Scans_Daily

Practicality. With photoshop all things are possible, but IRL lining up the elements as he presents them would be would be well beyond daunting, into the level of "quantum miracle."

Frex, look at the last panel here:



That is a dang good panel! It could be rendered much better, true, but when you judge it by depth and storytelling it works.

It's not in perspective. Things don't converge. Now, one reason they don't fall into line is because Trimpe wasn't much into rendering. But another reason it failed is that he set himself a one heck difficult task! You are looking through trees almost directly down at some things, just grazing across others, with things grotesquely manipulated for size (like the B-29 sandwiched between a red truck and a building).

Now, you could get all this information into a photograph, especially since things are recognizable from much smaller profiles. But it would never be arranged like this. Even with models on a set you'd have an incredibly difficult time with it. Either the truck covers more of the jet or the jet covers more of the building, and I just don't know how you'd get that last plane into the frame like that unless you used severe flattening with a telephoto, in which case how are you getting the background to rise up like that? Not even mentioning how you're looking down on the tower somehow, but only grazing across the wings of the B-29s.

I hope that's a satisfying answer; I'm trying to verbalize my experience as a photographer and it's resisting verbalization. Maybe I should strike out "photographically impossible" and replace it with "I couldn't do it."

It's great cartooning though.



Panel three: How would you focus the camera here?

The whole page is loopy, mostly because things are just not in the habit of arranging themselves like that. At least my reference photographs never come out half that clever and cut-and-dried. "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself."