Having seen a great presentation for Ant-man at Siggraph this summer, they talked about their macro unit and shooting high resolution imagery for textures that would stand up full screen scrutiny at a micro level. Finally, time to upgrade my old Canon Rebel XTi. I’ve had this camera body for about 10 years now and figured I was due an upgrade. I had bought some of the L series lens over the years and always meant to upgrade the body. Sadly the years got away from me.

The DSLR cameras have really made huge leaps.

First, being that you can shoot video with them at HD quality. My second want was to have a full-frame camera. My Rebel XTi cameras has a sub-frame sensor meaning it has a smaller angle of view (by a factor of 1/1.6x) than a full-frame camera with any given lens. This 1.6x ratio is commonly called “Focal Length Mutliplier”. Any of my lens on the Rebel would have to be multiplied by 1.6 to have the same focal length on a 35mm camera. For example, a 100mm on the XTi will show the same field of view as a 160mm lens on a camera with a 35mm frame size. I wanted to get away from the conversion and have a true 1:1 ratio with my lens mm. My third want was higher resolution.

At the talk they mentioned using the Canon 5d. I begin researching what would be best for me. The 5d Mark III comes very highly recommended, but then I stumbled upon the new 5DS.  This camera has the highest resolution out there right now at a stunning 50.6 megapixels! The next highest pixel resolution camera is Nikon’s 36.3 megapixel D810. The 5D Mark III is 22.3 megapixels. To put this in context my old Rebel was only 10.1 megapixels. So really either of these cameras is a huge jump up for me. With the 5DS being brand new this summer versus the Mark III being two and half years old already. The 5DS being 5 times more megapixels it’s hard not to just go with it.

Here are some specs:

Rebel xTi                         3888 x 2592 pixels; 10.1 mb; Sub-frame; no video

5D Mark III                        5760 x 3840 pixels; 22.3 mb; Full-frame; HD 1080 video

5DS                                    8688 x 5792 pixels; 50.6 mb; Full-frame; HD 1080 video

The full-frame cameras are a bigger investment, but I feel worth it. After reading many reviews it seems that the 5DS is well worth it’s cost for the increase resolution and upgrades on it. Doing an upgrade on it now I feel confident that this camera could easily last me out next 10 years. I’ll let you all know what I decide.

Well, here is the finished Ghost Pirates illustration.

This was an extremely fun piece to paint. The text described the pirates not as what you would typically think as ghosts. They seemed solid in form but would hide or come out from the shadows and seemingly lived in the sea.

Here’s the final image

The show is up next month at the Last Bookstore in Downtown LA. The opening reception is Oct 3rd. Feel free to check the many awesome artists who participated in this fun spooky show.

I like keeping my old sketches and ideas for projects handy. You never know if you’d like to revive them. One of mine that I’ve toyed with was something I put together during my grad school days which was the 7 Ancient Wonders of the World. I wanted to come up with a story that would include them into it but yet show breadth of shots from various eras and locations. Here is the shot breakdown I drew many years ago.

I wrote up a storyline where you have the same character popping thru ancient Babylon, ancient Greece, NYC in 1930s, then finally ending on a space station in the Future. The idea for the story was in the future, people take vacations into the past.

I’ve been looking more possibly add The Lighthouse of Alexandria instead of Babylon.

I figured this could be very interesting piece to do, but the water might add some difficulty to it. Been really interested in this for a while.

Then there is the Temple of Zeus with the massive statue of Zeus

I had written this one into the original story line. It has lots of potential for camera angles, lighting, and being an interior piece would be very interesting to try. Plus this could a be great challenge for modeling and push my learning on how to model more complexly and use programs like Zbrush to help in this.

The challenge is how many pieces would I like to do? Do I want to try and take on this whole story idea or only do some random shots and see how far I can go? It would be lots of fun to shoot actors in costume and add footage to this. This is what I’m still wrestling with

The painting of the pirate is coming along. Here are some snaps of it building up. Now I still have some details to put in. I also am not sure about how dark it’s reading. I want the figure to melt into the background but I still need some popping of moonlight to pull his face/chest area out. The eyes are starting to read nice but feel they need more to them.

The finished piece will be on display later this year at “The Last Spookstore, A Horror Story Art show”, held at the awesome Last Bookstore in downtown LA. The show will be up for the month of October. There will be an opening for the show on October 3rd, so if you are in the downtown area please check out all of the fabulous artwork. For more info check this out: http://dwarfandgiant.com/lastspookstore/