The majority of you, right now, are seeing this wrong. The reason? You probably don’t have the New Baskerville font installed on your computer. That is what I designed this website (and all of my branded materials) with, unfortunately you are probably seeing the inferior Times New Roman. The poor circumstance is a result of the majority of the web is still only able to see a handful of typefaces. The major reason is that unless you are a designer, you probably don’t have any fonts installed beyond what came with your computer. For those that do have extended fonts installed, designers can put a font hierarchy (@font_face) into their CSS code. This basically means that if you have any of the fonts installed that are in the list, it will show the highest listed font you have in your browser. So if you have ITC New Baskerville Std installed, it will show that as the best possible choice. If you don’t have that it will go through the list until it gets to one you have, for most it will be Times or Times New Roman. There are other ways to get around this by embedding javascript and other things that may or may not break the licensing of the font, but this isn’t actually what this post is supposed to be about.

What I really wanted to talk about was the difference of what you (probably) see and what I intend for you to see. (i.e. the difference between New Baskerville and Times New Roman.)
Here below I have a direct comparison of the uppercase letters and numbers of New Baskerville (red) and Times New Roman over the top of it (Cyan at 40% opacity). Click the image for the full size (1900×1200).

You can see that though they are quite similar (which is exactly why I chose it as a subordinate choice for the visual font) there are significant differences and this doesn’t even take into account the lowercase letters as was glimpsed in my header image.

Quick History of the Two Fonts

First, a little about each font. Baskerville was originally designed by John Baskerville in 1757. It is considered a Transitional typeface as it has a more vertical axis and greater contrast between the thicks and thins compared to an Old Style font such as Garamond. This was due to advances in printing technology and better papers that could take finer lines. The version that I use is a new design closely based on the original.

Times New Roman was designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent for the British newspaper The Times in 1932. It was created to increase the quality of the typography in the newspaper and had a strong sense of economy of space. Meaning it was specifically made so they could print more in their paper in less space.

The Differences

Remember that New Baskerville is in red and Times New Roman is in cyan.
New Baskerville leans more toward a humanist font. What that means is that it is much rounder and has a curving serif and base/cap height. Times New Roman (TNR) in comparison is more modern with serifs that are much straighter, almost machine made. The serifs and thins are also much more narrow. A serif is the name for the little feet at the bottom and top of a letter. The bracket (or curve of the serif) is also much more gradual on New Baskerville (NB). You can see what I mean in this detail:

The Q has an obvious difference in the tail, or the bit that hangs down, as well. The NB has a fancier, more calligraphic, tail compared to the modern tail of the Times New Roman Q. The axis, or angle of weight, is also noticeable here. Demonstrated by the gray line, for TNR, it is perfectly vertical whereas on NB it has a slight slant to it.

One more example is the differences in the Es. Besides the slightly curving base and top for NB, but you will also notice that the TNR E has a very sharp connection where the horizontal meets the vertical. This is in contrast to the softly curving transitions for New Baskerville. TNR also has much taller terminations, or the ends of horizontal lines that make it an E.

And that means…

So what does all of this actually mean, and why did I choose New Baskerville over Times New Roman? One of the biggest reasons is that NB is an older typeface that I connect closer with the Arts than the slightly more sterile look of TNR. Since my branding is that I do work with a lean to the fine arts, I had a careful selection that would give as much emphasis to the arts as possible. I also think that NB is a more pleasing typeface and actually more legible.
If it comes down to it, such as on the web, TNR will suffice, but I always prefer New Baskerville. I may, in the future, be able to display NB to anyone that visits the site, regardless of their installed fonts and I am currently looking into it, but it may be a while yet for standardization across the web to come to fruition.

Hopefully you learned a bit about typefaces and the thought that goes into both their creation and selection. I am a pretty big fan of typefaces (just ask my wife!) and plan on talking about them more in the future. If you have anything to add or any comment please write it below!

On to the creepy crawlies! (If you are ever interested in ordering a fine art print of any of these photographs, please use my print order page here.)

The header image is a really close shot of this dragonfly:

While I was shooting this large dragonfly, this curious little fly came along and took a close look.

A different dragonfly hanging out in the woods:

and yet another different kind of dragonfly:

On to the spiders

This guy even creeped me out, and I’m not usually bothered. He was sitting in a outhouse in Itasca State Park:

and a closer view so you can see those eyes:

Enjoy! And let me know if you use them, I’d like to see others stuff. If you like them, leave a comment. The more often I hear good feedback the more likely I am to make and give away more free stuff. And you should definitely subscribe to catch the next time I have free icons, textures, wallpapers or whatever else.

So what I have for you here are three high-res seamless textures of blackboard slate itself, followed by a full letter set (3 upper case and 2 lower case of each letter) and numbers (2 of each number) and symbols (one of each). So it is quite a large set of textures, all available completely free. I ask that you give me a notice if you use them. You can use them for anything, commercial or personal, 2D or 3D. Just don’t turn around and sell them.

