Radiant Comics

I’ve recently been working on a lecture about my history with digital art. Here is part three of three.

My photography, and most everyone else’s, has been greatly affected by the digital age. I was an early adopter of digital. I bought my very first digital camera back at the turn of the century. It was a Nikon Coolpix 3.1 megapixel camera that I bought in the year 2000 ( a year that was once way off in the future and is now way off in the past). It cost a lot of money, somewhere around $800, but I was glad to be going digital. I don’t have any nostalgia for the era of film.

Before the age of the smartphone if you wanted to take photos you had to carry a camera. Around 1991 I bought my first pocket camera. It was a 35mm Olympus Stylus camera that was about the size of a large bar of soap. It wasn’t as small as today’s pocket cameras but it was small enough to carry with me every day. I became known as the guy who always had a camera so on occasion people would ask me to take a picture for them. That never happens anymore since everyone carries a camera now. Everyone is the guy who carries a camera.

I kept the prints from my film days in photo albums. In the early years of digital I kept that up because there was no other way to show people my photos. They weren’t going to look at photos on my computer. It was too inconvenient. I’d print them up myself at 4×6 inches and put them in albums for people to look at. My very last album has the date on it of April 2004 so I kept printing for four years after I went digital. It was only when I saw portable digital viewing devices on the horizon that I stopped printing my photos. It took a while to finally buy a digital photo album though. I got the first generation iPod Touch in September of 2007 for just this purpose but I had been looking around for something similar for years before I bought that one.

The initial price of going digital in 2000 was high but the cost of shooting and processing was low. A roll of film cost somewhere around $6 for 24 exposures and getting prints made was around $10. Digital had no film costs and I was printing the photos myself so it was cheaper but eventually I stopped printing them and had no cost.

No cost shooting also opened up street photography for me. I had tried it before and even bought a special film camera for it in the 1990s but it didn’t work out. I never got the hang of it and it was way too expensive to burn off shot after shot hoping to get something good. My street photography aspirations were put on hold.

Digital photography added one more thing to photography in general and that was instant results. That was a big thing. I could see if I got the shot right away. In the film days I had to wait until the film was processed, printed, and I could pick it up at the store to see the results. There was always a bit of excitement as I thumbed through the photos but there was inevitably disappointment too. I, and usually everybody else, missed more shots then I got. Plus whatever gathering or event I was taking photos at was long over so there were no second chances. With digital I’ve go the LCD screen to preview the photos before and after I take them. I can always take another a few seconds later if I decide I don’t like what I see.

It took one more innovation a few years after going digital to really affect my photo making. That was burst shooting. That’s when a camera will take multiple pictures as long as you have your finger on the button. My early digital cameras had poor burst shooting if any. There was a lot of lag time between photos as it saved them. I never really used it much. But then one of my new cameras, probably one I bought around 2008, had a burst mode that really worked. It was instantaneous as long as there was a lot of light and the shutter speed was fast.

Burst mode really opened up street photography for me. I like to take candid street photos so I stand far away so as not to bother people and take photos. With burst mode I could capture gestures, movements, changes in expression, and generally have a better chance of getting a good photo. A lot of photography is playing the odds. You have a better chance of getting a good photo if you take a thousand pictures as opposed to a hundred. Shooting in burst mode I can take about 5,000 photos in a five hour period when I’m down in NYC taking street photos. That would be near impossible and too expensive to do with film.

Sports mode on my camera has also changed my shooting. That’s a mode that’s made for taking photos of moving things. It keeps the autofocus moving and refocuses between shots. I’m pretty sure this mode was available on film cameras but I never used it. I never had a camera fast enough to exploit it and I wouldn’t want to burn through all that film anyway. With digital photography fast and cheap is built in. I only started using the mode when I started photographing bicyclists on the days they close Park Avenue to cars. I had been avoiding the mode until I got a new camera and decided to give it a try. Along with burst mode it worked great. It’s been a staple of mine ever since.

The digital age also changed post processing of photos. I was once limited by what a photo lab could do for me. I’d occasionally get 8×10 inch photos made but everything else was 4×6 inches. Now I can print them just about any size I want them. And then there is Photoshop. We can now manipulate photos in ways that weren’t even dreamed of in the film days. There are all the basics a photo lab could have done such as adjusting color and exposure but digital photo apps are so much more.

I have an iPad these days and not only can that take photos but there are tons of apps available to manipulate those photos. I look for apps that can do at least one thing well and juggle between them. I treat each app as if it were a layer effect. I do the effect, save the photo, open it in the next app, apply the effect, and repeat until I’m satisfied. A photo viewer that also edit your photos? Who could have ever dreamed that could happen in the pre-digital days.

I’ve recently been working on a lecture about my history with digital art. Here is part two of three.

