Posts Tagged ‘roundbottom’

The Strange Horizons fund drive, with member card art by me

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Strange Horizons, one of the internet’s longest run­ning pro­fes­sional online spec­u­la­tive fic­tion mag­a­zines, is com­pletely funded by dona­tions from read­ers like you and me.  They con­sis­tently pub­lish award-​​winning, inter­est­ing work.  Without our help, they would not be able to do so.

Donors receive prizes and gifts in addi­tion to a nifty mem­ber­ship card with art­work by a dif­fer­ent artist each year.  This year,  the editor-​​in-​​chief approached me about doing a pho­to­graph for the mem­ber­ship card.  I have given them a Roundbottom–style image called “The Dissection.”  It looks exactly like it sounds.  The only way you can See that image in all its glory is to donate to Strange Horizons!  If you’re a Roundbottom com­pletest, send money now.

This is, by the way, the “secret” image and pho­to­shoot that I was refer­ring to a while back.  I’m very happy with the way it turned out.  In case you’re won­der­ing, the beau­ti­ful model is my wife.  The woman hold­ing the scalpel is just some per­son I dragged in off the street for the shoot. I kid!    You can catch a glimpse of the image over on the 2008 fund drive page.  Go check it out and let me know what you think.  I’ve had it on my desk­top as wall­pa­per for weeks, and I really dig it.

Speaking of Desktop Wallpaper…

Is that some­thing any of you would be inter­ested in me mak­ing from some of my pho­tog­ra­phy?  If you want wall­pa­per, just let me know what image and what res­o­lu­tion, and I will make it for you and post it on the site.  I’ll prob­a­bly include my name and site URL in the lower right hand cor­ner, just as  a lit­tle bit of adver­tis­ing for me, but leave it oth­er­wise unadorned.   Post your thoughts in the com­ments, or email me directly.

WIP: The Revised Roundbottom Site

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve been work­ing for the past sev­eral days, in between bouts of pack­ing, on devel­op­ing the new Roundbottom site design.    You can check out a sta­tic HTML pre­view here.  None of the links work, so don’t click on them, but mouse over them for fun, espe­cially at the top.  For newer read­ers, Roundbottom is my steam­punk photography/​short fic­tion project, cen­tered around a steam­punk nat­u­ral­ist and his adventures.

A cou­ple of things to note about this new design.  The flash video of the gears is still comp and needs to be pur­chased as well as com­pressed.  It sits at 2 megs right now which is just way too heavy a file for some­thing silly like that.  I should be able to reduce its file size con­sid­er­ably once I buy the video.

I’m using, as in the first design, SiFR font replace­ment on the head­ers, and SWIFR to style the main images and the gra­vatar images.  These are flash based tech­nolo­gies that are great uses of Flash.  They both should degrade fairly grace­fully, although the main header font is ridicu­lously huge with­out the styling.

I’ve been grab­bing resources from all over the place for this one, hence the planned “design cred­its” page.  It’ll include a link back to my port­fo­lio site, but as well list all the free resources I used in the design and link to them.

You might notice the Foundation stuff.  That’s lay­ing the ground­work for the Roundbottom club, basi­cally. More on that later.  It’s an exper­i­ment that will sink or swim depend­ing on a vari­ety of things.    The other thing you might notice is the Encyclopedia link.  My intent is to set up a wiki page for keep­ing track of Roundbottom’s world, cast of char­ac­ters, and so on.  I am pretty sure I will open up edit­ing of this to the fans.   I’m think­ing hard about ways to encour­age audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion here. I want the com­ment sec­tion to be a delight­ful place of steam­punk char­ac­ters not of my cre­ation.  Hence the “More Steampunk” sec­tion.  We’ll see how that works.

Overall, I think I’ve vastly improved upon the old design.  Cross browser com­pat­i­bil­ity should be rel­a­tively cleared up.  The images can be larger and more detailed.  And the design really says “clock­punk” now.

Please do let me know if you notice any major glar­ing errors in ren­der­ing.  There are a few things that IE 6 doesn’t get right, but for the most part, it looks okay there.  Obviously, more mod­ern browsers should han­dle it better.

