Pixel Industry

Taken away by China

Robin Hodgkinson — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 23:28:07 +0000

China is a land of contrast and extremes… big, small, beautiful, dirty, rich, poor, always captivating and sometimes just plain unexpected! While walking along the Hai River which runs through central Tianjin I came across an old traditional boat resting in it’s own “bathtub” of water, free of the ice. At first it seemed rather bizarre but on further thought it kinda made sense – under the bridge it won’t fill up with snow, and sink. Sitting in the water the hull won’t dry out, develop cracks… and sink.

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Fish and Chips

Robin Hodgkinson — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 09:36:48 +0000

My client wanted a shot of a parcel of fish and chips wrapped in a pretend newspaper for Aotearoa Fisheries Limited’s annual report cover. The conventional way to shoot this would be to mock up the newspaper, print it out, then wrap the parcel and shoot it. However this has a few shortcomings. Once you wrap up the parcel with it’s folds and tucks you won’t be able to read half the stories. The artwork will need redoing a few times, as will the wrapping and shooting to get everything to finally fit, once wrapped. In short the process becomes trial and error.

I suggested we do the job in reverse…

The parcel was first shot wrapped in blank newsprint and the resulting image with all the folds and creases used as a "template" for the artwork created in Illustrator. Once printed out from the studio printer, this was laid around the parcel and re-shot. In Photoshop I then layered the new artwork image over the top of the blank newsprint image, set layer properties to "darken" to allow the blank newsprint to show through from the layer below, tweaked tonal density, saturation, etc and we had exactly what was wanted with all the important information just where the client wanted them.

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Takin’ it to the limit…

Robin Hodgkinson — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 03:11:08 +0000

Pinhole cameras have been around for ages but now that you can buy professionally made "pinhole plates" that attach to DSLR’s in place of the lens, they’re undergoing a resurgence in popularity. Having the convenience of digital photography combined with pinhole creative effects is pretty cool.

But obviously working on the principle that bigger is better, and really big is totally awesome, Shaun Irving went one better…

I love this shot. No, this guy’s not the victim of a drive-by-shooting, but rather he’s pointing out the pinhole aperture in his truck, or should I say pinhole camera with truck accessory – the whole back of the truck is a camera. OK, tick! Christmas list sorted.

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Back to Nature

Robin Hodgkinson — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 02:30:01 +0000

If you live in Auckland chances are you’ve driven past the Symond’s St. Cemetery many times and probably not given it a thought. Or maybe like me you’ve wondered a few times at what was just out of sight as you’ve rushed through the lights on the corner of K’ Rd and Symonds St. Last week I went and checked it out…

Just 30 meters from the roar of the Southern Motorway these forgotten gravestones and memorials are slowly and inexorably returning to the earth as nature gets on with the recycling. How different must the scene have been when these were first stood around by family and friends.

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