Photos instead of art for published work

[DevP]

Suppose you get your digitial camera, some bored friends, a copy of Photoshop, and...

Are there any good/bad examples of photographs being used (instead of, or perhaps alongside, art) in published books?

[Jonathan Walton]

Little Fears makes good use of them, more in the layout of the opening pages than in the standard 1/2, 1/4-page illustration format of most roleplaying art.  Many games use altered photos (some very, very badly), but straight-up photos are hard to find.  As I recall, most newer Minds Eye Theater books from White Wolf use photos to open each section.  These are a mixed bag.  Some are pretty good (the people are dressed up in ways that are appropriate and not super-freaky-weird) and then some are just super-freaky-weird or, worse, offensive or ignorant looking (check out "Laws of the East" for people trying to look Asian, which can be as disrespectful as people wearing blackface).  In my experience, many LARP books use photos (the Fading Suns one did, though Nobilis' doesn't).

That's a start, at least.

[Daniel Solis]

Hooray! I was hoping someone would ask this eventually. Are you considering using photos for your spacerpunk game? It'd be interesting to see how editted photorealistic imagery could be used for a space setting. Christopher Shy used something like this technique in the Transhuman Space corebook, though he used considerable amounts of tweaking to produce his imagery. PUNK's going to be using photography, hopefully, but it'll be augmented to look like it's been through the copier a few too many times.

The problem with using photography is that your far more limited in your source material, those limitations mainly being the use of models and real-life locations. If you're not in a metropolitan area or don't have a lot of funds, your models will likely be limited to your extended circle of friends, who are, in turn, likely gamers excited about getting to dress up and be in a game book. That's a big danger when you're trying to evoke a certain feel and the art looks like a bunch of buddies dressed up for a costume festival. Truly natural models are very difficult to find for niche settings.

The other limitation, as mentioned, is location. Chances are that you're not in a location that looks much like the main setting of your game. Sure, you can do some photoshopping to add buildings, adjust lighting, and so forth, your local city can be made into a hulking metropolis but it's likely more literal footwork than just hiring and directing a good illustrator. On the opposite extreme, the natural scenery of your home town is difficult to transform into the sweeping landscapes of a rustic fantasy world.

There's a reason Peter Jackson went to the remote parts of New Zealand to film Lord of the Rings. Anything less would seem more like the old SNL skit where the goth kids made their own short film in their local park, but the mood was continually interrupted by people playing frisbee and riding bikes.

There is a big resource available to the enterprising art director in the form of stock photography. In any other professional field, using stock is usually a big no-no. It seems generic, unnatural and photography for photography's sake, instead of an organic solution to the desires of the art director. However, being an indie game designer with limited options, stock's not such a bad idea. It can be expensive, and not worth the price unless it's a really appropriate image, but some suitable photoshopping can make even the blandest pics real knockouts.

One last tip: Don't pull stuff from magazines or ads. Doing so is asking for a lawsuit. Even if you think you've augmented the images enough to avoid that legal headache, it's not up to you to decide.

Suppose you get your digitial camera, some bored friends, a copy of Photoshop, and...

All that stuff having been said, this is pretty much the source material for the photography in PUNK. I'm fortunate to be living in a town with a large university and an abundance of subcultures from all over the world. Though urban sprawls are a long distance away, I can still make do with character portraits of notable NPCs being mugshots of actual punks from around town.

[Valamir]

Beware however.  There is a sizeable contingent of people on RPG.Net who routinely nominate Legacy: War of Ages for worst game art "EVAR".  It is largely modified digital photos of the authors bored friends striking "fierce" poses.  I never figured it was all that bad, but it seems really roundly reviled...enough so that I'd be hesitant to use the technique unless I was pretty confident in my ability to do it well.  John Harper/Feng has some mad digital manipulating skillz that would qualify in this regard.

[iago]

Consider http://www.istockphoto.com/ for cheap photos of people you don't know.

[Trevis Martin]

Clinton's supplement urge for sorcerer uses photographs, which works for it pretty well.  I don't know his source for them off the top of my head though.

[Clay]

I think that using photos is a great idea. I would even go so far as to say that heavy work with photoshop isn't necessary. In fact, unless you're very good, heavy alteration is a bad idea because it will look like you spent too much time in photoshop.

Part of the trick is recognizing your limitations, and part of it is just putting in the work. You're going to take a lot more pictures than you're going to use. If you get one good picture in twelve, you're doing great.

I've wanted to do this for a game for quite a while now. It doesn't work for my current project, but I have another that's been simmering for a while where I want very much to use it.

[Eric Kimball]

I used Photoshop altered photos solely in the Essential Spectra game http://www.arrogantgames.com/spectra.  I think I came out quite well and I have not gotten any negative comments on using photos instead of drawings.  

I think the key is to know you medium.  There are many situation, actions, wardrobes that look very compelling in a drawing that come out just silly in a photo.  Also trying to make photos look like drawing using charcoal filters just makes your art look cheap.  Finally if your friends are fat and ugly in real life they are going to be fat and ugly in a photo no amount of manipulation can change that.

If you are going to use photo look at advertisements in magazines and art photography collections.  See how they layer and crop images to make them more powerful and iconic.  With pictures you have to be more abstract to make them interesting.

[jdagna]

Having spoken with Clinton Nixon, I know he gets a lot of his stock art from http://www.arttoday.com.  The trick with them is to find all of the pictures you want at your leisure, and then buy a $7.95 weekly membership in which you download all of them.  You can buy longer memberships, but all of them allow unlimited downloads and you can browse the low-res samples for free...

Art Today also has drawings and graphics in addition to photos.

I'm personally very opposed to photographs in RPG books.  One is that good stock photos are very hard to find for most RPG genres and other people have already discussed the difficulties of making good pictures in other ways.  I'm also opposed for more personal aesthetic reasons, but I'm not sure how many people really agree with me.

[anonymouse]

It's not an RPG (although I think it could be adapted for use as a mechanic in one), but the card game Lunch Money uses tweaked photos as the artwork on its cards. Maybe similar vein.

[xechnao]

If it is for the feel of fantasy I don't like photos. For every other setting I have no preference against them. But it is important to me that the type of art in a rpg book has the same base. For instance I wouldn't like a mix of paintings and photo based illustrations. I think it unbalances the atmosphere. This is my personal taste on the theorical level. I don't know if other people share the same one.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I'd like to remind everyone that this isn't a survey thread: "Do you like photos as art in role-playing games, and why?" That was not the inquiry. This thread concerns actual examples of photographics, for purposes of discussing how well or badly they work.

Let's stay focused (no pun intended) on that.

Best,
Ron