A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME AND HOW I WORK
This site is written unashamedly in the first person. This reflects the fact that it is a very personal site.
Raised a Londoner, now a dual nationality English/Belgian living in Brussels, married to a Viennese, and having multi-lingual sons, I view myself completely as a European. Through my work I've had the good fortune to travel a huge portion of the world, both developed and remote.
I do not consider myself an artist so much as a creative artisan. I worked as a Director of Photography in movie and TV and my role was to give flesh and atmosphere to a Director's vision. It is an interpretive role that requires the ability to use my own creativity to add visual interest and mood while remaining sensitive to the needs of others. The major part of my job was lighting the sets and this love of lighting is reflected in some of my work here.
Most of the recent years were spent shooting in Bollywood commuting regularly between Brussels and Mumbai. A few years ago I found shooting ten to twelve hour days, together with the long flights, was beginning to get tiring so on my seventy fifth birthday, after fifty four wonderful years of movie, I reluctantly decided to retire.
I am completely self taught in computer graphics and started this very late in life. I discovered a simple photo editing software bundled with a scanner and started to play with it. Soon I was moving on to Photoshop and exploring other graphics applications. This has now become a passion equalled only by my lifetime passion for Asian inspired cooking.
My prime interest is the creation of photorealistic Escher like illusions combining photography and computer generated imagery. I have been fascinated by illusions all my life but, because I only learned the different disciplines of computer graphic needed so late in life, I was already well into my fifties when I first created an illusion of my own. In the years since, many of my illusions have been published in books and magazines worldwide and can easily be found on the Web.
FOR THOSE FAMILIAR WITH COMPUTER GRAPHICS - SOME GENERAL 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 3D construction involved as well.
In the early days of digital I used a Canon PowerShot Pro 1, an 8 Megapixel SLR camera with a 2/3” CCD and integral 7 x Zoom for most of the photographic elements. More recently I used the 18 Megapixel Canon EOS 600D with two zooms 18-55mm and 55-250mm. This is a high end semi professional SLR. It has an orientable viewfinder which I find an absolute must.
Many of my illusions start with a vector construction in classical vanishing point perspective or with an isometric projection. In the early days, before it was discontinued for Mac, I used Corel DRAW but have now moved on to the excellent Affinity Designer.
I tend to avoid 3D, which I find a bit mechanical, and which is hard to use to create constructions which, by definition, cannot exist in 3D space. However I have recently developed ways of bending the incredibly quick and intuitive Trimble Sketchup to my particular needs. It is wonderful for ‘thinking aloud’ and for ‘sketchpad’ testing of an idea. It has the ability to create a 3D camera by analysis of vanishing points in a 2D image which means I can model to match an existing photograph. I plan any 3D elements very carefully so I can export them to multiple Photoshop layers for combining and texturing.
By far the lion’s share of the work here was done in Adobe Photoshop and occasionally in Affinity Photo. Images 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 an A4 active surface Wacom Intuos 4 pen tablet to draw with my right hand and keep a Razer Tartarus V2 keypad, mapped for modifiers and main Photoshop functions, under my left hand. (This is actually a device for gamers but it adapts perfectly to my particular needs in graphics). 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 the simplest basic model of the 3D Connexion Space Mouse for 3D navigation in Sketchup.
To avoid the predictable digital look, I use almost no plugins or complex filters, preferring to work very simply and, for the most part, by hand. My philosophy is that the subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is likely to be inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it!
For many years I used a 2008 Mac Pro computer which I loved! Modern software incompatibilities means that this had to be replaced. Being now retired without the benefit of claiming such expenses against tax I cannot afford to stay Pro. I now have a high specification 27 inch Mac Studio with tons of RAM.
CAMBIGUITIES is the official site of illusion creator David Macdonald. All images strictly copyright of the artist.