This is probably obvious to everyone reading this, professionals and fans alike, but animation is hard work. I’m learning this the hard way. I’m in the middle of production of my first animated web series Mighty Aphrodite!, and I’m quickly finding out that there are a lot of hidden tasks involved in producing something like this that actually haven’t anything to do with animation at all.
It’s fundraising, yes, but after that it’s writing, and scheduling, and recording voice artists, and editing.
And then it’s design and animation (in my case nearly all the design work was done by somebody else, an artist at the company who makes Plotagon), and then you have to render it all out. It was supposed to be a short little thing, just a few quick inserts to cover things Plotagon couldn’t do.
Ben is holding a box. You can’t do this in Plotagon either.
And then reality hit. Plotagon, as neat as it is, really isn’t suited for dramatic storytelling. Not really. Your actors can stand or sit in interesting settings and talk to each other. And that’s it. No walking through the scene, no getting up or sitting down as a motion, no carrying anything, no hand props (unless you count a cell phone welded to their hand), no running, no falling down, no dancing (unless you count dancing in place doing a weird sort of Austin Powers dance move). Even something as simple as a character handing a bag of coins to another character requires special animation.
So, you do your best, and you light everything, and render it out, and then you discover that you haven’t checked your scene well enough before sending it to the render queue, and you’ve just wasted $100 of render farm resources, and you didn’t have it to spare. Vowing not to waste any more money, you render it on the one machine you have, and 216 frames takes 3.5 days. So you’re now trading dollars for time.
Aphrodite standing up from a seated position. You absolutely positively cannot do this in Plotagon.
Some people use a game engine to produce their animation. Some animate straight up in Blender, or Maya. I’m doing a hybridized approach, animating using something similar to a game engine, and then padding out its capabilities when I hit something in the script that I need to do that it can’t do. The next result is that, at most, I have to hand animate perhaps 500 frames out of the some 8000 frames that comprise the episode, which is an enormous savings of time and effort. I only have to animate about 6% of the completed episode, and while that sounds great, and it means my production costs are $300 to $400 per episode instead of $25,000, it’s still a daunting, soul sucking amount of work. The production literally owns you until it’s done.
So far my damned project is about four months behind schedule. Thank God my backers are all behind me and being patient. But boy, lesson learned. An errant line in a script can mean weeks of extra expense and production effort. I’m so looking forward to finishing this episode, so I can get to work on the next two. This is a story that needs to be told, and we need significantly more money than I got on the first Kickstarter to make it not painful to produce the next batch of episodes.
The payoff, though, should be pretty huge. I’m using Plotagon to save me 95% of my production costs and time, at least, but it’s something that isn’t likely to be spawning a hoard of imitators. My show is going to set some records, and hopefully be greater than the sum of its parts.
I wrote this piece a number of years ago. Since then, I have been made Top Writer on Quora for 2018, and this kind of piece I think is one of the reasons why they did that.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
The phrase is Latin, and is literally translated as “Who will guard the guards themselves?”
In other words, “Who watches the watchmen?” I have encountered this for years, and I finally figured out the answer to that question.
And it’s a real answer.
The real answer to “Who Watches the Watchmen?” is, “We watch ourselves. We are answerable to our own conscience, ethics, morals and sense of duty. We can trust no one else’s more than our own.”
And that implies that we are being asked to follow somebody else’s ethics and morals without questioning them, and that’s exactly what we’re being asked to do by those very people who ask “Who watches the watchmen?” What they’re implicitly saying is that our own judgment should give way to theirs.
This argument is almost always used not in the search for truth, but in the obstruction of it. It introduces a self-referential logical conundrum that cannot be solved, thereby stopping any reasonable discourse in its tracks. By attempting to declare that there is no clear acceptable answer, the speaker implies that the opponents are intrinsically wrong, and this is a logical fallacy. An unknown solution does not imply incorrect action. It’s basically a false dilemma fallacy, similar to a loaded question such as “Have you stopped beating your wife?” or “Are you going to admit that you’re wrong?”
Those who stand up for the good, the innocent, the right and the just are often publicly attacked by those seek to set themselves on a throne and tell others how to think, feel and act — or worse, seek simply to do society harm and not be caught at it.
The next time you hear someone ask “who watches the watchmen”, think about why they’re really asking this. The answers may surprise you.
Obi-Shawn’s t-shirt design for his morning show on Krypton Radio, “Good Morning, Tatooine!”
This was written in 2017. We changed the name of the station to SCIFI.radio on January 25, 2021.
We use Patreon to keep our sci-fi radio station, Krypton Radio, fueled up and on the air, and it’s been working for years. However, it’s also a struggle, and we’re not doing anywhere near as well as we should be given the size of the market. Getting the word out is an enormous problem when what you do is a service, not putting 100% of your energy into a single one-shot incendiary mortar shell of a geeky project.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far.
Patreon is Hard
The main issue with Patreon is that you have to live there to make it work. You can’t run your stuff out of your web site and visit only occasionally, you pretty much have to move into Patreon and run your entire operation from there.
For most creators, that’s a real problem, because they’ve spent years developing a following on the web and in social media, and it’s very hard to get your fans to follow you over to Patreon, and it’s hard to keep their attention once you do. Patreon is not social media, and it lacks all the things that make people hang around for extended periods. Once your patron is done reading your page, there’s nothing else to keep them there.
Very very recently Patreon has released a plugin for WordPress that makes it possible to post Patrons-only content on your own web site, so that lets you bring the Patreon to the fans instead of having to do it the other way around, and we’re about to start experimenting with members-only content that way. We have no idea how much or how little that will help yet, it’s totally uncharted territory for us.
One important factor with Patreon is that you have to be very very active in it or people will think you’re out of business. A post a week isn’t bad. Two a week is probably optimal.
Another important factor is that you’re going to have to plan your productivity to include creating assets specifically for Patreon that aren’t directly part of whatever creative thing it is that you do. You’ll need videos, graphics, short articles, sound bytes, all sorts of things specifically shaped to the needs of running a continuous crowdfunding campaign. It’s like running a Kickstarter, but you never get a break and it never stops.
But Does It Work?
Well – I can honestly say that we wouldn’t have a radio station if it didn’t work.
Advertising certainly doesn’t work. Nobody clicks on anything, and web browsers are built to filter them out by default. Kickstarters are a pain, and very stressful and make you crazy. Subscriberships are the only way to go if you want to be paid every month for what you do.
What About the Perks?
That’s one of the things we’re struggling with.
We produce audio, so there’s no finite physical product that we can send people. We have to come up with content specifically geared to being output in little parcels that our fans would want, so we’re exploring publishing fiction exclusively for our subscribers.
We’re also developing a sci-fi radio drama, and when that comes out we’ll have props and costumes, and challenge coins, and patches, but it’s a massive push to get it done, and it’s taking years longer than we planned to do this.
We also feature a line of sci-fi / geek t-shirts that we’ve designed ourselves that nobody else carries, and you’d think that would be an attractant, but to be completely honest, apparently nobody gives a @#$#@ about t-shirts. Like, at all. We’ve given away maybe two of them as perks in the last two years when people ask for them, despite the fact that half our patrons are eligible for them.
White Elephant? Why, Yes. Yes We Are.
Part of our problem stems from what we are. We’re a full time sci-fi fandom format radio station, and that makes us unique on the planet (one or two other stations lay claim to this, but they also do things like fill up 60% of their air time with metal or hiphop). We don’t fit categories. In anything.
Most radio station listing services don’t even have a listing category for us, so we get stuck in “Other”, or “Eclectic”. Nobody searches for “other” when they’re looking for a radio station, and people don’t think to search for sci-fi radio because all they get is podcasts when they try it – so we’re hard to categorize, hard to find, and searched for much less than we’d like because people don’t even realize that full time sci-fi radio (as contrasted to a podcast) is a thing.
Our response for that is to hit as many distribution platforms as we can. We get another dozen patrons, and we will be able to get listed on iHeartRadio. Suddenly we’ll be exposed to 70 million iHeartRadio subscribers, and available in people’s cars, which is where most people listen to the radio in the first place. We’re hoping our fortunes will improve after that.
What’s Next?
Our biggest problem is that since nobody knows we’re here, relatively speaking, we have to maximize our exposure. We have to position ourselves so that the maximum number of people have a chance to find us by serendipitous search. I can’t tip my hand just yet, but there’s another distribution network we’re looking at in addition to iHeartRadio, and between the two of them we’ll have exposure to a new potential audience of 190 million people that we didn’t have access to before. We’ve never made a jump this big before, and surprisingly, the two services we’re going after will make us big fish in a small pond despite the huge subscriber numbers for each service.
The reason is, once again, that Krypton Radio is unique. Literally nobody else in the world does what we do the way we do it. It’s not like regular radio stations. How many hip-hop stations are there across the country? About 250. Rock? About 360. Oldies? Oh my god, 500 plus of those. Metal? You get the idea.
