, together with my background, came together naturally in professional photography. I am now in my forty-eighth year of working with film.

I am completely self taught in computer graphics. Late in life, already well into my fifties, I discovered a photo editing software bundled with a scanner, started to play with it and was soon exploring other graphics applications. This has now become a passion equalled only by my lifetime passion for Asian and Oriental inspired cooking. My prime interest is the creation of photorealistic Escher like illusions combining photography and computer generated imagery. A number of these are published in illusion books and can be found on the Web.

A SHORT MOVIE OF DAVID AT WORK

In French only, this short movie was made by the Belgian TV channel RTBF (la Une) and shows me at work on the same “Other Side of the Mirror” illusion that is used in the Method section of the site to show how I construct an illusion.

COMMENTS AND FEEDBACK

This is a new site and feedback of any kind is welcome. Please feel free to send your comments.

ONLY FOR THOSE FAMILIAR WITH COMPUTER GRAPHICS - SOME INFORMATION ON HOW I WORK

For the most part I do all my own photography but library images are also used from time to time, and a very few images are constructed entirely from library images. There is often a large amount of hand ‘painting’ and construction involved as well.

For the photographic elements I use a Canon PowerShot Pro 1, an 8 Megapixel SLR camera with a 2/3” CCD and integral 7x Zoom (28- 200m 35mm film equivalent). It is a high end enthusiast’s camera, a step below the interchangeable lens, larger CCD professional SLR’s.  Since I photograph simple ‘elements’ for building pictures I find it more than adequate for my needs and it avoids the need for carrying multiple lenses. I also find the orientable viewfinder an absolute must.

For vector constructions I use mostly CorelDRAW X4. Most of my illusions start with a vector construction in classical vanishing point perspective or with an isometric projection. DRAW has an excellent toolset for perspective distortions and extrusions which I use to create my basic constructions.

I tend to avoid 3D, which I find a bit mechanical, and which is hard to use to create constrcutions which, by definition, cannot exist in 3D space. Howver I have recently developed ways of bending the incredibly quick and intuitive Google Sketchup 8 to my particular needs. It is also great for ‘thinking aloud’ for ‘sketchpad’ testing of an idea. I also use Strata Design 3D CX 7 for finished renders. Both applications have the ability to create a 3D camera by analysis of vanishing points in a 2D image and Strata is designed quite specifically as a partner to Photoshop and has the ability to interface directly with Photoshop CS Extended’s 3D layers and to render directly to multiple Photoshop 2D layers and animation layers.

By far the lion’s share of my work is done in Photoshop CS 5 Extended.TImages are first composited ‘flat’ without lighting. I then approach them exactly as I would an unlit film set, and add life and atmosphere by ‘lighting’ them. Although the physical techniques of lighting in the real world and lighting in Photoshop are poles apart, the mental and visual approach is virtually identical.

I use a large A3 (12" x 18") Wacom Intuos drawing tablet and a Belkin n52te input device in the left hand for modifiers and main functions. (This is actually a device for gamers but it adapts perfectly to my particular needs in Photoshop). I try not to touch a keyboard except when entering text or naming layers. I find that the flow from mind to screen is more fluid and instinctive this way. I also use a 3D Connexion Space Navigator for 3D navigation.

To avoid the predictable digital look, I use almost no plugins or complex filters, preferring to work entirely by hand. My philosophy has always been that the subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is likely to be inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it!

Except when travelling with my MacBook, I use a Mac Pro computer expressly configured for graphics.  When I need to run Windows software (Corel for example) I do so by means of a virtual PC on my Mac using VMWare Fusion 4. Aside from avoiding two machines, this also permits direct data transfer between the two operating systems running simultaneously.

You can find more information on all these applications on the Software and Hardware links page.

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