Here comes that question again, Before the age of digital if you were going to make a photograph you had to ask yourself, “What size?” Not the size of the photograph, that’s a question you have to ask yourself too, but what size film format will you work in. The main sizes were is 35mm, two and a quarter inches, four by five inches, and eight by ten inches. Those are all negative sizes. The last one is large format, the middle two are medium format, and the first one we just called 35mm.

Along with negative size came cameras and lenses. A 35mm camera was the most common by far. You could get a cheap snapshot 35mm camera, an expensive professional 35mm camera and all sorts of ones in between. You could also spend lots of money on lenses for those 35mm cameras. Fixed length lenses, telephoto lenses, zoom lenses, and wide angle lenses. The 35mm market was huge and that’s what almost everybody shot.

The medium and large format cameras were almost exclusively for professional photographer or maybe high end hobbyists. The negatives themselves were pretty big. The bigger the negative the more detail it could capture and the bigger you could make a print showing off that detail. So if you were a fine art photographer and wanted to make a three foot by four foot print you would want to use a eight by ten inch negative. That would be the equivalent of a very high DPI Photoshop document.

The other choice that came along with size and format with pre-digital photography was processing. It took chemicals to develop filming photographs. Your choice was negative film or positive film (slides) and black and white or color. With negative film (or negatives) you had to make a print. The film itself captured the light from the camera in a negative fashion. Then the image had to be projected onto light sensitive paper to create a positive version of the image.

Slides were a positive image. They were meant to be projected in a slide projector and shown on a screen. They were easier to develop since there was no positive print to be made but they also had to be cut apart and mounted in slide holders before they could be projected.

Lots of hobbyists took slides because they could develop them themselves. It became a running joke in movies and TV shows that people would put together boring slide shows of their vacations and want to watch them with their suffering friends. Professional photography for magazines, books, and newspapers also often used slides because the quality was first generation. The slide was the original. A print would be second generation and therefor the quality might be lesser.

Black and white film was easier to develop than color. It was a one step process. Color film often needed more than one step of chemicals to process them. Most beginning classes in photography were in black and white. You could even set up a home black and white photo processing lab if you really wanted to. The next level of classes were shooting on color slide film and color prints came after that.

Most people who weren’t professionals got their prints processed by the corner photo lab. Or maybe it was a photo store that sent the film out to be processed. They were everywhere. You would shoot a roll of snapshots, drop the exposed roll of film off at the photo store, and pick your processed negatives and prints of each photo in a day or two. That’s how most of us got photography done. The professionals sometimes did their own processing and sometimes sent their stuff out to high end professional photo labs.

With moving images it was just as important to choose a size and format. There was 8mm film, 16mm film, 35mm film, 1/2 inch tape (VCR), and 3/4 inch tape (Beta). If you were shooting motion picture film you had to send it out to be processed just like 35mm film. That cost money. Hobbyists and home movie makers shot on 8 or 16mm film. Anything bigger than that was shot by professionals. Film was measured by the foot. You’d have to calculate that into time yourself by how fast it spun through your camera.

By the 1980s VCR tape had taken over the home video markek. VCR camera were relatively cheap an there was no need to process any film. It could also playback right on your TV. Professional news cameras used 3/4 inch tape for better quality but home users used 1/2 inch tape.

If you really wanted make something with film or video you had to edit it. That was a whole other process that took a whole other set of equipment. With film it was cut and paste. You literally had to cut the frames of film out of the big roll of film you shot and use clear tape to paste it to the next scene. They had big editing machines with a hand crank so you could roll the film back and forth and watch your edits on a small screen. That’s how they put movies together.

Tape made things a bit easier for editing. Whether it was 1/2 inch or 3/4 inch tape all you needed was one tape deck for playback, one for recording, and a monitor to watch on. You’d put the master tape in the first deck, fast forward to the scene you wanted, hit play, hit record on the second tape deck, and then it would make a copy. Put another scene after the first and eventually you had a movie. This was called linear editing.

Nowadays in the digital world you need a camera and a computer. That’s about it. You still have to choose what size video to shoot, HD, Full HD, 4K, or even 8K but that’s just a matter of setting a switch on a camera. I have a fairly inexpensive, five year old camera that shoots up to 4K video. All I have to do is tell it do.

Most computers come with basic video editing software. So do phones and tablets. I edited a 45 minute video that was shot on a VCR back in 1991 on my iPad. First I digitized the video (smoothing you can do on a home computer), transferred the raw footage to my iPad, and then edited it in iMovie. It was remarkably easy. No giant film editing bay needed. I did it in an easy chair.

I’ve recently been working on a lecture about my history with digital art. Here is part one of three.

How did we get from there to here? Analog to Digital in Art.

