Pipe Dream, winning entry in the November, 2006, Photos.com Challenge (click to enlarge).

David first came to the attention of Graphics.com members with the submission of his Pipe Dream entry to last November's Photos.com Challenge. The image's technical mastery and breadth of vision, combined with his ingenious use of the provided photos and those he'd taken himself, added up to a blockbuster entry that had no trouble snagging a top spot that month.

We've learned more about David since then via his subsequent Photos.com Challenge entries, several of them winners, as well as his participation in the forums and even the most recent AbleStock.com Design Brief. But our curiosity remained piqued. We wanted to know more about the man behind these unique images, and we're pleased that David recently agreed to our request for a profile. What follows below is David's response to our request for background information:

David Macdonald shooting Gandhi My Father in India.

I am an Englishman now living in Brussels, Belgium. Married to a Viennese, and having two multi-lingual sons, I view myself as a European. Between us our family speaks five languages. By reason of my work, I've had the good fortune to travel a huge portion of the world, both developed and remote.

The son of a photographer, I was, by the age of eight, already taking photographs and able to use a darkroom. A school background that combined heavy emphasis on the arts, alongside the disciplines of advanced mathematics and engineering drawing, led to rather diverse abilities which, together with my background, came together naturally in professional photography.

I am now in my forty-fourth year of lighting and photographing for film and television. My latest project, a major two and half hour Indian movie, Gandhi My Father, is scheduled for release this August.

David's first published illusion, The Terrace, can be found all over the Web (click to enlarge).

Completely self taught in computer graphics, at well over fifty years old I discovered Corel PhotoPaint bundled with a scanner, started to play with it and was soon exploring other graphics applications. This has now become a passion equalled only by my lifetime passion for cooking.

My prime interest is the creation of photorealistic M.C. Escher-like illusions combining photography and computer-generated imagery. A number of these are published in illusion books and can be found on the Web.

I create the basic construction of an illusion in vector and sometimes 3D software. These elements are brought into Photoshop CS3 Extended, with which I do ninety percent of all my work. Here they are combined with purpose-taken digital photographs (and recently some Photos.com downloads) to create the final image.

The images are first composited "flat" without lighting. I then approach them exactly as I would an unlit film set, and add life and atmosphere by "lighting" them in Photoshop. Although the physical techniques are worlds apart, the mental and visual approach is virtually identical.

An idea for a board game based on an impossible structure, containing 22 separate impossibilities. Can you spot them all? (click to enlarge)

I use a large A3 (12" x 18") drawing tablet with the pen in my right hand and the five button thumbwheel mouse in my left. The mouse is set up not to move the cursor, but its buttons are mapped to all the main navigation and modifier keys, so that I never touch a keyboard except for such functions as naming layers. I find that the flow from mind to screen is more fluid and instinctive this way.

To avoid the predictable "digital" look, I use almost no plugins or complex filters, preferring to work entirely by hand. My philosophy has always been that the subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is likely to be inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it!

By and large my images are very large indeed, being intended for printing and framing. Image sizes of 50 megapixels and larger using more than a hundred layers are commonplace and can lead to file sizes of 1 to 2 gigabytes for a single image.

For the vector constructions I use mostly CorelDRAW with Isocalc, an isometric plugin. I try to avoid 3D, which I find a bit mechanical, but when I do need it I use the incredibly quick and intuitive Sketchup 6 for basic construction and "thinking aloud," and Strata CX 5, which is made to complement Photoshop and can render to multiple Photoshop layers, for more complex constructions and renders.

I use a Mac computer exclusively except for certain software that requires Windows. The recent introduction of the Intel-based Mac, which can run both OS X and Windows, means that a PC will soon be completely a thing of the past for me.

For the creation of his winning entry for the March, 2007, Photos.com Challenge, which was based on images from The Book of Kells, David downloaded additional photos from Photos.com (top). The middle illustration shows an initial "flat" composite without lighting. The final image has "lighting" added in Photoshop (click to enlarge).

I discovered Graphics.com last November and I love it. Aside from a direct line to all that is latest in software, and so on, it has a wonderfully positive atmosphere. Most of all I love the Photos.com Challenge. The spirit of competition is very generous and light hearted, and it is a great way to learn and garner ideas and inspiration from others who would appear, for the most part, to be self taught like myself, and who contribute not so much for the prizes as for the sheer joy of doing what they love.

Readers can respond to David Macdonald's profile by contacting him directly.

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