Thursday Post 10-30-08

Location

The three most important factors in buying a home are, location, location, location!
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Unknown Source

Galer, Mark. Location Photography: Essential Skills. Focal Press: Woburn, 2002.

This book covers various exercises that illustrate the importance of design and communication as well as helpful techniques when working with existing light or added light. Mark Galer teaches the leading photography course in the southern hemisphere at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. He also co-wrote and taught new online photography courses there. He has taught photography in the UK and Australia as well as freelanced as a commercial photographer in both the commercial and editorial world. He has also written; Photography Foundations for Art and Design, and co-written Digital Imaging: Essential Skills and Photographic Lighting: Essential Skills .

As my project moves along scouting locations is taking on more and more importance. First I was challenged to try and work with existing environments and now I'm moving more towards scouting locations that I can Photoshop to make it look like they were in. Currently, I need to find a candy store and a good spot in the woods with colorful leaves.

Sunday Post 10-26-08

Bryan Peterson

For over 30 years Bryan Peterson has been shooting professional commercial photography for clients such as Philips, Intel, and Citibank. Communication Arts Photography Annual has featured his work seven times, and Print Magazine has shwon him four times. He has also won the New York Art Directors Gold Award. He is a contributing editor for Popular Photography Magazine and has published four books, Understanding Exposure, Understanding Digital, Learning to See Creatively, and Beyond Portraits. Jim Infantio of AD-NY-Wunderman Worldwide has said "It is rare to find such a talented photographer who honestly has his ego in check. Brian is a team player from day one and always brings to the table a host of ideas!"His work is bright and bold, and though not always the cleanest of backgrounds (or foregrounds) they are still striking and powerful. He makes very interesting use of motion blur and sometimes captures intriguing high contrast lighting. His color palette is quite enviable.

Interview:
http://www.betterphoto.com/article.asp?id=67

Gallery:
http://www.veer.com/products/artistgallery.aspx?artist=8409

Website:
www.bryanfpeterson.com

Thursday post 10-23-08

Environment

We begin to see, therefore, the importance of selecting our environment with the greatest of care, because environment is the mental feeding ground out of which the food that goes into our minds is extracted.
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Napoleon Hill (1883-1970) American speaker and motivational writer.
http://en.proverbia.net

Peterson, Bryan. Learning to See Creatively: Design, Color, and Composition in Photography. Watson-Gutpill Publications: New York, 2003.

This book covers several areas of photography including environmental portraits, in which the author favors 35mm and 50mm focal lengths. Bryan Peterson has been a professional commercial photographer for over thirty years, shooting for clients that include American Express, BP, Kodak, and UPS. His work has been featured in the Communication Arts Photography Annual seven times, four times in Print Magazine, as well as being rewarded with the New York Art Directors Gold Award. He also serves as a contributing editor for Popular Photography Magazine and has published three other books, Understanding Exposure, Understanding Digital, and Beyond Portraits.

Recently I have been experimenting with the success of environmental portraits for my project. I don’t want to rely completely on a pure environmental portrait, in which none of the background is manipulated in Photoshop since I’ve often found that the environments don’t always lend themselves to looking good in a photo. Mostly the spaces are too small and the angles of things in the background get skewed and distorted in odd ways that don’t work for my images. I’m not sure if it qualifies as an environmental portrait if I photoshop the background, but I am taking that background from an actual environment and just manipulating where the person is in that environment to correct for physical impossibilities.

Simen Johan Lecture 10-15-08

Simen Johan

During this lecture I couldn’t help but think of all the times Tom has lectured us about how to speak about our work. He consistently told us that if we don’t sound excited about our work how can we expect anyone else to care. Simen Johan sounded incredibly bored the entire time he spoke to us. He didn’t seem to say much about why he made his work, instead just described what we were already seeing projected on the screen. I actually began to laugh during the questions at the end, when he interrupted the questions or vaguely answered them at all. Though he did provide insight into why he does creepy children pictures when he said he switched to animals because he doesn’t really like children.
On to his work, if he was hoping for his audience to be disturbed by his pictures of children, then he was very successful. The idea he did some of those pictures of his own little sister made me wonder what in the world went wrong in his own childhood, if anything. I did find many of the animal images to be quite beautiful and amazing, and the fact that it takes him a few years to finish a piece makes me a feel a lot better about my own photoshopped endeavors. When he moved on to his sculptures, the first one of the wolf covered in hair and jewels intrigued me, but the rest seemed so shapeless and awkward. Of course they were unfinished, which I guess makes it hard to pass any sort of judgment on them, but I just couldn’t see any of the things he said were in there.