So let’s take a look at the world of analog art and see how we make things. If you want to make a piece of art what is the first thing you have to do? You have to ask yourself what size will the art be. What size paper should you draw on? What size canvas should you paint on? What size should you make your sculpture? What size should you make your book? This was the first choice you had to make.

So what is the first thing you have to do when making something digital? The same thing. You have to ask yourself, “What size is it going to be?” But since it’s digital there is a new twist. In the digital realm the idea of “Size” becomes conceptual. Is the size of the screen you’re working on the real size? What about he size of the screen someone will look at it on? Which is the real size? That’s a question for you to decide at the very beginning. You’ve got to pick your pixels.

Digital size is measured in pixels. But what’s a pixel? It’s the smallest unit of measure that makes up an image on screen. It’s a pinpoint of light. A tiny little dot that acts independently from all the other tiny little dots that make up a computer or phone screen. There is no set size for a pixel. It’s as small as the manufacturer can make it. A millimeter, half a millimeter, a tenth of a millimeter, who knows how small? The physical size of a pixel doesn’t matter when choosing what size to make a document. It just matters that we know the word and what it represents as a concept.

A screen is measured by how many pixels it contains. Also called its resolution. It’s basic math. Length times width equals area. Area is how many pixel it contains. Video is simple. You pick a size by how big the screen you want to show it on is. Some common screen sizes are: HD 1280×720=921,600 pixels. Full HD 1920×1080=2,073,600 pixels. 4K 3840×2160=8,294,400 pixels. 8K 7690×4320=33,177,600 pixels. Most people opt for as big as then can make it. Computers have gotten more powerful over the years and can push more pixels around but there are still limits. With resolution you can always make it smaller but you can’t make it bigger. At least not without losing quality. It’s best to go big but not into the area of too big. Too big is when it takes up too much of your time to push the pixels around. There is no fixed number for “Too big” and with computers getting more powerful the goal posts keep shifting.

Things get a little trickier when you leave the world of screens as the presentation device for your art piece when making digital art. When you decide you’re going to make something physical, such as a photo, poster, print, book, or magazine you have to decide what size the final piece is going to be and then determine what size you digital file is going to be. Let’s say you want to make a letter size photograph. That’s a standard size: 8.5×11 inches. That’s what you set your “Document Size” to. It’s also called “Canvas Size” in Photoshop and other art programs. Think of it that way. That’s the size of the canvas or piece of paper you’re working on regardless of how big it looks on screen. The app keeps track of the concept of how big you want your painting but it only exists in a digital space.

Document size is the first step in choosing a size the next is resolution. Resolution is measured in dots per inch (DPI), pixels per inch (PPI), or parts per inch (PPI)? How big is a dot, pixel, or part? Part of the answer is that it depends on your output device and part of the answer is that It doesn’t really matter. It’s all conceptual size. The only thing that matters is more DPI is usually better than less DPI. For example: If you wanter to make an 8.5×11 inch photograph you will need to make it at least 300 DPI. Maybe 600 DPI will be better but it might be overkill and merely slow you down. But 72 DPI is way too low and you won’t get the photo you want. I usually err on the side of overkill.

Now that I’ve told you about screen resolution and DPI I’m have to tell you that sometimes DPI doesn’t exist. Sometimes size in regards to digital art gets even more conceptual. DPI exists within a bitmapped digital world. Something that’s bitmapped means that every single bit on a screen it kept track over. What is a bit? It’s the same as a dot or part. It’s the smallest size piece that an app keeps track of. So an HD 1280×720 screen or Photoshop document kept track of all 921,600 pixels at all times. Even if they’re blank.

So when does DPI and resolution disappear? When instead of a bitmapped program you have a vector program like Adobe Illustrator. A vector program uses math to keep track of things. If you draw a square in a vector based program it doesn’t keep track of every pixel in the square. It keeps track of the four points that make up the four corners of the square and notes that they are connected to make a square. Since vectors are are math equations they are “Resolution independent.” That means you can make them larger indefinitely. Blow up a bitmapped image and it gets fuzzy. An old standard definition TV show shown on a new HD TV looks blurry. There isn’t enough resolution to make the old TV show look sharp on a new set. A vector based image would look as sharp no matter how big the TV set was.

Bitmap, vector, page size, canvas size, and DPI those are the things you need to know to answer the question, “What size do I want?”.

Eddie Campbell and Alan Moore’s comic book “From Hell” came out back in the 1990’s. I bought the first couple of issues and then decided to stop buying the single issues and wait until it was all finished and released all together in a collected edition. That’s not something I usually did and I can’t quite remember the reason I did so with this comic but it probably had something to do with the format.