I can’t wait to get this thing up and run­ning and to start rolling out new, fresh steamy con­tent.  I’ve got some great sto­ry­lines lined up for this sum­mer that I think you’re really going to enjoy.

One last thing! Design type folks, if you have any tech­ni­cal ques­tions about how I did some­thing or why I did some­thing, do please ask!  I’d love to talk shop on this one.

Massive Costuming Score

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The Roundbottom project is in full swing around here, with large chunks of my prof­its from web design going into expenses.  This week­end, I mirac­u­lously some­how stum­bled upon a going out of busi­ness sale at a cos­tume store in Denver.  I was try­ing to find replica revolvers, and this came up.  Today was the last day, and every­thing was 70% off.  Needless to say, Sarah and I went hog wild.  I’ll be upload­ing some pho­tos of what we scored later on, but here’s a list:

  • One men’s frock coat (black)
  • two pairs suspenders
  • white cra­vat
  • one set of kid gloves (red)
  • one set of spurs
  • Asian-​​styled parasol
  • gray derby hat
  • black Bowler hat (vintage)
  • civil war cap
  • one cross between a cow­boy hat and a top hat (don’t know what the actual name is)
  • two pairs men’s Victorian pin­stripe slacks (one size for me, one smaller)
  • three men’s tuxedo shirts, vary­ing sizes
  • Renaissance bodice (red)
  • Men’s vest (silver)
  • 18th cen­tury men’s shirt
  • three vin­tage turn of the cen­tury women’s blouses
  • three blouses that are period, but not vintage
  • five skirts of vary­ing sizes, peti­coat styles, etc
  • one set of mil­i­tary gog­gles (at mil­i­tary sur­plus store later)

All this was acquired for $250.  Which seems like a lot, but we’ll get dozens of shoots out of this stuff. Woohoo!

So a note to you steampunkers–keep your eyes open for cos­tume shops going out of busi­ness in your areas.  Great deals can be had at these closures.

Daily Photo: Back to Steampunk

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve got a few more black­bird shots in reserve, but I fig­ured you would rather see any­thing else at this point. So I’m back to some of the raw shots from the last steam­punk shoot. Consider these out­takes, because they have no post or effects. They’re good images though, at least, I think so.

I did a top secret shoot last night that I really wish I could show off, but instead, I’ll tell you how you can see it later…

Daily Photo: Back to Steampunk

Anatomy of a Steampunk Photoshoot

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This was my first seri­ous shoot with logis­tics involv­ing a model, cos­tum­ing, and a shoot loca­tion. To spend an hour and a half behind the cam­era, I spent prob­a­bly 4 hours doing the var­i­ous admin­is­tra­tive tasks to set up. Here’s an overview of the process we went through to get the pic­tures I wanted.

The Model

A cou­ple of weeks ago, I posted a gen­eral cast­ing call on a site that con­nects pho­tog­ra­phers, make-​​up artists, and mod­els called Model Mayhem. I received quite a few responses, but most of them were from mod­els in the Denver area, which pre­sented logis­ti­cal prob­lems. I offered $15 an hour as my rate. I received prob­a­bly a dozen or so inter­ested responses, and I con­tinue to receive responses over time. Michelle was the stand-​​out of the group, and also, was local, a huge plus.

The prob­lem with a site like Model Mayhem is that there tends to be a bit of homogeny in the look and age ranges of the mod­els. Many, if not most, of the mod­els are young women in their 20s. This is fine for some of my needs, but I also need older mod­els, and male mod­els.
Continue read­ing ›

Daily Photo: A Close Inspection

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I am hold­ing out on you. I admit it. The best images from the shoot are going to take some post work to bring up to the level for the Roundbottom sto­ry­line, and I think I won’t reveal them until they go live as part of a story. That way you folks will still have some­thing excit­ing to see… There are some pretty damned good out­takes here though. Like this one. I don’t play with color much because of the Roundbottom sepia thing, but some­times, I just have to make an image like this one, espe­cially when Michelle has such great tat­toos. When I have time, I’m going to write a post­mortem of the shoot, exam­in­ing it for ways that I can improve in the future.