But full time sci-fi geek culture genre format stations? There’s one. When people look for that, they find us, and that’s it. I’m hoping to improve our odds by expanding our “broadcast range” so to speak.
Nine tenths of success is not giving up. We’re already heard in 135 countries and we reach between 65,000 and 100,000 listeners a month depending on the season.
Expect to send out about 30% of what you get as perks. People pay money to get stuff, as much as to help you. Show your true appreciation, even if it hurts a little. You’ll be much better off. Of course, you do have to make your goals, so you’re walking a fine line when you’re just starting up. It helped a lot that Patreon started doing fulfillments as a service, so that we can spend our time actually doing the thing instead of churning around trying to do fulfillments, which we were very bad at.
Name Yourself Something that Makes Sense
When we changed our name from Krypton Radio to SCIFI.radio on January 25, 2021, suddenly our findability and listener traffic jumped 30% – and it stayed there. It was a permanent boost, and the boost we needed. Now we’re reaching 300,000 listener connections a month, over about 110,000 uniques. This, in turn, has translated to a big boost in Patreon receipts, a bigger jump since the January name change than we’ve ever seen in the history of the station.
When I first sat down to write about Star Trek: Discovery, I had some very clear thoughts about why I wasn’t happy with it. Then I posted them on Facebook, then I copied them here.
After I had done that, I was given a teachable moment, and learned from a writer and director exactly why I was on the wrong track with most of it.
First, What I Thought Was Wrong
Here are my thoughts on Star Trek: Discovery, and why I’m disappointed in it.
After a 12 year drought, we finally have new Star Trek to watch. It should be the return of the prodigal son, but it isn’t. Here’s just a few of the things wrong with the show from my perspective, having nothing to do with CBS’ abusive treatment of the makers of Star Trek fan films, or the bizarre decision to put Star Trek behind a paywall for U.S. audiences.
If you haven’t seen Star Trek: Discovery and plan to, STOP READING HERE, because there are SPOILERS after this. You have been warned. Anything bad that happens to you after having read this warning is therefore your own fault.
People have been asking me what I think of Star Trek: Discovery, and I have to tell them that it’s just not wonderful.
They’re dumbfounded. Yaaaay, Star Trek, there’s finally new Star Trek, yaaaay.
And then I tell them, I’m sorry, but while somehow despite all its faults it’s watchable, and that this is an achievement, all the problems mean it’s not great Star Trek, or even great story telling.
And then they get incredulous, or defensive (even aggressive in some cases), and demand that I explain myself.
So here goes:
If you can’t get a lock on a body without a life sign to beam it back, why can you get a lock on a body without a life sign to beam anything to it?
Spores are how fungi reproduce. They cannot, by definition, quantum entangle. This is not science fiction. It is deus ex machina. What they have created here is magical woo-woo space boogers.
The potentially dangerous anomaly is too far into the danger zone for the ship to fly. So instead of sending, oh, I don’t know, how about a PROBE? No. We send Michael Burnham in a space suit. Wait, what?
If a pile of Klingons and an entire Federation away team couldn’t control the Tardigrade, how did Captain Lorca manage it? And why didn’t he do that in the first place instead of letting it kill all those people?
How is it that a creature than can instantly teleport anywhere in the universe be contained by a security field? Woops, watch your step. Plot holes are everywhere.
We have a primary hull that spins now, like – what is that thing it reminds us most of? Oh yes. #usspizzacutter
The Discovery’s chief of security, one of the most trusted officers on the entire ship, is really such an arrogant, irresponsible trigger happy goon that she gets herself killed over it? Really?
In 2369, on the Enterprise D, the holodeck was this remarkable new technology that had never been in a Federation starship before – and yet, here we are on the Discovery, in the year 2255 and there’s Captain Lorca and Lt. Taylor doing combat training in one, 114 years too early. Continuity is apparently for losers.
Peace loving Vulcans shoot first. Wait, what? What did I miss?
Vulcan soul katra does not work like a telephone. Or shouldn’t. The fact that it does in Discovery is more space magic deux ex machina. In Star Wars it’s established that you can talk to Force ghosts this way, or send very simple messages over relatively short distances to other Jedi, but in Discovery it works like a 3D holodeck, complete with tactile feedback.