Each letter/symbol image is 1436px square. Each blackboard background is different, so you can see those below. All of the letters/symbol images are transparent .png files, so that they can be used on nearly any surface, but more easily combined into an image like the one I made for the header of this blog post. The tileable backgrounds are .jpg files.

For the entire texture pack, download this .zip file. (86Mb). This is the only way to get the letters, numbers, and symbols.
For example of the letters, here is the full set of As:

Here are the seamless blackboard background textures (available individually):

Blackboard 1

Full size image here. (2562px x 2552px – 3.33MB)
Seen here repeated four times:

Blackboard 2

Full size image here. (2400px x 2492px – 2.18MB)
Seen here repeated four times:

Blackboard Smooth

Full size image here. (2400px x 2492px – 2.13MB)
Seen here repeated four times:

Texture suggestions?

If you have any suggestions on future tileable, or otherwise, texture sets just pop in a comment below or send me a message. And see the links below for other free high res seamless textures.

These are shot with a single strobe in a variety of directions, but a consistent distance from the face. There is also a Canon 580EX II Flash on camera pointed to the side with the catchlight panel pulled out, just to add some sparkle in the reflection of the eyes. And yes, that’s me making faces for the camera. I removed the color just to put more emphasis on how the light itself is working. Below I will go into a little more detail.

Here are the images again, only larger with a diagram of where the light source is located in relation to the face. I will leave it to you to determine the mood you can get out of a certain light direction.

I recently went to the local county fair where I shot a number of photos of the fireworks display. They had an impressive show and I’d like to share some of it and how to take great fireworks photos yourself. Unfortunately, photos never can really give a real indication of not only the scope, but the feeling of a fireworks display.

How I did it

The first year I attempted to shoot fireworks I made a number of mistakes. The good thing about making those mistakes is that I learned how to do it better.
I think the most important thing is to use a tripod. Without using a tripod, you cannot hold the camera still enough for the length of exposures that are necessary. They end up streaking the fireworks and they simply don’t look good. When I first tried, I went without a tripod because I was too embarrassed to carry one through the fair. This is, quite frankly, silly. There is absolutely no reason to be embarrassed about taking your good equipment. It might even strike up some conversation and you can meet new people (and potentially customers!). So, mount your camera on a steady tripod so you can get real still shots. Use a tripod even if you are only using a point-and-shoot camera.

Second, get farther away. The first mistake I made that first year was to go into the stands where the majority of people sit. This place is so close to the fireworks that you not only have to strain your neck to look up, but you would need a very wide angle lens to get any of the blasts in frame. This year I was probably 250 yards or more away from the stands and I was not only able to fit most of the fireworks in frame with a 50mm lens (80mm effective on the Canon 40D due to sensor size) but I also was able to put some fair rides in frame as perspective. This gave the fireworks scale and reference, which creates a much better photograph.

Use a wider lens. I actually could have improved on this myself. I used a 50mm lens, which on a full frame (35mm) sensor probably would have been fine. But since my camera has a APS-C sized sensor it has a magnification, or crop factor of 1.6. This means that whatever length lens I used multiplies by 1.6. This is great if you want to get closer to something, but not so great to get a wide angle shot. I should have used my 28-80mm zoom lens set fully wide. Dumbly, I didn’t take this lens along because I thought I wanted the faster aperture of the 50mm. The 50mm has a f/1.8 and the 28-80mm has a f/3.5 as the fastest. For the fireworks it really didn’t matter because I ended up shooting at f/22 anyway. I did try take some animal pictures earlier but even with f/1.8 and 1000 ISO, it was still awfully dark. So that goes to show the difference in lens needs for different photography. In this case, for fireworks, I should have just gone with as wide as possible to fit more of the blasts in frame, particularly the higher stuff.

Use your bulb function with a remote shutter. In these shots I actually hadn’t brought my remote with, but I wish I had. Even if you are careful when you push down the shutter release button, you will move the camera slightly. The bulb function just holds the shutter open as long as you hold it down so that you can get more than one blast in the frame at once. This will further fill the picture and make the fireworks look that much more impressive. When the shutter is open this long the entire trail of the fire will show in the picture giving you the full effect of the blast. You may end up holding the shutter open for less time than others, it all depends on how the fireworks are blasting off and how many of those blasts you actually want in the picture.

Use a low ISO and a high aperture. This is mainly to compensate for your extremely long shutter times (mine went as long as 46 seconds). That way you won’t blow out the picture with any other lights, such as the ferris wheel in my case. I shot these pictures with an ISO of 100 and an aperture of f/22.

Anyone else have any tips to add or anything at all, please leave a comment below. Share a link to any of your own fireworks photos, I’d love to see them.

I only ask that you tell me how you used them and I might share a link for you on my blog.