P3309044

Daily Photo: Early Steam Rat (Incomplete)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I had my sec­ond model shoot tonight. Over the past three days, we sorted out cos­tum­ing, a shoot loca­tion, and actu­ally did the shoot. The model, Michelle, was fan­tas­tic to work with, and I look for­ward to work­ing with her in future projects. I am plan­ning to make her char­ac­ter in the Roundbottom sto­ry­lines a some­what impor­tant one, so I sus­pect we’ll be shoot­ing again soon. The other all-​​star hero of this shoot was Sarah, who is pretty much respon­si­ble for the cos­tum­ing here. She’s a genius a putting this stuff together quickly. I think we’re going to do some shoots of her char­ac­ters, Miss Watkins, very soon. Miss Watkins will also be nar­rat­ing a field record­ings pod­cast as part of the Roundbottom project. Right I’m just build­ing my inven­tory of pho­tos and writ­ten pieces and pod­casts ideas up unti I have 3 months of con­stant work to be released on a weekly basis.

Note that this is not a com­plete Roundbottom image and in fact isn’t very close to the way I do the sepia on those other images. This is a quick and dirty look, just to get a feel on which images I want to develop fur­ther in Photoshop. The real Roundbottom images are going to take some time. I was look­ing, and out of a lit­tle over 90 shots, I flagged 45 as picks. That’s an unbe­liev­able ratio of good shots. I have some seri­ous culling to do…

The Steam Rat (Temp. Sepia)

An Interview Regarding Dr. Roundbottom

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

K. Tempest Bradford has inter­viewed me for Fantasy mag­a­zine about my Dr. Roundbottom project. The inter­view is now live here.

K. Tempest Bradford: Did the ini­tial inspi­ra­tion for Dr. Roundbottom start with the pho­tog­ra­phy or with the story?

Jeremiah Tolbert: The work started specif­i­cally in pho­tog­ra­phy. I had an oppor­tu­nity after a week of rain to go out and take some pic­tures of mush­rooms. I started play­ing with some of the images in post, and ended up cre­at­ing my most pop­u­lar pho­to­graph, the eye­ball mush­room. From there, I started writ­ing flash fic­tion around the pho­tog­ra­phy, and Dr. Roundbottom was born.

K. Tempest Bradford: Did the ini­tial inspi­ra­tion for Dr. Roundbottom start with the pho­tog­ra­phy or with the story?

Jeremiah Tolbert: The work started specif­i­cally in pho­tog­ra­phy. I had an oppor­tu­nity after a week of rain to go out and take some pic­tures of mush­rooms. I started play­ing with some of the images in post, and ended up cre­at­ing my most pop­u­lar pho­to­graph, the eye­ball mush­room. From there, I started writ­ing flash fic­tion around the pho­tog­ra­phy, and Dr. Roundbottom was born.

Tempest: How does a typ­i­cal Roundbottom image come about?

Jeremiah: I’m pretty strongly lim­ited by my own sur­round­ings and what I have the capac­ity to pho­to­graph myself. Some of them come from exper­i­ments in pho­to­graphic tech­niques that I want to try out, and some of them come from spe­cific images that I con­ceive and then try and pho­to­graph. Then some just come about as happy dis­cov­er­ies of odd things as I explore my sur­round­ings with cam­era in hand.

For instance, there are not a lot of peo­ple in the Roundbottom pho­tographs at this point because of my lim­ited bud­get and access to period cos­tumes. Luckily, I have leads on some cos­tum­ing resources, so that will change with time as I do more sto­ry­lines for the project. Also, my wife is hard at work sewing a more for­mal Roundbottom cos­tume for myself, and a cos­tume for a female char­ac­ter that’s part of the narrative.

Daily Photo: The Steam Wraith

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This is a Dr. Roundbottom image that I am work­ing on for a new sto­ry­line over at the Clockpunk web­site. I haven’t quite worked out all the details of the story, but this char­ac­ter here will cer­tainly end up being an antag­o­nist. I’m meet­ing with a model in an hour that we are cos­tum­ing to shoot for this set of sto­ries. She’s got a really cool look. I bought a cou­ple of 15 pound pipe wrenches that are period for this shoot, to give you a hint of what’s going on in this one. Here’s the photo. Note that you can click on the photo to enlarge it with­out leav­ing the site.

The Steam Wraith