Why did the first two episodes exist at all? These should have been folded into Episode 3 as backstory so that we could start the series actually on the Discovery to start with. This is just bad writing, this is screenwriting 101 stuff. This must be why we’re getting 15 episodes instead of 13 – they padded it with two pointless extra scripts.
Why is the Klingon makeup so over-designed to the point where the actors can’t move or speak in it? What was the point of doing that? They could have saved twenty thousand dollars just using slipcast rubber masks if that’s the result they were going to get. I’ve seen better makeup in fan productions.
Can whoever is in charge of the lights on the bridge please turn them on? Seriously.
Can whoever is in charge of the lens flares on the bridge please turn them off? If there are no damn lights on the bridge, where are the lens flares coming from?
When we saw the delayed reflection of Stametz as the cliffhanger of one episode, why did we completely drop the subject in the next episode? Okay, so that was nothing. Then why was it there? Or if it was something, why was it there instead of someplace else where it would have made more sense?
If the Tardigrade could have jumped away the entire time, why didn’t it do that in the first place? (See above complaint about not being able to jump out of a force field.)
The Tardigrade rehydrated itself in the vacuum of space. Where did it get the water? We could presume that since it could teleport anywhere in the universe, it might also be able to teleport anything it wants to it, but that’s rationalization, not established or set up in any way in the plot.
They ejected the Tardigrade directly into space through a tube that led from the heart of engineering straight to the outer hull opening directly to space. Really?
Why were the stealth detection devices Burnham took onto the Klingon Ship of the Dead so bright, flashy, and noisy? They were custom built for the job, so a conscious decision had to have been made to make them as stupidly non-stealthy as possible. This makes no sense whatever.
Harvey Mudd knows more than probably any one person alive about how to get past the security methods on a Federation starship, and he killed the captain 52 times trying to take the ship, using a time loop device. He’s possibly the single most dangerous man known to the Federation at this point, and was spying for the Klingons, but they let him just sail off with his wife when it’s all over, with no punishment whatsoever. Wait, WHAT? And whle we’re on it, why are were these episodes even produced? They literally add nothing to the story line, and apart from the marginally necessary first two episodes, are the only other episodes that don’t.
Captain Georgio and 1st Officer Burnham, the two most senior officers aboard the Shinzou, decide not to send trained security personnel on a ship-to-ship mission to a Klingon heavy cruiser. Neither of them is armed with more than a hand phaser, the two of them together weigh 280 pounds soaking wet. They know Klingons are big, because Michael Burnham killed one. So they beam over to a hostile ship with no knowledge of how many of these hulking, bred-for-combat highly trained adversaries they might be facing. Wait, what?
Surprise, Tyler was Voq’ the whole time. Seven episodes in. Like we couldn’t tell four episodes back. Please.
Surprise, Lorca is from the Mirror Universe, like we couldn’t tell twelve episodes back. Please.
The entire series leads up to handing the Klingon woman the genetic key to the bomb? Hello, just kill her. The bomb can’t detonate if she doesn’t push the button, and she can’t do it if she’s dead, so giving her control of the bomb solves literally nothing. They can’t make it a deadman switch either, because as soon as she dies of old age, kaboom. Or leaves the planet for any reason, kaboom. That’s the weakest ending scenario they could possibly have gone for. And she’s just like oh, yuppa yup, okie dokie, I’ll end the war now. Uuuuuhhh, what? Did everybody just take stupid pills?
How many was that? Two dozen issues? And I didn’t even get into the ridiculous “reimagining” of the Klingons that loaded the actors with so many silicone appliances and different sets of goofy teeth that for the most part it was all they could do to huff out their lines through the unresponsive makeup. They had their occasional moments, but for the most part they simply didn’t work. Nor did I address the series ending, where all 23 houses of Klingons suddenly decided to act responsibly instead of the leader of at least one house succumbing to Klingon battle rage (something Klingons have always been known for).
And to be frank, that’s not even a comprehensive list of all the script problems, and you’ll notice that I didn’t even touch the jarring discontinuity of Starfleet technology as a significant flaw that affected every single other creative decision they made after throwing that out. It’s not just a fan being butt hurt about the show being inconsistent with established canon. Canon is useful for a reason: if you stick to your continuity, your show fits well with the rest of the established universe and can be taken seriously as an addition to the universe. If you don’t, then what you do looks like a tacky attempt to pump money out of a franchise.
Of course it was restricting. Of course it’s difficult. There’s a cure for that, though. It’s called “writing”.
When red herrings and “deus ex machina” are regular plot devices, and when the writing just falls apart from day one, and when the art direction runs amok, it detracts from one’s ability to actually watch and enjoy the show.
Is anybody actually in charge? Which of the show’s eight or nine executive producers actually producing? I’m guessing not very many, and the ones that are are either overtaxed or not paying attention.
This is why I’m not as enthused as I wish I could be about the new Star Trek. That there would be so much wrong with the show after only six episodes is staggering. It’s also insulting, because it demonstrates very clearly that CBS thinks we’re all just too stupid to notice any of this.
Each episode appears to have had a great deal of spit and polish applied to it, with a great many people applying their very best efforts to make it look as good as they possibly can. The attention to the quality of the acting and the visual design was obviously there, even if we don’t all necessarily agree on what that should have looked like. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be anybody watching to make sure it all meshes together properly, and in many cases it simply doesn’t.
This should be a triumphant return. Instead it’s a deeply flawed exercise in dumbed down “pew-pew” sci-fi, and while I’m sure it’ll be okay for people who don’t care that much about whether a story has internal consistency or not, if I tried to send a sci-fi book manuscript to a publisher with these kinds of problems I’d get it kicked back for a massive rewrite in a heartbeat.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is pulp sci-fi. Star Trek should have been above this.
What They Got Right
Now, in its defense, you can see where the story arcs have been set up, and why, and how the characters are meant to progress from their various falls from grace, their struggles for redemption, and the mirror arcs of characters who are supposed to be in control gradually losing that control. That part of it is working, but I think there’s more to this problem than just acknowledging basic dramatic constructs like Checkov’s gun, that if you show the audience the gun in act 1, that this gun should be used by act 3.
The character of Michael Burnham is complex, and a little alien because of her upbringing. That’s part of why she’s been unapproachable as a character, why people aren’t warming up to her. Hello, she’s been raised as a Vulcan. Of course she’s going to have a severe case of broomstick-in-uncomfortable-places.
As much as we might not like the technology as portrayed in the series, from the standpoint of having to sell this to the general public it makes sense not to make things look like the 1960’s view of the future. The fact that this makes it not mesh well with Discovery being a direct prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series is just something they have to work around. There’s no smooth fix, but in CBS’ defense, frankly, sooner or later you have to give the whole universe a face lift. You can’t stay in the 1960’s forever.
The characters took 10 episodes to make sense in some cases, but eventually they got them where they needed to be from a dramatic standpoint, and from a storytelling standpoint. A friend of mine called this a “long build”, and that you have to have patience with the process, and more of it will make sense as we go. The simple visceral requirements of the story are met, yes. They could yield some satisfying story arcs out of all this.
In the End, It Falls Far Short of the Mark
But this – this is not only presented as Star Trek, but as science fiction as well, and with science fiction at least, there is an additional overlay of requirement: the story must be internally consistent. In this way it is like a mystery novel. Everything in the story has to feed back into the story and clearly connect with other parts of the story with a decisive *click*. These moments are few and far between in Star Trek: Discovery.
It’s certainly not the worst Star Trek we’ve seen. We don’t, for example, have a story about how a tweaky variant of warp drive turns the captain and the first officer into giant lizards who then have sex and create a new species, like we did in Star Trek: Voyager.
However, this is damning with faint praise. No, to fix Star Trek: Discovery, they’d have to get some people who understand science fiction into the writing pool. It’s obvious, to me at least, that they don’t have them yet.
Whether you enjoy this iteration of Star Trek depends on how much you care about internal consistency and story arc. The acting is pretty good. The stories they tell are a jumbled, jangly mess. Each episode contains some sort of internal contradiction so bad that it takes you out of the moment, ruining the episode and the experience if your brain is engaged at all. And, the first season ends in a jawdropping Whiskey Tango Foxtrot event that makes zero sense given the setup and the history they’ve established for the Klingons.
The first two episodes really have very little to do with the story arc, and were really just back story which should have been used as subtext for the remainder of the season instead of being uselessly produced at a cost of about five million dollars.
Two episodes in the middle have to do with a hilariously misinterpreted Harry Mudd, and suddenly drop the series from being story arc driven to episodic, only to have that course reversed again when they’re over.
A sign that something can be cut from a story or script is whether you’ll notice something missing if you were to cut it. If you cut out these two episodes, and pretend they never existed, nothing happens. Five million more dollars completely wasted. As far as the story they claimed to be trying to tell goes, they could have just filmed the cast shooting soda water down each other’s trousers for 84 minutes. It would have been a lot cheaper, and it would have had the same contribution to the story line.
