By Ben Kessler of the Graphics.com Network

Dateline: October 11, 2007
Read more Insight articles

You know an image by "Lathspell" when you see one. A subtly adventurous color palette and sleek simplicity of nearly Scandanavian proportions are his identifying marks. Even the afterlife is depicted in his portfolio as a symmetrically split pair of white staircases offering only a glimpse of heaven and hellfire. Lathspell's minimalism allows him to communicate ideas effectively and universally; images such as negotiation are just specific enough to evoke situations and struggles that know no borders. His heavy abstraction is complemented by a somewhat dark wit; check out dead manager for an example of his humor.

Via email, Lathspell explained his thought process and working methods to me in generous detail.

Ben Kessler: Who are you outside of microstock?

Lathspell: My name is Jörg. I will turn 36 this December, and I was born and raised in the German Democratic Republic, which was better known at the time as East Germany. Dresden is my home town—I love it, and I'm not going to move ever.

How and when did you start out in microstock? Do you have any formal training?

I started in 2002 with uploading to a small, weird Canadian site where people shared photos based on a 5:1 ratio and where you could actually earn $0.05 per download. This site is obviously istockphoto.com, and being there from almost the beginning of the microstock boom was my only training. Which also means that I don't consider myself a professional

At the very beginning I tried to earn some credits there by uploading pretty mediocre pictures out of my 2-megapixel digicam. But then in 2004 I remembered what "fun" it had been years ago to do raytracing stuff on a 100 MHz Pentium processor—every simple thing took hours to raytrace. I gave it a second try on a faster computer, and suddenly I saw these files selling! The most important reason for this success was probably that typical microstock pictures at this time came with image quality of 2-4 megapixels, while I was able to render pictures with 6, 12, 20 or even 50 megapixels.

What do you use to create your images?

80% of the work is done with Persistence of Vision (Pov-Ray), a freeware raytracing program with a very long tradition. This software's scene description is text-based—with all the pros and cons. You can create a scene containing thousands of objects with just a few lines of code, but you could also write a hundred lines of code without being able to create the one object you'd like to build.

The post processing is done with Photoshop, which is used for either reducing or adding noise (rendered files are sometimes just too smooth, gradients sometimes are showing a heavy and unnatural banding, so adding some noise actually can improve the impression of a picture!).

For the very small amount of vector files in my portfolio I used CorelDRAW, and the few real photos were taken with my Olympus E-500. But there's almost nothing less successful in the microstock industry than my photos :).

Whatever graphic work I do happens 100% at the computer. I don't draw sketches by hand—every scene or idea growing in my mind goes immediately into a scene description or bitmap or vector file.

Besides creating for microstock, what do you do on an average day?

I work as a graphic freelancer, mostly in print design. I think in CMYK or Pantone, rather than in RGB. My typical clients are small and midsized companies to which I offer the whole range of corporate design artwork—logos, brochures, websites etc.

A typical day starts at noon with a quick check through a few websites (microstock and others). Then I do all kinds of phone calls, which is followed by planning the order of my work and then doing the beloved "emergency orders" (which always need to be done by yesterday). After taking lunch with my wife I then start the "serious" part of my day at 8 p.m., working until 6 a.m. the next morning.

Do you make your images with specific uses in mind? Do you design for a specific audience?

That's very difficult to answer! Sometimes I do rather abstract renderings with no clear intention—it's like stumbling around at the beginning and happily finding a right direction at the end. And sometimes I do just specific objects like my "server" pictures. Of course these server pictures are targeting a certain market, but since I have no idea about who is actually using them I can't even tell whether they are used the way I imagined them to be used.

Concerning the more abstract work: there are pictures with a (hopefully obvious) message, and there are a lot of pictures where my only intention was to find "nice" colors or a "nice" composition of objects (or a combination of both).

Atom, for example, is a very early work which I still consider as one of the best things I've ever done—and it's a picture which has almost not sold at all, on any microstock site. The market for pictures depicting an atom-like thing seems to be pretty small :). I can't remember how much time it took to develop the scene and raytrace the whole thing with its depth of field and reflections—it could have easily been 8 or 10 hours altogether. But this was done for fun!

The server pictures sell pretty well, so it seems as if they are what the market asks for.

What inspired your distinctive style? In an image such as server room 2 (shown below), one of your most popular, I see a little bit of Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Am I wrong?

Sorry, but you are wrong :). Of course, I've seen this movie once or twice, but it didn't have that deep an impact on me.

The basic idea behind most of my server pictures is to give them an impressive look, to make the objects in these scenes look as dramatic and giant as possible without crossing the line to surrealism. To attract clients, a picture needs some tension. That's why I love to use wide-angle or even fisheye lens camera simulations. Straight lines and right angles are a little too boring to draw much attention.

