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

Saving my Old Photos of Prague

It was over a decade ago that I visited Prague. That was before I switched to digital cameras, and I shot two rolls of 35mm film during the few days I spent in the city. I was shooting high speed black and white film, which doesn't play nicely with airport x-ray machines. Many of my photos from Prague were damaged. The photo immediately below is one of my favorite undamaged photos from my trip to Prague. But now that I've been spending time going through my old negatives, it occurred to me that I could attempt to salvage some of the prints in Photoshop. Digital salvation isn't as good as the real thing, but it has still been fun to see the foggy prints come back to life. The second and third images below show two photos I'm in the process of restoring: the stone detail of the Charles Bridge and the city lit up at night.

Shooting digital brings its own challenges. While the images on memory cards won't be damaged by x-ray machines, they can still get corrupted, as one of my friends learned the hard way recently. And  even though you can fit hundreds of photos onto a memory card, you need to remember to download the photos so you don't lose them if anything happens to your camera or card. I've got over a hundred photos on my camera right now, so I need to follow my own advice.


 —Gigi

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Edinburgh

As February draws to a close, I haven't yet completed a draft of that novella set in Edinburgh I'm working on (these things always take longer than expected, as I should have learned by now!). But here's a last set of Edinburgh photos before exploring a new set of photos for March.

Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, was born in Edinburgh and attended medical school at the University of Edinburgh. He based Sherlock Holmes on his med school lecturer Joseph Bell. There's a bronze Sherlock Holmes statue in Conan Doyle's honor on Picardy Place, near where he was born.

Not far past the statue is the walk up Calton Hill, which goes past an old cemetery...

...and leads to some of the best views of the city. 

 —Gigi

Edinburgh Through a Fisheye Lens

Today was one of those days where I felt really happy with my decision to organize my photos in this public way through the Gargoyle Girl photo blog. Without publicly declaring that I'd go through more than fifteen years worth of old photos, most of which are negatives, I never would have stuck with the project.

I said at the beginning of February that I'd post cool photos of Edinburgh this month, since I'm working on a novella set in the city. Once I said it out loud (well, I wrote it online, but you know what I mean), I had no choice but to stick to going through my digitized Edinburgh photos from over the years. As I did so, I had the strongest feeling there was a set of photos I'd forgotten. After a few minutes of digging, I found a CD full of scanned negatives from a trip from six years ago, right before I switched to taking most of my photos digitally. One of the rolls of film was shot with a fun fisheye lens. Here are a few of those photos.

Edinburgh Castle in the distance from Princes Street.

The Bedlam Theatre, where I acted in a play during college. I love the architecture of this building.

An iconic British phone booth.

—Gigi

Edinburgh's Alleys

All month I'll be working on a novella with an Edinburgh setting, so here are some more photos of Edinburgh. Today I'm posting a few photos of closes—the shared alleyways between old buildings that fill the city. They're often steep, narrow, and full of mystery.

—Gigi

Edinburgh in Black & White

I'm currently writing a mystery set in Edinburgh. The characters in my first novel, Artifact (released August 2012), make a quick stop in Edinburgh on their quest to find a missing treasure. I love Edinburgh, so I was always disappointed that they didn't get to spend longer in the city. Now that I'm working on a novella with the same characters, I realized Edinburgh would be the perfect place to set this particular mystery story.

Going through my old Edinburgh photographs from over the years, I noticed that I shot a lot of black & white film there. The photos below are all scans of black & white negatives. It's a mysterious city, making it the perfect place for both black & white photos and for a mystery story.

Edinburgh Castle from Princes Street

  

Old Calton Cemetery, Edinburgh

View of Edinburgh from Calton Hill

Looking out at the city from Edinburgh Castle

—Gigi

The Moss-Covered Dunnottar Castle Ruins

I was recently designing a book cover for a book of poetry, and I thought of a photograph that would work wonderfully for it. It was the top image below, a doorway at the Dunnottar Castle ruins in Scotland. When I pulled out my Dunnottar Castle photos to find the image, I realized there was what looked like a face carved in stone above the doorway. I guess I gravitate towards gargoyles and grotesques even when I don't mean to!

I haven't looked at these images for a while, so I'm glad I pulled out these old photos of Dunnottar. This dramatic Scottish landscape is why I set part my first mystery novel in this region of Scotland. I'll talk more about Dunnottar later in the year, but for now, here are some more photos of the moss-covered ruins.

—Gigi