Jordan and Maitland
An unlooked-for campaign of insurgency against a corporate behemoth takes "corporate warfare" into space, but not in a manner the corporation wants!
COMMENTARY!
This series began in the vein of "shooting on location." In the past, I've nearly always shot character images in my studio (that is, in my apartment) and superimposed those on to background photos taken at some remove. The idea with the book cover imagery here was to shoot the characters in situ, taking the camera and tripod, costumes and props along, so that the source material could be inter-leaved with little or no guess work as to how they related to their surroundings and to each other. The perspective depicted would be as it was in the frames; the spatial relationship between characters would be mostly correct, and the lighting and its cast shadows would be more consistent. The biggest problem I had was actually getting the frame to encompass the characters I imagined showing, and eliminating anything in the frame that would look "wrong." For the most part, it worked, and with the exception of the third book I added little or nothing beyond the blaster fire from the energy weapons. Book three, however, just wanted "more," more environment or atmosphere, but that is all behind the figures shown.
Once I started down the path of the magazine article, I would have preferred to continue in that vein, but I couldn't quite; there are only so many places I felt I could do the location photography, so for several of those character images I was back to the "tried and true" method, but I'm happy with the results.
Why the magazine article became such a "thing," I can't say. I just followed the rabbit, I suppose. It would up being a longer project than I thought it would. It was going to be the group photo by itself, modeled after the spotlight articles in magazines like Vanity Fair - an excuse, really, to put the characters in "nice" clothes. But I just couldn't cram enough information into a single caption, so down the rabbit hole I went. The OSG office photograph is a modified image of the Bank of America tower, which seems kinda' appropriate.
Including out-takes!
