(Roughly) Daily

Belgian artist Ben Heine has no interest in leaving well enough alone.  In a series he calls “Pencil vs. Camera,” he creates photos in which he matches drawings to the subject of the shot…

As he explained to The Telegraph (from whence, the photo above)…

There are four ways that I produce my work… There is the traditional way, which is to simply draw the picture and hold out your hand with the scenery behind it. With this method I always remember that there has to be a contrast between your imagination and the reality of the photo. The second way is slightly different in that I print a very large picture of a background scenery and then place this on the wall and hold the drawing up to it. This gives me time to re-touch my work during and after. The third is to take a picture of my hand holding the drawing and then digitally match them up with a totally different background that I have photographed. I do not follow that particular method often. And the fourth and final way is to use the computer to create a digital background and add a digitally drawn picture to the scene.

For more, visit the Telegraph article linked above, or Ben’s own site.

As we make an addition to our mental catalogue of ways to mediate reality, we might send a toner-smudged copy of a birthday card to Chester Carlson, the inventor of “electrophotography” (which came to be known as “xerography”); he was born on this date in 1906.  Carlson developed the process– which involved sensitizing a photoconductive surface to light by giving it an electrostatic charge– between 1934 and 1938; but while he immediately protected his invention with a tangle of patents, he wasn’t able to obtain funding for further development until 1944.  In 1947 he sold the commercial rights for his invention to the Haloid Company, a small manufacturer of photographic paper… which later became the Xerox Corporation.

source: University of Rochester