Over the following years I've won another competition in Atari World magazine, came highly ranked in some of the early IRTC competitions (top 12%) and created artwork for two audio CD's which have been published. My main focus these days is a little bit less on the surreal side of scenes and more on the spacecraft modeling (around the TTA background that can be found in other areas of the website) and enhancing fractal scenes with a mixture of effects using POV-Ray and Photoshop.

Digital Waterfalls

Digital Waterfalls (or DW for short) came about when I met up with an old college friend Dave Bennett and introduced him to raytracing in the summer of 1993. Between us after a year, we started to knock out some images and needed somewhere to show them off. At the time, I was registered on a BBS called Raytech and various people and groups showed off their scenes created with a variety of programs such as POV, QRT, Vivid and Lightwave. We needed a name for our little 'group' so I came up with 'Digital Waterfalls'. After Dave had asked me what drugs I had been taking (none, I should add!) to come up with such a title, after abandoning Raytech after a while we finally got access to the internet and set up the first DW gallery in the summer of 1996.

Our galleries went through various incarnations until Dave decided to get his own domain name (2Surreal.com) and focus more on the web design side of things as a showcase for his images, whereas I stuck with plain 'old simple HTML and more on the image side of things. The two websites (2S and DW) are still linked as you will no doubt see and Dave and I still collaborate on projects, but the change in emphasis with the two sites allows us to concentrate on our preferred methods of displaying our galleries.

The Terran Trade Authority

Like other people who are fans and have obtained these books, I was bought the first in the series 'Spacecraft 2000-2100AD' when I was about nine years old by my parents. The books were colourful and had a compelling background to the scenes. My brother and I spent hours re-drawing the images from the books and designing our own and gained further inspiration from the next books in the series; 'Great Space Battles' and 'SpaceWreck', of which I still have, though the first book is looking a little worn now! My brother had the fourth book 'Starliners' bought him - I eventually tracked my own copy down around twenty-five years later which cost about 10 times the original price! The books and artwork have provided a constant inspiration for designing spacecraft and futuristic scenes of my own. As my raytracing skills have got better, I've turned them more towards re-creating and expanding the original content of the TTA books which I hope to continue to do over the next few years. A number of books, the 'Galactic Encounters' series by Steven Caldwell (aka Stewart Cowley) also provide some expanded background to the TTA books but the quality of artwork isn't as consistently good as the original TTA books. However, I would still recommend obtaining these books if you wish to complete your collection.

Disclaimer and Rant

I should point out, that Digital Waterfalls has NOTHING to do with pictures of waterfalls or streams. It is purely a name, for some reason, some people feel the need to ask for pictures of waterfalls. Sorry ' you?re looking in the wrong place! If you've been sent here by a website that says I keep such images, then tell 'em their link is wrong! Thanks!

Hardware and Software

As you've probably guessed by now, I'm a die-hard Atari fan. My old ST is still working (20+ years old now!) though the modelling software used under emulation on my PC has finally been retired, replaced by AC3D in August 2006. I started out with a 1Mb 8MHz ST, then to 4Mb, then a 5Mb 386SX 20MHz PC, up to a Pentium 60MHz, 550MHz Pentium III and I now my final set up is this:-

2GHz Core 2 Duo laptop, 1Gb RAM, 120Gb hard disk.

POV-Ray software, versions, 3.6, 3.1g and 3.02. MetaCreations Bryce 4.1 and 5.0, AC3D 6.2, Ultrafractal 2.05, Spiraliser 1.2, BioWin 1.0, LParser 4, Photoshop 5.5, and Paint Shop Pro 4.1 and various conversion utilities I've collected over the years.

Inspirations

I'm a big fan of the work by Peter Elson - his artwork in the TTA books 'Great Space Battles, Starliners and SpaceWreck' along with his collaboration with Chris Moore in 'Parallel Lines' really kicked off my interest in sci-fi artwork and there haven't really been any books published like them since the late 1970's and early 1980's. I also admire the work by Chris Moore, Tony Roberts, Angus McKie, Chris Foss and Fred Gambino - links to some of these artists can be found in the 'Links' section.

Where to now?

I want to carry on developing my skills with POV and Bryce (a slow process!) and building more into the TTA background that is used for some of my scenes, get some posters printed and displayed somewhere. You never know, I might even get to do a few more CD covers one day?