Text to Speech Readthrough

There are fourteen days left until The Field is released and I’m going through the final read throughs. I’ve found the best way to catch errors and to tweak a manuscript is hearing it read out loud.

I use Scrivener for my books and one great feature is the speech synthesizer. You can read your manuscript out loud yourself, but after awhile your throat starts to hurt and you still miss a lot. At least I do. Having a separate voice read it helps immeasurably. I’m making three read-through passes through the book to catch all the typos and polish the manuscript. It’s drudge work at times, but necessary. If you’re considering releasing a book, listen to it at least once before hitting the upload button.

RIP Nikon 3100

My little Nikon 3100 finally broke for good. Here’s the last shot I took with it:

 

I took this camera with me everywhere, dug sand out of the lens extender with a pen knife on a beach in Mexico, took shots in Detroit neighborhoods where you were a sitting duck if you stood still for over a minute, kids birthday parties and countless other scenarios. The lens only stayed sharp when fully wide angle and now the on-off switch is shot. I’ve had this camera for about eight years and it took a lot of abuse, being my primary street photography camera. I’m really going to miss it, and I’m not sure what to replace it with. Thinking about a Leica C or a Canon S120.

Here are some links to some of the 3100 shots:

http://stefanstudios84.wordpress.com/around-detroit/

http://stefanstudios84.wordpress.com/around-detroit-2/

http://stefanstudios84.wordpress.com/freeway-abstractions/

 

Graphic Novel First Steps Part II

As stated in the last post, I’m experimenting with photographic backgrounds with hand drawn characters to produce a graphic novel. For practice and fun I’m putting a recurring strip up on this blog entitled JUSTICE – DETROIT STYLE. I’ll show the tools I use, the process to produce the panels and I will also post the script so you can see how that works.

Here’s the first panel I’m playing with:

I took the photo earlier this week and used Pixelmator for everything. If you have a Mac, Pixelmator is the way to go. Here’s a post about it here: http://stefanstudios84.wordpress.com/blog/ If you don’t have a Mac, you can use GIMP which is open source and free. GIMP is a great tool for creating graphics and manipulating images. If you have Photoshop then you’re all set.

The main character is Rick Justice who appears like a normal guy but takes extreme justice into his own hands. The first story is worked out which will result in about eleven or twelve panels. After that I’m going to make it up as I go along. I’m working on the characters (bad guys, Rick’s girlfriend, victims, etc.) now for the first story and for future installments.

Graphic Novel First Steps

I started some preliminary work on a graphic novel tonight. I plan on making it little different than the normal graphic novel fare where the backgrounds will be photographs with the characters layered on top. I’m not sure how well this is going to work, but I’ll document the steps here. I’ve been wandering around Detroit taking background shots and started character sketches tonight. Here’s the first one:

The drawing is a candidate male character. Above are a couple of street shots in Detroit. Next to the drawing is a Royal Langnickel pencils set that I came to appreciate in about two minutes. If you want to do any reasonably serious pencil sketches, this is the set to get. I got it for $28.75 on Amazon.

My next post will be the first attempt at scanning a character drawing and layering it into a photograph, probably using Pixelmator.