Photography: People and Action - Lessons Learned on the First Attempt (Part 1)

For a very long time, now, I’ve been taking photographs. Mostly, I take shots of birds, beetles, spiders and sunsets, but I recently took up a new hobby—learning the art of ancient swordsmanship with the Ancient Arts Fellowship (AAF) in Canberra. Because I’m a recruit, I can’t join in with the melees until I’ve learnt how to swing my sword safely, so when recruit training is over I pick up my camera.

The first of these shots were a complete learning curve. I had never used my camera to take pictures of more than my small daughter tearing around the yard or ‘helping’ in the garden.

And I had certainly never pointed it at strangers.

Three weeks ago, I did both. With the permission of the AAF fighters, I photographed some of the training session. Most of the time, I focussed on the melee combat, but occasionally I took a few closer shots. If you’d asked me beforehand if I’d be taking individuals, I’d have said ‘no’, so this is something I’ll have to remember for future events.

Here is some of what I learned:

My short lens doesn’t have a filter on the glare, and so does not produce shots that are of the same quality as those I take with the close-up lens. It is, however, better for larger group shots.

short lens - no filter

close-up lens - filter

short lens - no filter

close-up lens - filter

short lens - no filter

close-up lens - filter

short lens - no filter

close-up lens - filter

short lens - no filter

close-up lens - filter

short lens - no filter

close-up lens - filter

Photography, Etiquette, Art and People

The first rule of taking pictures of people is to ask the group you’re photographing if it’s okay to take their pictures. Anyone says, no, and then you have to make sure you don’t take shots of anything with them in it, or you don’t take shots of the activity they’re involved in. Some people just hate being photographed.

Second thing: if you want to submit your photographs to stock photo sites such as Dreamstime of iStock or whoever, you’re going to need a model release from every recognisable person in, or likely to be in the photographs you take. This means that if, like me, you’re not sure if you’ll be mixing the odd opportunistic ‘face’ or ‘character’ shot in with your group shots, you should get the folk to sign up early. It also means you should probably get a model release for each person prior to the activity as you never know if you will want to use the shot a few years down the track—when that person might no longer be found.

The last thing is to be generous. If you take photos at a club, provide the club with copies they can use free of charge. If you take photographs of a person, provide the person with copies of the shots that include them. After all, without them generously allowing you to take pictures, the pictures wouldn’t exist.

If you’re taking pictures of art or crafts, be sure you get the name of the artist—it’s also nice to be able to put their picture beside the picture of their artwork.

Finally, some of us take photographs as reference material. The important thing to remember with this is that you still need a model release to upload art work based on those ‘modelling’ in your photograph to stock photo sites. Even if you have no immediate intention of doing commercial work, it’s best to have the model release form recorded, in case you change your mind later.

People are awesome - most of the time - and it's nice to treat them well.

Cover Design and Creation: Anna and the Rock Dragons

Some people ask me how I come up with my covers, but I think the hardest part of any cover is coming up with the illustration. After that, the basic cover design is relatively simple. You just have to remember the following things:

• The illustration tends to draw more attention if it contains a face or human figure.
• The illustration is the first thing that will catch a potential reader’s eye.
• The illustration should alert the reader to the genre.
• Text needs to let the reader know what the book is called and who wrote it.
• Text must be readable fro
• All elements of the cover have to work together to draw the eye.
• m a distance – or in a thumbnail.
• Text should be easy to read.
• Text should harmonise rather than dominate the cover, but it conveys the most important information, so it should draw slightly more attention than the illustration.

With these thoughts in mind, and with the illustration already chosen, I created a new image in GIMP. I made it 1875 pixels wide and 2850 pixels high, as those dimensions seem to suit the cover dimensions for a variety of platforms, and are easily adjusted to suit others. I then set the resolution at 300 pixels, as that is the minimum acceptable for most platforms. Finally, I decided I would use a black background for the cover and used the bucket-fill tool to turn the background black.

Once those basics were taken care of, I opened and resized the base illustration in a different window before saving it for import.

I imported the resized illustration, where it formed a new layer. I then enlarged the illustration layer to fit the background.

 

Once I was happy with how the image fit the background, I looked at the branding I had used for the Carlie Simonsen Chapter Books, and added the title and author name using the same texts.

Looking at it, I decided I wanted to differentiate Carlie’s young adults from her tween-to-young-adult chapter books, and the best way to do that was to change the script, so it looked less ‘younger audience’. This involved clicking on the Tool Options for the writing Tool.

You will notice there is a ‘Text’ box next to the Font box. If you click on the ‘Text’ box, you will get a drop-down list illustrating and naming the fonts available, and you can get a vague idea of what the text will look like before selecting it.

The main key, however, is to experiment with different fonts for the author…

… and then adjust the font size to suit.

And then you do the same for the title font, adjusting the positioning until you are happy with how it looks.

Once I’m happy with the look of the base cover, I then adjust it for the platforms with different requirements. Most, such as DriveThru and Ominlit, only need minor adjustments to size, but others, such as CreateSpace, require a slight rearrangement of elements.

Base Cover for Anna and the Rock Dragons

CreateSpace Large-Print Cover

CreateSpace Normal Print Cover