The Cardinal's Sin

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Fictional book cover. I added the blood for drama.

 

 

Needing to take a 15-minute morning break a few weeks ago I decided to go on a quick walk into the surrounding town that borders my office.  On my way back I noticed a bright red object just a few yards into the grass off the sidewalk which borders the large field in front of the business park where I work.  Curious, I flipped it over with the tip of my shoe and was surprised (and saddened) to see a dead cardinal. There was no blood or trauma that I could make out. Large trucks often rumble by from a nearby distribution center so I surmised it may have been struck by one of these and landed where I found it. It was the middle of January and quite cold outside so I suspected this helped preserve it in it's pristine condition.

I have always been intrigued by these magnificent birds. In fact, when I was 7 or 8 I assembled a life-size model kit of one.  I had it for years until it finally succumbed to the rigors of one of the many moves a child of an Air Force family must make.

I decided that if it was still there that afternoon I would bring a bag and pick it up, take it home and take some some photos for my personal archive. It was. On the way home I picked up some white surgical gloves at the drugstore and spent a good 2 hours or so photographing him before having to leave for a previously scheduled appointment. That was the window I allowed for the shoot.

Here are some of the photos I took that night.

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The Road to Helmand

A slideshow video using imagery from the Department of Defense and Wikipedia.

The Road to Helmand
Words and Music Copyright 2010 by Larry Knox

On this mountain
with my band of brothers
the stars above us
they light our way

and when I walk through
this valley of death, dear
I fear no evil
when I think of you

Chorus:
and I
...see your face each night
when I close my eyes and dream?

The road to Helmand
will be long and deadly
but we'll remember
the falling Twins

We keep our focus
out on the horizon
and wait for nightfall
to rest our heads

Chorus:
And then I
...see your face each night
when I close my eyes and dream

Refrain:
Tracers rain
like shooting stars
down on me
and my brothers in arms
were going home
were going home now
were going home
i don't want to go home
now

The night owl
he'll be sleeping
when you wake
at the break of day

And the letter
they deliver
tears the earth
from beneath your feet

just remember
the stars above you
are the same stars
that guided me...

Chorus:
to see your face each night
and then I closed my eyes....

Teaching Robots to Swim

Teaching Robots to Swim
Music and Words © 2010 by Larry Knox

In our hands
we hold the key
of inner peace
serenity

nothing lost
nothing gained
roll the dice
play the game

there is no future
there is no past
here and now
is fading fast

my monkey mind
will never rest
jumbled thoughts
a foregone quest

I'm teaching robots to swim

Gone, gone, gone beyond, Gone altogether beyond

in emptiness there is no form
no sounds
no smell
no tastes
no mind
no death
no decay
no stopping
no going
no suffering
no beginning

no end

Gone, gone, gone beyond, Gone altogether beyond

Synchronicity

My daughter, a sophomore in college, just took her first Philosophy class. The teacher assigned a recently published book entitled The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love Death, and Happiness. She loved it and thought I would too. Lending me her copy, complete with highlights and margin notes, I must admit she was correct. It's a remarkable story about the bonds between  human beings and beasts, our differences and our similarities.

Discussing the beauty of wolves with my daughter, I reminded her that I had the fortunate experience of photographing a couple of them for a book cover 4 or 5 years ago. It was for the Prestwick House Touchstone Classic Edition of Jack London's classic The Call of the Wild. (I also used a photo from the shoot to create their The Call of the Wild-Spotlight Edition cover).

It wasn't but a few days after our conversation that I learned Warner Bros had requested permission to use the Touchstone cover as a prop in an upcoming Clint Eastwood film starring Matt Damon.