And since I'm not bound by any physical limitations I can play with angles, positions and light as long as I want—that's why I do renderings: I can stay in my office, sitting safe in my desk chair. Taking pictures like mine the conventional way would involve hours of crawling on floors or flying below ceilings :).

Your illustrations are quite abstract, reducing humans to primary colors and simple shapes. Do you think this technique works better for microstock than a more detailed approach? Do you think you will work in more detail in the future?

I believe that the typical microstock client needs pictures which "work" in a second. Most of the clients are not looking for art but rather for basic "stuff" which can easily be completed with their own content and gets the attention of their audience the fastest way.

Abstract pictures can ease the problem of targeting a large group of people with all their own preferences and opinions. For example, a photo of a 30-year-old smiling female could carry the message of happiness to the audience, and depending on the situation, a simple neon green cube could do this too, but in a much shorter time.

I don't think that I will do work with more detail in the future—details may distract attention from the point of most importance, diluting the message or the composition.

Many of your illustrations show a "rebellious" object, one that doesn't look exactly like its counterparts. Why does this idea come up again and again in your portfolio?

To be honest: most of us are average people (like me), and average people (like me) are mostly attracted by the non-average things, by the rebels, the outsiders, the extraordinary people. That's why I use the "rebel" theme so often—it just catches your eye.

You certainly have many ways of showing the euro smashing the dollar. How do you come up with multiple variations on the same theme?

The first time I held euros in my hand I wasn't absolutely convinced that this would become a success story. Giving up the Deutschmark, mixing a rather strong national currency with the currencies of other nations was not particularly comforting to me.

When I started doing these euro versus dollar pictures it was about the idea of the dollar perhaps becoming weaker and weaker in the future. But take a look at today's exchange rates and you will find that these pictures are not even dramatic enough to reflect the current situation.

The euro versus dollar drop-shadow idea came when I was playing with a pen which was lit by my desk light from the side. The bulldozer theme? I have no idea where this was from. It was probably just when I did some design with the Compacta typeface and I realized that the euro symbol would make a pretty massive block in 3D. Adding the cylinders and putting something into the picture that could be smashed by that vehicle was an obvious consequence.

And finally, the idea for sinking dollar 1 (one of the very small number of real photographs in my portfolio) was from a song I heard during work with something about drowning ships in the lyrics—subliminal messages leading to strange pictures :).

Many of your images are somehow related to the corporate business world or economics, fields in which designers aren't usually very comfortable. How do you communicate to these worlds?

My wife is working in the field of economics. She knows a lot more about money, stocks, corporate finance etc. than me and so sometimes she's inspiring me by simply telling about her day at work!

The rest of my work is pure guessing about what could attract a potential buyer. As I have mentioned above: I have almost no idea about how my pictures are actually used.

Which of your illustrations is your favorite, and why?

Beside the atom image mentioned earlier, one of my favorites is probably winner's dice, because this picture took days to be built and raytraced. There was no Photoshop involved, except for saving the picture to JPEG. This is 100% Persistence of Vision and I'm proud of it.

Or for a last example: rainbow colors 2—simple math, friendly colors, perfect circles. This is what pleases my eyes.

How long does it take you to complete an image, on average?

From finding the idea to finishing the scene description it probably takes about 3-4 hours on average. The raytracing is mostly done overnight when I am sleeping, but there are some pictures in my portfolio which took about a day to render. Post processing usually takes about 30 minutes, because I always try to already get the best possible result from the raytracer.

Your work employs a variety of patterns. How do you create a visually appealing pattern?

Well, I just put things together in lines and rows and then I adjust the viewing angle until it looks good to me. Sometimes I play with algorithms for positioning virtual things in a virtual space, and then suddenly something comes up looking interesting enough to spend a few more hours of work on. And sometimes things are just growing in front of my closed eyes when I'm falling asleep. Not sure how many ideas got lost over the years because I just didn't find the strength to get up again and take some notes.

What can we expect from you in the future? Can you give us a glimpse of what you're working on now?

There are certainly more server and rebel pictures to come. This is what sells pretty well and makes creating other (less successful but nevertheless interesting) things possible.

Beside this I've some scene files with basic ideas waiting to be completed for months which I'm not sure will ever make it into a final bitmap. But winter is coming and so I will probably concentrate on brighter colors, higher reflection levels, more glamour, anything that makes the dark days friendlier. Imagine a neon glowing easter egg in front of a mirror preparing for disco :).

Don't miss the next Insight article on Graphics.com. Get the free Graphics.com newsletter in your mailbox each week. Click here to subscribe.