The individual comics of “From Hell” were printed in a square bound format and that is a format I’ve never liked. I prefer my comics bound with staples rather than a glued spine because I find them easier to read. A stapled comic opens flat and stays that way. A glued spine doesn’t open flat and constantly wants to close itself. I’ve never appreciated that.

The “From Hell” collected edition that I have is a softcover book with a glued spine (as are all softcovers) but despite being a thick book opens up well and lays pretty flat. It has a lot of pages to it. According to Amazon the page count is 565 pages but I can’t verify that because the book doesn’t have overall page numbers. It has chapter page numbers that start over at number one with every new chapter. There are 14 chapters of at least 40 pages a piece. At a quick glance at least one chapter was longer.

This collected edition was originally printed back in 1999. That’s when I first read it. It’s hard to believe that 20 years have slipped by between readings. That seems impossible but of course it’s not. I remember enjoying those first two issues of “From Hell” when I read them individually but when I read the whole graphic novel in 1999 I remember it leaving me frustrated. I found it a bit confusing and impenetrable. When I reached the end of the book I found the forty pages of tightly packed author’s notes and couldn’t even read them because of the frustration. I figured I’d reread the book along with the author’s notes sometime in the future when I wasn’t so frustrated. Then those twenty years slipped by and here we are.

The only other comic book I can think of with such extensive author’s notes are Carla Speed McNeil’s “Finder” collected editions. But with “Finder” the story makes perfect sense without the notes but you can read them at the end and enhance your knowledge and enjoyment of the story. I read all the “Finder” stories as individual issues first and they became favorites of mine long before the collected editions with author’s notes in them were published.

The second time around I read “From Hell in a completely different way than normal. The author’s notes in back were broken down by chapter and page number. The notes referred to scenes that were broken down into one to four page increments. A single note might be a few paragraphs long and refer to three pages in the book. So I would read three pages of the comic and then flip to the back to read that notes about those three pages. That turned out pretty well for me because things became a lot clearer.

In case you don’t know “From Hell” is about Jack the Ripper. I don’t think I have to explain who he is but I will tell you that the story takes place in London in 1888. I don’t know a ton about the subject but being that I’m a history fan I do know a little. I’ve never read a book about the Ripper but I have read some short articles and seen at least half a dozen TV documentaries on the subject. That’s why, with my first reading twenty years ago, I was so frustrated. A comic about Jack the Ripper shouldn’t have confused me so much.

First of all I’m an Eddie Campbell fan. I bought his work before “From Hell” and have bought other stuff since. But his indistinct art style often confused me in this book. He uses a very expressive but sketchy line that didn’t always serve the reader in this book. That’s because there are a lot of characters in this black and white book and sometimes I couldn’t tell one from the other. When there are fourteen middle age London men to draw it’s tough to make each one distinct. Especially when that’s not your style. The same with the fourteen women. That made for some confusion but not the impenetrability. That was all Alan Moore.

I’ll give you an example of a scene that confused me. Chapter 2 starts with a three page flashback to 1827. Two of the pages are almost all black with dialogue until the final panel reveals a little boy with his dad on a boat. What was the point of that? I had no idea until I read the notes. It was William Gull (the doctor the story says is Jack The Ripper) as a boy. Why was it there? Because in his research Moore found out some stuff about Gull’s childhood.

Another example of an impenetrable scene was that one of the chapters began with three pages of a couple having sex with a panel that had blood gushing down some steps somewhere. Or maybe the blood rushed through doors. I can’t quite remember. I had no idea why that was there. Upon reading the notes it was made clear. Turns out that Moore had calculated that Adolf Hitler had to be conceived at sometime around the Ripper murders. So this scene was of Hitler’s parents having sex. Foreshadowing the violence of the 20th Century. Makes sense with the author’s notes but doesn’t without them.

There are lots of other scenes in this book that I didn’t get without the notes. That was the source of my frustration twenty years ago. In reading the book with the notes I did come to a new conclusion. This isn’t a book about Jack the Ripper. This is a book about Alan Moore researching Jack the Ripper. This isn’t Jack the Ripper’s story. It’s the story of everything that Moore found out about what went on around Jack the Ripper’s story. There are scenes of the coroner’s inquest taken verbatim from the inquest, scenes of what witnesses were doing taken from their testimony, and scenes of speculative fiction built from what Moore thought some of the characters would have been doing. There is a lot of detail that shows us what was going on that isn’t necessarily there for story purposes.

I really have enjoyed this reread of “From Hell.” With the author’s notes all the confusion and frustration went away. Though it may not be the ideal way to read a comic reading this one along with the author’s notes was a good time. I think I understand the book a lot more now and coming to the realization that it’s not about Jack the Ripper but about Moore’s research into Jack the Ripper was the key for me.