“Technological Breakthrough” cover for BYTE magazine, January 1986.
Byte’s January, 1986 issue had a focus on robotics. Mr. Tinney reused a robot claw he had painted for the April, 1985 issue and showed it hatching out of an egg. I re-created Tinney’s vision as if it were real, and as if a photographer had been standing next to Tinney as he painted.
(I sell prints of my photos at very reasonable prices. For information, please contact me.)
This was an obvious cover for me to re-create, since I had made a model of the claw for my other re-creation, Intelligent Reflections.
Or at least, so I thought. In my initial test photographs, I realized that the claw in Tinney’s Intelligent Reflections cover was much larger, in proportion to its “wrist”, than the claw in Technological Breakthrough. I had to either redesign and re-manufacture the claw, or Photoshop it. I chose to do the latter.
The ribbon cable was “posed” with stiff, aluminum craft wire. The egg was a goose egg – there are people who sell emptied, cleaned out eggs!
I wrestled with the background. I tried a continuous sheet, starting underneath the egg and bending upwards to cover the wall, to reproduce the background in Tinney’s painting. But ironically, even though it was real, it looked fake. So I ended up with two different sheets.