What I remembered most from the photoshoot, besides their beautiful, expressive faces, was the manner in which the wolves would walk back and forth, circling and pacing their immediate area. There seemed to be no perceptible movement of the back or shoulders, as you would have expected from a large dog. Instead, they seemed to almost float above the ground, silently, intently gliding. Was it me? I tend to visually enhance movement and settings in my mind, especially over time, but in this instance it wasn't my imagination. The author of the The Philosopher and the Wolf, Mark Rowlands, describes his pet wolf's movement in a very similar manner. Remarking how struck he was with his wolf's movement when they ran together he goes on to describe the beast as if he was "floating an inch above the ground." Apparently wolves use their ankles and large feet to propel themselves forward when walking or trotting. It's an amazing display of grace and stealth that is as unnerving as it is beautiful.

Not a great shot but it illustrates how the wolf moves so smoothly using their large paws and bending at the "ankles".

Dream of Fire

.CD cover of original demos.
The title is taken from a line written by a co-worker–inspiring the song which in turn inspired this imagery.
Thanks Stephanie P.

"When I close my eyes I dream of fire."


Detail showing the Leaf Totem supported at the bottom by the Aztec frog deity–hands cupped to his ears listening for the Conquistadors.
You may access a larger version by clicking on the image.

Entering the dream, flawed, cracked, broken, but head first...

Making A Break from the Meat Wheel of Conception

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Click on the image to a view a larger version.

The Morning After

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Salem the Sleeping Dragon

Pine Filtered Light

Serenity and Turmoil–Contemplating the Firmament

Light filtering through a row of pines lent itself to this very quick, impromptu set up. Grabbing a ladder and the statue I shoved them into the boughs of a pine row and fired off 15 to 20 shots before the sun fell behind a tree line and the light had moved beyond reach. Fleeting/in the moment/the scent of pine.

Spielbergian Skies

The drama and power of dark storm clouds overhead never ceases to fascinate me. This collection was taken in early August as a front swooped down quickly from the north while I was at work. When the afternoon light grows dark I always grab my camera and run out back to a field with an unobstructed view of the horizon in hopes of capturing a few shots of the ensuing tempest before the first raindrops fall and the lightning flashes. Many of these photos, or pieces of them, end up on book covers or other photo collages.

Just imagine a huge spaceship rolling out of one of these. Now that would be the shot.

The Scarlet Letter Revisited

Organizing my photos recently and I came across my collection of The Scarlet Letter images for the Prestwick House Touchstone Classic edition book cover I photographed last fall. So many excellent shots of my model, Stephanie that I couldn't resist processing one of my favorites in the series. I plan to crop it, drop in the logotype and propose it as the new cover when they reprint in the next few months.

"Like dragonflies they have filled the river"

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Buddhas and Beads

While on vacation this summer I discovered this little jem of an import shop as I wandered the streets of a nearby seaside resort town early one rainy morning. Every square inch of the small shop was filled with statues, beads, wall hangings, and exotic curios from the east. It looked like a movie set from an Indiana Jones adventure. Asking permission to shoot some photos I ended up staying an hour or so chatting with the laid back, very friendly clerk and marveling at all the amazing items imported from Asia.
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The Hesitant Storm

This storm seemed to be hesitating at the shoreline before continuing his journey out to sea. Dipping his toes in to test the waters if you will. Knowing full well that if the water is cold it will sap his pent up energy, he pushes forward, unable to slow his suicidal momentum.

Minutes after taking these I was blasted by 40 mph wind gusts mixed with stinging, exfoliating sand. Somehow I managed to throw my camera into it's water proof bag and then under my shirt for a mad dash back to shelter...

Is that a bearded profile I see?

Transparent Design

Invisibility as a super power, according to H. G. Wells, may have some, well… "side effects" associated with it. Insanity would be the number one, but I would guess hypothermia would run a close second. Taking this into consideration, next to flying, it still has to be one of the more popular super powers that, at one time or another, most of us have fantasized about. On a design level, I can attest to the madness associated with this ability.

I was assigned the task of creating a cover image for our Literary Touchstone Classic edition of Wells's classic novel, The Invisible Man. Definitely a challenging and creative assignment, but with some Photoshop skills under my belt I figured it wouldn't be too difficult to pull off the whole invisibility thing. This is where the madness sets in.