Right click and hit save as to download. These images you can really only see the detail in the large size, so I suggest clicking into those.
Download the whole texture pack here in a handy dandy zip file. (21.2MB)

Flesh

Full size image here. (2068px x 1760px – 2.95MB)
Bonus image with mole! (2068px x 1760px – 2.91MB)
Seen here repeated four times (+mole image):

Arm Hair

Full size image here. (2896px x 1628px – 3.63MB)
Seen here repeated four times:

Heel

Full size image here. (2079px x 1485px – 3.56MB)
Seen here repeated four times:

Leg Hair

Full size image here. (2109px x 1468px – 2.42MB)
Seen here repeated six times:

Palm

Full size image here. (1124px x 1503px – 1.24MB)
Seen here repeated four times:

Stubble

Full size image here. (1691px x 2148px – 3.31MB)
Seen here repeated four times:

Bonus! – Eye (not seamless)

Full size image here. (333px x 324px – 44.8KB)
Seen here full size:

Have any suggestions for a seamless texture you would like? Let me know in the comments below. Don’t forget to grab the other textures here. You can also see how to make these yourself by watching my how-to videos here.

The Photos:

River Pan
This shot is a combined 10 photos and at full print size is over 5.5 feet wide.
Click here or the picture to see a larger size.

Cloud Panorama
This shot is a combined 16 photos and at full print size is over 13.5 feet wide.
Click here or the picture to see a larger size.

The Method

The way I take these is through multiple exposures as I swing my camera (on a tripod) to the side. I don’t just sweep and hold the shutter release though, I move the camera a certain amount and take the next shot. They are then stitched together using Photoshop’s stitching tool (one of the options under the move tool. You can see where in my video on Photoshop’s move tool here. This never ends up perfect, however, and I must do some manual manipulation. This almost always means cleaning up the seams to some degree. Each individual image will generally be darker on the edges than in the center, so once the panorama is stitched, you can see some zebra striping to indicate the separate images. This can sometimes be fixed by masking the overlaying photo or using the dodge tool to lighten it. The stitch tool sometimes will auto-warp the image, depending on the setting you choose, and that will at times need to be fixed using the free transform tool. The warp function in that can be accessed by right clicking within the free transform selection.

Almost inevitably there will be an uneven edge at the top and bottom of the entire image. This is caused by overlapping of the photos and them not lining up exactly. This can either be cropped out or manually fixed. Cropping is obviously the easy way of getting past it, but can sometimes drastically reduce the height of the image. I usually do a combination of the two, by cropping in a little ways and then healing and stamping in the rest of the white space. Now if you have Photoshop CS5, you could simply select the white area and use the magic button err… the content aware fill tool.

That pretty much sums up the process. I might have to do a time-lapse video or a retouching animation for one of these at some point. The problem with working on photos this large is the massive resource drain it creates on the computer. Everything starts slowing way down and some computers wouldn’t even be able to handle it.

I’m curious as to what you think. Leave any comments below.

These are available to order as a fine art print:

These are not available to order as a print, but have been added to the portfolio:

In the Design categories:

In the Illustration category:
this illustration style is available for commission. Just message me if you are interested.

These are images from the freely available graphic novel, Prisoner:

After I exhausted that, I decided on a few themes to follow. I particularly wanted to avoid the cliche of a computer clipart type, so I decided I would work directly with the name. My prominent idea was to promote the WALK part of the name, as a road walk sign. I did a number of sketches working out the ideas. I used Google images of walk signs with both the walk symbol and the word as inspiration. I also followed the idea of a street, a crosswalk, steps, and some others. Here are some of my sketches. I tried to keep some of the tech idea in the design by use of a modern sans serif typeface.

I decided on my strongest ideas and sent them to Paul to see what he thought. The first was on the idea of a crosswalk with tech in a tech type font and the walk like a WALK word sign. The second idea I followed was using an inspiration of the walk symbol combined with the K and the final idea was along the lines of the steps with the K just having feet. Below you can see my black and white initial ideas done on the computer. I almost always start with a black and white design because I believe that a logo that works in monotone should be able to work in any almost any other color scheme later.

Paul preferred the second concept, that I dubbed the K-man. He also liked the steps concept from the third, which I thought could work into the second concept pretty seamlessly as well. So I did some revising of the logo, particularly with the shape of the K-man and worked on some color concepts. I presented these to Paul:

He preferred the third option, so I did some more minor refinements and presented a final logo. He was very happy with the result and I moved on to the business card and letterhead design. I wanted to work with the steps and the K man rather prominently and it was a priority to show the web address. I like vertically designed business cards as they tend to stand out among the crowd, but I didn’t want to discount a horizontal design either. So I made a number of sketches of my ideas and presented one option to Paul. Here are my sketches:

I went with #1 for the front and #5 for the back. Paul was pleased with this and I took a similar route for the letterhead design. If you are in the Thief River Falls area and need computer repair you can contact Paul through his website (of which I did not design). Here below is the full identity system that I designed for Paul at techWALK:

Testimonial from Paul Mooney, techWALK:

I’d like to thank you for your work and design skills. I hope you were pleased with everything as I was. I am excited to hear people’s reactions to the design and will pass on the good word for you if anyone shows interest in hiring design work for themselves.