Author:
Ernest Bywater
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Date Posted: 07:02:35 03/27/15 Fri
>Sometimes when the desire to write has gone away for a
>while, I'll spend some time creating photos, usually
>in an older program, Paint Shop Pro 7. I've had this
>program for years and am familiar with it, so I use
>it. I'm not opposed to using old software if it works
>and does the job, and sometimes it works better than
>the newer stuff.
>
>A lot of my creating photos involves making covers for
>my books. It's not quite as easy as it sounds, since
>covers have to be composed specially to allow room for
>the lettering. Very often the photos I need for covers
>aren't cropped right and I have to massage them a
>little -- it's going to happen in the book after next,
>for example.
>
>For my purposes, it's necessary to find public domain
>photos that I can legally re-use. Very often I can
>take the photo myself, but sometimes I can't. If
>needed, I can often find the photo I want for a cover,
>like Bird In the Hand, but not always. When
>that happens, I have to create a photo, like I did for
>Bird On the Field, which has pieces of six
>different photos in it, four of which I took myself;
>the other two are public domain images.
>
>Over the years I've gotten fairly good at creating
>such photos. Sometimes it doesn't work well -- I'm not
>very happy with the cover for Stray Kitten, for
>example. It's not easy -- the lighting and the
>resolution have to be right, and sometimes they aren't
>and other tricks are necessary. It's usually possible
>for an expert or a trained eye to see the little
>errors and inconsistencies that are inherent in a
>created photo, but at least when I create a photo it
>carries the message I want it to carry.
>
>Which leads to an interesting question: Is it right to
>use a "fictional" photo to illustrate a book of
>fiction? I think so. To quote someone in an upcoming
>book: "Photos lie. In fact, they lie all the time,
>from the moment they're taken. They're isolating a
>view from what is going on around them. It's just that
>in the digital age, it's easier to lie with them."
>
>Now, most of you know that I publish a small weekly
>newspaper. Our rule is that we do not massage photos
>in such a way as to change the meaning. We may fiddle
>with things like cropping, lightening or darkening,
>and such things. I have been known to wipe out a
>prominent and embarrassing zit on a kid's face because
>it doesn't change the meaning of a photo that might
>have been taken because the kid won an award or
>something, but I don't go very far beyond that.
>
>All of that said, sometimes it's just fun to create an
>"impossible" photo -- something that never existed in
>the first place, or something that happened where no
>one was around to take the photo. I'm going to share a
>couple of recent ones with you, and will give you
>links to high resolution versions suitable for
>computer backdrops. The photos -- and the discussion
>about them -- are at
>href="http://www.spearfishlaketales.com/shorts/creating
>%20photos.htm">Creating Photos on the
rel=nofollow target=_blank >rel=nofollow target=_blank
>href="http://www.spearfishlaketales.com/shorts/shorts.h
>tm">Shorts and Rants page.
G'day Wes,
In a newspaper the images presented are news and seen as facts by the readers, so you have to be super careful there. With a book cover artwork you can do anything that won't get you arrested as long as it doesn't violate copyrights.
As an author with 89 stories (shorts, novellas, novels, and sagas in 21 books and 4 anthologies) plus 3 advice booklets where I've created the cover artwork for each myself I know how difficult getting the right cover for the book is. Like you I tend to use public domain images and then manipulate them - I've only used one provided by someone else. I also sometimes use copyrighted images where the owner has allowed their use under Creative Commons Licence or has given me direct permission. With the Creative Common you have to be VERY careful to make sure it allows the use for covers and commercial usage as not all of the variations do.
I find Wikipedia and US government websites good image sources. The most difficult one I've made is the cover for the Clan Amir anthologies. The original image was of a falcon on a wood fence right beside a car. I had to eliminate the side of the car and the wing mirror, extend the fence, and then overlay that on a shot of a jungle background - getting rid of the car was tricky. I use GIMP for the image work and find it a bit easier to use than the Photoshop 5 I used to years many years ago. The image I like the most is the one I did for Star Performance because I worked over the black and white athletics logo to make it colour and overlay it on the space image to get the right perspective.
Some of my early cover artework did leave a little to be desired, but I can usually manage to find a good image relevant to the story now. Some are with two images.
I like a lot of your cover artwork because they do represent something important in the story or the title itself.
Ernest
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