Imaging now is all that I do. Photography is only a small part of it and I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to become well-rounded in the world of pixels, vectors and textures. They all seem to intertwine now and I couldn't imagine using some of the programs without other programs. For example, 3D Studio Max is a tremendous program. If you've ever seen the show "Ally McBeal" then you know about the "Dancing Baby". This is a creation of 3D Studio Max and the folks at Kinetix. The main job of Studio Max is to draw in 3D, add textures and render to those wire frame images- giving them a photo realistic look, and to animate those scenes. But because of its' nature, Studio Max isn't the greatest picture editor in the world. So, I use Photoshop to create all of those textures and backgrounds. I simply make a JPEG file of whatever I create and then incorporate it into my 3D scene.

3D Studio Max also has a non-linear editor as part of the program. This means that it can edit video within the computer. I've used it, but find it cumbersome and difficult to use when it comes to editing the video that the program creates, so I use another piece of software for that called Adobe Premiere. I'm not the greatest at looking at software manuals, and 9 times out of 10 I'd rather sit there and try to figure it out myself. Premiere took about 20 minutes for me to be able to sit down and put a video together. Over time I've learned to incorporate the "fancy" features and have come to appreciate "Alpha" channels and their importance in video productions. Now, I can produce imaging that can rival a full blown studio in quality and effects. Pretty amazing stuff, really.

I also decided that I wanted to show you how you can take a simple image, such as a girl jumping and make it into an image that appears to have been made from a building wall. Total, this image took me about five minutes to make- all "in-computer". The greatness in electronic imaging is that in addition to all of this, one person can write and produce an entire presentation and publish it to the web. To me, this is truly amazing technology that adds depth to any story.(Note "Swosh" is a trademark of Nike, Inc)

But that's only part of the imaging that I do. Since I'm also responsible for the layout of my company's promotional materials, flyers and proposals. I mainly use two layout programs, QuarkXPress, which is a mainstay among newspapers for layout and Adobe PageMaker, which I found that the latest version is surprisingly good. Admittedly, it doesn't have all of the nice features that Quark does, it is more economical and I can still layout just about anything with it. And with layout comes illustrations, and for this I've used Adobe Illustrator, which is another mainstay of graphic artist. The difference between Illustrator and another graphic-oriented program like Photoshop is that Illustrator is a vector-based program, which means that the artwork can be scaled to any size without losing any quality. Photoshop is a pixel based program, which means that the images have a particular range of the sizes that they can be without losing quality.

And to use the layout programs, you have to have pictures, and some of these pictures are from 3D models, which means that I make the image in Studio Max and incorporate it in my layout programs via Photoshop- got that? Most imaging now is greatly intertwined and this, in my opinion, is mostly because of the internet. It's the one medium that all of the elements of imaging can co-exist in the same environment. You shoot a picture and post it to a web page on a layout and you can accompany that with a video, PDF file or animated file, such as a GIF. No matter what it is, the internet can handle it.

This is also the premise for the new photojournalist- Dirck Halstead, a White House photographer for TIME magazine coined a term for this new kind of imaging- the Platypus. When it was first discovered, explorers didn't know quite what to make of this animal that seemed to be a combination of other beasts. Eventually, they found that the Platypus was an animal with the most useful features incorporated into a surpurb design.

I feel that within the next ten years, the need for the average photojournalist to expand their pallet of skills will be mandatory. It won't be good enough to be just a photographer. They'll have to be a videographer, still photographer, writer, graphic artist, web master, administrator and even business person. Because of the Internet, the single person will be able to compete with the mega-media corporations on a daily basis. The single person can go out shoot, write edit and package an entire news story and have it posted to the 'Net hours after the event.

And to me, there seems to be an added depth to any story that's done by one person. The same person shoots the images, writes the story and accounts, edits the story/images and "packages" all of it in layout and functionality. Pretty amazing stuff if you think about it. So, how does the photographer learn these skills? If you're like me, you sit down and play with the programs on the computer and learn them. Read everything you can and practice, practice, practice...

July 24,1 998

Mark Lent

Sidebar

This past Monday night, my wife told me that while picking up our son, Grayson, he informed a woman that my wife was talking to that he was going to have a little sister.

"Are you pregnant?" the woman asked my wife, who laughed it off and said "No".

When she told me about it, we had a good laugh over it and asked Grayson where he came up with that.

Well, as things work out, my wife got to thinking about it and Thursday night told me "Gee, I just may be pregnant afterall..."

So we broke out the in home test and sure enough- it was positive.

"Nah...couldn't be" we said. So, being the stubborn folks that we are, we decided that I needed to make a late night drive to the local Wal Mart and get another test.

So, there I am in Wal Mart, trying to be as inconspicuous as I can when I run into a friend who works there. She glances at my box and asks "Is Kristi pregnant?".

I told her I wasn't sure- we'd already done one test and we wanted to do another. So, I got home and she had yet another positive result.

Needless to say, we were in shock. Well, the next day, still thinking that there could have been some kind of flaw in the tests that we did the night before, my wife went to the doctors where they did two more tests- both positive. We haven't been to the OB doctors yet and will be going very soon.

We estimate that my wife is now 6 weeks along and are expecting the due date to be around the 19th of March. I am utterly thrilled about this. We're hoping for a girl, but would be happy with healthy above all else.

(Image deleted by company request)

As part of the (Name deleted by company request) promotional package for our web site (still in the production stages, but should be out within the next month or so...), I wanted to show some of the animation that we're able to produce while giving a message to the viewers about our quality and services. The full animation is 01:06 (one minute and six seconds...)and took about one week to draw, add textures, animate, render, edit and add sound. I like the final cut and am planning to add to it eventually- adding a tour of the structure. Speaking of which, this is known in our business as a "Process Module". This entire video was made digitally- that is to say that from start to finish it was made completely "in computer" using 3D Studio Max for the 3D drawing, rendering and animation. I made the textures in Photoshop with Kai's Power Tools texture explorer (a Photoshop "Plug-In") and edited the pieces (each individual scene) together with Adobe Premiere. The really nice thing about using Premiere is that experimentation in scene order, transitions and sound are done easily.

(Name deleted by company request) Promotional Video

Using Real Player, QuickTime, or NetShow

(Image deleted by company request)

These posters were designed for the upcoming United Way campaign at our corporate offices. I didn't shoot the images that go with the posters (Each agency provided an image for use in the posters). This is also an excellent example of what can be accomplished using certain "core" programs such as Photoshop, PageMaker and Distiller (which makes PDF files...). All are made by Adobe.

United Way Posters (Adobe Acrobat PDF file format)

Adobe Plugin

Video Plugins