Sunday Post 10-19-08

Belinda Eaton

Born in the 60s in Mombasa Kenya, Eaton has spent time living in London, New York, France, Karachi, and Barcelona. She received her B.A. in Fine Art from St. Martin’s School of Art in London in 1983 and was in the post-graduate etching program in the Central School of Art in London in 1984. She started showing her paintings in 1982 and had her first solo show in 1989 at the Dome Gallery in New York. Her paintings have been described as “A world of colour, vivid characters, swirling spaces, uncontained energy that can’t be trapped by the limits of the canvas, images constantly on the move, living life, dancing, drinking, and eating.” She has spent much of her life traveling so she brings many different perspectives to her work. There are some in which she paints patterns over clothes, faces, or tattoos on the skin, which attracted me to her in the first place.

Inteview:
http://www.artquotes.net/artists/eaton/artist-interview.htm

Gallery:
http://www.art-affair.net/

Website:
http://www.belindaeaton.com/

Thursday Post 10-16-08

Focus

A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
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Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) British historian and essayist.

Coleman, A.D. Depth of Field: Essays on Photographs, Mass Media, and Lens Culture.
University of New Mexico Press: New Mexico, 1998.

Sterner, Thomas M. The Practicing Mind: Bringing Discipline and Focus You’re your Life. Mountain Sage Publishing: Wilmington, 2005.

The title of this book basically says it all, it covers strategies for self-discipline and focus. It involves changing your perception, changing habits, and becoming patient. Thomas M. Sterner has also written The Meditating Mind about bringing meditation into your life, which can enhance focus and help with relaxation. Sterner spent years becoming an accomplished piano player, but it wasn’t until he began to learn golf that he started noticing some key motivational flaws that disrupted the dynamics of practice. He notes that today’s society encourages excessive multi-tasking which creates exhaustion and prevents focus from ever remaining on any one thing long enough to do any benefit. He argues that striving for perfection is self-defeating; instead practice should be considered the end result. By living in the present and always practicing, one can remain successful.

I picked the word focus because it has double meaning for my work. In the technical sense, I have been struggling to get the tattoos in crisp, perfect focus. I have recently acquired a new lens, which seems to be helping a lot with that issue. I also recently decided to focus on creating a portrait of the person, revealing an aspect or two of the tattoo-wearer’s personality. Though I feel it is good to have found this focus so that my work will be more coherent, it has greatly hindered my ability to find suitable models. Sadly, there are so many people who get, for lack of a better word, bullshit tattoos. Most of the people who seem to respond to my ads have names and/or flash images they picked off the wall, and I have been struggling to figure out a way to incorporate anything else of meaning into the picture.

Sunday Post 10-12-08

Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz began taking pictures while in the Philippines where her father was stationed as a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1970 she began working for Rolling Stone and was named chief photographer in 1973. Her intimate celebrity photographs defined the look of Rolling Stone. Starting in 1983 she did feature portrait photography for Vanity Fair. He photo of a pregnant Demi Moore was altered with the face of Leslie Nielsen for parody use promoting Naked Gun 33 ½; The Final Insult. Her case against Paramount for copyright violation set a precedent for parody as fair use. Her images are highly detailed. Some capture intimate moments while others are much more odd and surreal.

