New Gargoyle Pets & A New Book

Dorian the gargoyle has a new stuffed animal friend to keep him company on my bookshelf. Here they are with the new Henery Press edition of Artifact: A Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery that hits shelves today!

Dorian the gargoyle with Gigi Pandian's mystery novel Artifact.

Dorian's gargoyle cousin with an eBook card of Artifact.

Dunnottar Castle, Scotland, Overlooking the Setting of ARTIFACT

My debut mystery novel, Artifact, goes on sale this week. There are links to buy the book in the side-bar of the blog, but since this is a mysterious photography blog, I'm going to keep things related to photography! (You can read more about Artifact here.)

The setting for the book was inspired by my travels to the Highlands of Scotland, especially the Dunnottar Castle ruins. The site of the ancient fortress is a chunk of land on cliffs that stretch out into the North Sea, only accessible by walking down a steep path and up another one. It's no wonder the site was used as a fortress beginning in the Dark Ages and played a role in Scotland's history throughout the centuries.

In ARTIFACT, historian Jaya Jones travels from San Francisco to London to a Pictish archaeological dig in the Highlands of Scotland, piecing together the secrets of a lost Indian treasure that are hidden in a Scottish legend from the days of the British Raj.

 —Gigi

Turning a Photo into a Book Cover

Last week I finished designing the book cover for my mystery novel, Artifact, that comes out this summer. This week I've been doing the interior layout to the book. Therefore I've been too busy to do much in the way of photography lately. But I realized I have been working on some cool photography—just not in the way I usually do.

Today I thought I'd show the process I used to turn a photograph I took in India into my book cover.

I took the photo below of Red Fort in Delhi, India, almost fifteen years ago. It's a nice enough photo, but not especially great. But I love the structure of those arches, so the image stuck with me. When I scanned a batch of my old negatives several years ago, I digitized the photo.

Once I knew I'd be designing my own book cover for my mystery novel, this image immediately came to mind, since the plot involves an artifact from India that has somehow wound up on a Scottish archeological dig.

I knew the photograph wasn't strong enough on its own to become a book cover, but certain elements were. In Photoshop, I turned the image to black and white, and used Threshold to make all the values of the image black or white—no shades of gray.

I liked the look of that high contrast image, but it didn't lend itself to the kind of background image I envisioned. So I inverted the image, with the result show below.

Now this was an image I could use. In InDesign, I took the image and applied some color and used a transparency to show a map of the UK behind the Indian arch. Here's the final cover.

—Gigi