So they shot fifteen episodes and didn’t have the sense to realize four of them could have been cut without hurting a damn thing, and it ballooned their budget by ten million. 1Every episode out of the remaining 11 had at least one “wait, but THEY JUST SAID…” moment in it, and the whole first season leads up to a belly flop of an ending.
Yes, it’s possible to watch, and even enjoy, Star Trek: Discovery. But leave your brains in the bucket by the door. You can pick them up again on your way out.
Yes, Virginia, there is a difference between taking snapshots and taking photographs.
Here is what that difference is:
A snapshot is something you take on the spur of the moment. It’s meant to capture an event, or a memory, to remind you of what it was like being there at that moment. It’s usually unplanned, and usually not designed.
A photograph, however, is an expression of photography as an art form. Every factor is taken into account by the photographer: the lighting, the mood, the color balance, the composition, the thematic elements, the story the photograph tells.
This is a snapshot. I took it spur of the moment with almost no planning. It’s a fun subject, but other than that it’s nothing special.
Two fellows I met at a Dr. Who convention in 2015 who happen to look like Roger Delgado and Tom Baker.
And this is a photograph. This was a very different endeavor. This one was taken at Gallifrey One over the weekend, and this tableau presented itself in the convention’s hospitality suite. The lighting, the wall, and the young lady all just happened to be exactly right for this photo.
The subject was seated beneath a single light source that produced some fantastic surface modeling on her hair, her face, the dress, the subsurface scattering in her skin and the scarf, and created a dramatic chiaroscuro effect. The point source lighting beautifully modeled the geometry of her face, shoulder and hands, and the eye is led in sweeping arcs from one to the next. The subject has texture, from the delicate white scarf to her red satin dress, to the soft mute of the wall behind her, to the glowing human warmth of her skin. Light and dark dance together to create a sense of substance and presence, and it almost looks more like a clever painting than a photograph because of the color palette rich in that one specific color of red.
This is photography as art. This is a photograph.
I’ve seen paintings by Degas and Rembrandt that used this technique to great effect, so when I saw this happening before my eyes, I had to have the picture.
By the way, no, unless you’re the subject Brenna Koneval, you can’t have a copy. I don’t have a contract with Brenna to sell her likeness, so that means you can’t use it either. That’s why this photo has a watermark on it in a place that it would be very difficult to remove.
Photographers live for moments like these. Keep your eyes open. What makes it art is constructing the image in your head, knowing exactly what each part of the image is for and how it works, and then getting the camera, setting and subject to do precisely that thing.
I got totally lucky. I didn’t design this shot – it just happened in front of me, and I had eyes enough to see it in its moment of perfection, and ask the subject if I could take a photograph. She agreed, and this is the result, unretouched, unfiltered, unprocessed and unplanned – but seen with a photographer’s eye, and captured by intent.
I had posted the latter image on Facebook asking for help on the possibility of starting a side career in photography. What I got was this comment: “I’ve seen nothing in the other snapshots you’ve posted online to suggest that you have what it takes. This image is has a great subject and composition – but it’s poorly lit.”
So I looked at the photos this guy had posted himself. Every single one was a snapshot, lit brightly and colorfully, without a single thought given to lighting other than getting a good exposure. He had apparently never taken a photograph where artistic expression was the goal.
Like this one. Shot the same day, by myself, at the same SF convention in 2014. This is Michael J. Galloway, known as “Scratch” in LASFS circles (that stands for “Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society”), shot in natural light.
Michael J. Galloway – photography by Gene Turnbow
And that’s the difference between a snapshot and a photograph. And, specifically, why the self-styled critic on Facebook was full of baloney.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
People have been asking me what I think of Star Trek: Discovery, and I have to tell them that it’s just not wonderful.
The subject was seated beneath a single light source that produced some fantastic surface modeling on her hair, her face, the dress, the subsurface scattering in her skin and the scarf, and created a dramatic chiaroscuro effect. The point source lighting beautifully modeled the geometry of her face, shoulder and hands, and the eye is led in sweeping arcs from one to the next. The subject has texture, from the delicate white scarf to her red satin dress, to the soft mute of the wall behind her, to the glowing human warmth of her skin. Light and dark dance together to create a sense of substance and presence, and it almost looks more like a clever painting than a photograph because of the color palette rich in that one specific color of red. 
I’ve seen paintings by Degas and Rembrandt that used this technique to great effect, so when I saw this happening before my eyes, I had to have the picture. 
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