Have to shoot some reference photos for Ty and we’re out of toner for all the printers in the house. Pointed out that he can just look at the reference photos on his monitor which made him complain a lot–which makes me wonder how he ever managed back in The Old Days with those itsy little ol’ Polaroids. (To be fair, I do know that it’s because that means he’ll have to sit in his computer chair at his desk to draw, rather than lounging in his comfy drawing chair on the other side of the room.) And how much money we’ve saved with the switch to digital cameras! (Which got balanced out by all those children so…still broke!).
Ty always goes on and on about how good I am at taking all his reference photos–probably because I was always so conscious of how much that damned Polaroid film cost, and that you only got 10 (?) shots in a package. So, we had to make every one count.
And I always preferred shooting the photos to having to ‘star’ in them…I’ve told tales of being four days postpartum and having to sit on the exercise bike in my skivvies pretending to be Wonder Woman riding a kangaroo–seriously–and the baby started crying, so I had him in one arm, and posing the whole time. The following Batman cover I remember well. We would look at Ty’s sketches and try to figure out how to get the reference shot in just one photo–because of those pricey Polaroids! Nowadays, it would be three or four pictures. But for that one, I remember having to pile all the sofa cushions in the corner of the sofa and balancing precariously on top of them, head completely over the edge, preparing to topple to the floor at any moment. The Batman and Robin figures would have been so easy–either I would have stood at the top of our very steep stairs shooting down at Ty…or those might have been down with him lying down on the floor reaching out toward me.
I always wonder what the neighbours would have thought if they could have seen any of what we got up to for these shots…)
(I’ve Googled and Googled, and I can’t find Ty’s pinup of Wonder Woman riding a kangaroo…wish I could remember what it was for… It would have been done in February 1996, so it would have been published probably that summer).
KEIREN SMITH 