Interview:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/photos/leibovitz/interview.html

Gallery (Magazine):
http://www.vanityfair.com

Website:
She doesn't seem to have a personal website but her images can be seen on the following sites
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/02/hollywoodcovers_slideshow200702
http://www.andrewsmithgallery.com/exhibitions/annieleibovitz/americanmusic/index.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/library/photos/leibovitz/bourgeois.html

Sunday Post 10-5-08

Jesse Smith

Smith and his family moved around a lot while growing up since his father was in the military. His father still lives in Germany, where Jesse went to high school. Smith learned to tattoo in Newport News where a scratcher (someone who tattoos out of their house) taught him how to make a tattoo machine, described by Jesse as “ghetto”. Smith enjoyed the idea of putting his art on someone and having it stay with them the rest of their lives, but he did not plan on really becoming a tattoo artist. After doing a lot of free tattoo work, he bought a professional machine, put together a portfolio, and hunted for a job among the local shops. Six months after each and every shop rejected him, he tried again and landed a position. Smith has since won a string of awards from festivals, magazines, and conventions, mostly first and second place. He currently tattoos at Ghostprint Gallery, which has a gallery in the front and a tattoo studio in the back. His work is known for it’s vibrant colors and usually has a cartoon-y style. To have a piece done by Jesse, a non-refundable deposit must be made, and he’s booked months in advance. His artwork always flows with the shape of the body, and he makes sure to find out plenty of background information about his client before designing the tattoo so it can be as personal as possible. He does intricate shading and very fine detail work that makes large pieces so mesmerizing and impossible to ingest without really spending some time looking closely. He pays great attention to lighting, especially in the more dramatic pieces, which is often not evident in other tattoo artists.







Gallery:
http://www.ghostprintgallery.com/

Interview:
http://www.prickmag.net/jessesmithinterview.html

Website:
http://www.jessesmithtattoos.com

Maya Hayuk Artist Lecture from 9-30-08

Maya Hayuk's work at first had me less than thrilled as she paraded some snapshot photographs in a quickly paced slideshow set to music. It was standing room only and each picture showed for at most a few seconds, so even if I found a particular one intriguing it snapped off the screen before I could critically assess it. It seemed throughout the whole presentation her interest lay much more in setting the correct music to the slide show than allowing us to truly view her work. She invited the crowd to shout questions when she was into the third slide show, but it's hard to formulate much around a flash of an image.
Her work began to intrigue me when she stepped away from straight photographs and started showing her paintings. I learned that she had done a lot of music photography, so setting the slide show to a rhythm had a bit more meaning. The display of her paintings to us through progress photos showed not only the rhythm inherent in the finished pieces, but also the beat to which they were made. Her brightly colored patterns develop in very rhythmic stages (as seen through the photographs at least) which was fascinating since she described her process as "smoking cigarettes and staring at the wall asking me what it wanted me to do." Using such bright, and sometimes fluorescent, colors gave the work a very psychedelic feel, which I personally like despite it sort of being looked down upon in the art world as being kitsch. Her work exudes an exuberant energy that combines graphic design with intense spirituality in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Thursday Post 10-2-08

Advertising

"I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public."
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) British author.

Petley, Julian. Advertising. Smart Apple Media: North Mankato, 2004.

This book covers every subject surrounding advertising including what it is, how to do it, and how to get a job doing it. Julian Petley is the professor of Film and Television Studies at Brunel University in London. He founded the Journal of Popular British Cinema and sat on the editorial board. Now he acts as the primary editor of The Journal of British Cinema and Television, it’s successor. As Chair of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom he actively involved himself in debates surrounding the 2003 Communications Act. He has written twelve books to date, including Media: The Impact on Our Lives and Newspapers and Magazines.

Advertising is critical to my work in two stages of production. First I must advertise my project well enough to uncover willing models in the community. Secondly, I must present the tattoo in a way that not only advertises my talent as a photographer, but also shows the world the talent of the tattoo artist involved in the tattoo. Problems have been arising when the quality of the tattoo is (admitted by the artist as well as noticed by me) not up to advertising standards. My small pool of willing models with usable tattoos amplifies these problems. I feel that I need to start branching out into abstract design tattoos though I’m not completely sure how to interact subject and background in such cases.