Woof! Up close and personal

This, above, is a typical shot of the wolves at Brookfield Zoo, when they're on the top of the hill.


This is what you get when you have a f-11 lens, aka a 1.6-meter-ish telescope mounted to your SLR. Yes, this wolf is on the top rock in the photo above.

These are both from 2006, two different trips.

Thunder-Duck, and a Wolf

Click on the pictures to embiggen, BTW (embiggen - good word, thanks Yarn Harlot)

Hmm. Clever of me to call this Otter-Dracos Pictures instead of Photographs, as these aren't photos (obviously). They're drawings that Ron scanned in, brought into Adobe Illustrator, and traced/cleaned up (hence the awsome display of symmetry). So I probably should have put the copyright as belonging to both of us, but I doubt he'll be fussed.

The first one is a Northwest Coast-style wolf's head I was working on for myself. I forget how many versions I've gone through as I worked on it in the last mumble years, this time I finally got it right, I think. I think the key was getting rid of outlines. You may or may not notice that the bits are free-floating, not necessarily connected. But it works, you end up seeing the face as a whole. It would be more detailed, but for design constraints the final medium will impose.

As we were finishing the wolf face up, I had the idea to do a Thunderbird-Duck. Yes, with DucKon in mind. I couldn't resist. I did it. Hence the second drawing, ThunderDuck with the duck face in the chest. More semi-detached bits, although less obviously than in the wolf face. More detail, too. I knew that I could put more detail in it.

Then Ron had fun, took out the duck face, and put in the wolf face (with some stretching and/or squashing to make it fit, but not obvious deformation).

In some ways, the ThunderDucks are just . . . wrong. But they came out so well! We also have colored and black-and-white filled-in versions, in which the moustache-y bit in the beak is gone, because it was waaaaay too much like a moustache.

If the DucKon leadership leaves me as Publications again, I do solemnly promise . . .
. . .
. . . NOTHING! I have the POWER! I have the SOFTWARE! I have the IMAGES! BWAH HA HA HA HA!

Looky looky! New Bloggy!

Since LJ's picture storage/uploading makes me crazy, and our other Blogger blog is for Otter Necessities, I've started Yet Another Blog for general picture-posting. And here it is, dracos-otter-pictures.blogspot.com. I'll add links from LJ and Otter Necessities' blog.

So, about these pictures: A while back I decided I'd like to take pictures in Hillside Cemetery, which is on Smith Street, about a block or two north of the Palatine train station, as there seemed to be some older stuff there. New headstones are boring. Old headstones (and footstones, it turns out), are interesting. So we finally got there on Wednesday. We went about 6 pm, because the sun is getting lower and so the light is more interesting.

I think Ron took the first picture, and a couple others, I took the other two posted, and most of them for the evening. And most of them had to be rotated counter-clockwise a couple degrees - but some had to be rotated clockwise - woo! drunk Lon! Straightening was made even more fun by the fact that a lot of the older stones lean. And the cemetery is hilly. Finding a good line to straighten on was sometimes entertaining.

I need to work on my composition. Perhaps that's why I bought a book on composition a week or ten days ago?

Not sure these are the best of the batch, but they're the ones I grabbed this morning.