12-3-06

Day 114 of 365 days.

Yesterday, I was "called out." In a nice and friendly way, sure. But make no mistake about it, Jack Scoresby and Stephen Poff laid a punk card down right in front of me. Jack and Stephen are fellow photographers, who also both happen to be doing this crazy 365 Days project and both happen to be big comic book geeks like myself. A couple days ago, Stephen posted a picture which he dedicated to Jack and me. Then yesterday, Jack dedicated his 365 shot to Stephen and me. They both then pointed out that I'd be a total jerk not to follow suit. They were right.

I actually thought of the idea for this shot last night. But then when I got up to do it this morning, I discovered that the lens I wanted to use was filthy and I didn't have any lens cleaner. So I rushed off to the camera store at the mall to get some and decided I should run some other errands while I was out. So I eventually I got home and took the shot but then went to work on it and discovered that I only had under 3 gigs of hard drive space free. For me that's nothing. So I had to clean out some old photos to my external terrabyte drive. I finished with that just before people came over to watch the football game. I spent the entire game and some time after it with Photoshop and a Wacom tablet. I am happy to say that my beloved Steelers managed to win, though.

So anyway, this picture is dedicated to Jack and Stephen. For the uninitiated, the character I am portraying here is Venom. A Spiderman villain and sometimes anti-hero. I actually hate Venom (his existence invalidates Web of Spiderman #1, one of my all-time favorite comics). And I'm not terribly fond of the artist who created him, Todd McFarlane, who's drawing style I attempted to emulate in this photo (down to his annoying signature banner taking up valuable composition space). However, I thought this would be a fitting tribute to Stephen's penchant for superhero-iffying himself and Jack's penchant for dark, macabre, face obscuring artwork. I recommend everyone check out their work. I very much enjoy it.

365 days