I never realized how difficult it would be too render an invisible person with even a slight degree of realism. Oh sure, I could have made it easy and photographed him in a dark room with bandages wrapped around his head like a jazz-age-mummy but I wanted the classic Hollywood still effect with dramatic up-lighting and maniacal hand gesturing — I would need lighting for that. Specific lighting. Casting eerie shadows on the wall.


I could visualize the image, and my next step was to set about lining up a model, the clothes, and a location. The model was a no-brainer. My first and only choice was my younger brother for a couple reasons: one he is an avid fan of the 1930’s classic horror movie genre and everything associated with the era; he's a ham and has no problem whatsoever putting himself completely out there for the sake of "art;" and finally, he's my brother and he agreed to work for free! (I had him sign a model release just in case he changed his mind.)


For the location all I really needed was a space where I could shut out all light (except for my direct source), and preferably a blank, bare wall against which the subject might stand to capture the shadows smoothly and without distortion. My brother's basement fit the bill perfectly (and again, no charge).

My vision was to photograph him from the waist up, so I only needed a jacket, shirt, and scarf in a style that would have been used in the 1930's. My brother borrowed a jacket from his wife's grandfather and the warm, brown tweed set just the right nostalgic tone. The scarf and shirt were easily found around the house. The last but most important prop was the glasses. They couldn't be just any ordinary sort of glasses and needed to have side covers (preferably leather) and appear almost goggle-like. Sure, piece of cake, just pop down to Target and pick some up on the 9.99 carousel — hmmm, no such luck. I visited a few antiques stores. Nada. So my brother ended up borrowing a very expensive pair of military issue goggles from a local Army Navy Store connection for the weekend. They looked amazing. (Okay, in retrospect, perhaps I should have paid him). The last prop was an Ace bandage that I picked up at a local drug store.

The shoot went off without a hitch and I ended up with more images than I needed. Here's a short video made with some of the photos:

The difficult and most time consuming part of the process turned out to be working in Photoshop. I had to “clone” out the model’s actual head yet leave the wall and the shadow of his partially wrapped, partially transparent head, bandage and hands casting the shadow they would have made had he really been invisible. After many, many Photoshop layers and countless hours of “cloning,” I managed to pull off the effect at least to a degree that was acceptable. Mapping a Victorian wallpaper pattern on the wall helped to break up the flat planes of color so that some of the tougher cloned spots would be less discernable. The wrists proved just as problematic but again, with some cloning and many layers I was able to achieve the desired effect.


Here's where the real insanity kicked in. While working on the cover image, I had the idea that it might be cool to have the chapter heads show Griffin fading into invisibility and, of course, into madness. Similar to the Crackerjack flipbook prize we coveted as kids, I felt it would add drama and movement to the book. The "animation" effect doesn't quite work in the printed book, as there are just too many pages in between to give the required "persistence of vision" effect needed to create the illusion of animation, but the idea that the reader might slowly discover the transformation of the novel’s protagonist without being told about it beforehand seemed exciting — something I would have gotten a kick out of when I was in school.


But now, as if the invisibility effect wasn't difficult enough, I needed to slowly fade the head, wrists, and their shadows in stages. Yikes! If I would have had this brainstorm prior to photo shoot, I might have tried to photograph the model’s jacket separately with the wrists and neck areas empty with the exact same lighting. This would have added considerably to the length of time it took for the actual shoot, and the idea of reshooting was logistically out the question.


With a little luck and some serious “cloning” and “duplicating,” I managed to pull off the effect I wanted without a lot of compromise to the quality of the image. The relatively small format of 6 x 9 eliminated the need to worry about superfine detail, and gave the desired effect.

So in short, The Invisible Man cover took longer than the some other covers in the series, but in the long run, I feel like it was worth it. Who would have guessed that designing a cover around something that can't be seen would be so labor intensive?