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From the website: Beginning by documenting the small dorps or villages of rural South Africa, Ballen's photography moved on in the late 1980's and early 1990's to their inhabitants; through the late 1990's Ballen's work progressed. By the mid 1990's his subjects began to act where previously his pictures however troubling fell firmly into the category of documentary photography, his work then moved into the realms of fiction.
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Johnson Museum presents The Architect's Brother, Photographs by Shana and Robert ParkeHarrison
Apotheosis - Grapevine - Robert ParkeHarrison
From the website: ParkeHarrison makes work that mixes photography, painting and sculptural props with old-fashioned darkroom techniques. Primitive yet elaborate constructions are photographed and the resulting creations are collaged into other image sources; some from his picture archives, others from the history books of photography (e.g., for Mending the Earth (1999) Timothy O'Sullivan's Steamboat Springs, Nevada (1867) was revisited). The process frequently Involves paper negatives that are cut and pasted together before a final image is contact printed. Flaws that are revealing of the process-strings used to suspend props and the hard edges outlining layers-are then retouched in numerous washes of monochromatic paint. Final prints are mounted to wood panels with an elevating frame behind them (envisage a canvas on a stretcher), and a finishing touch takes the form of an application of beeswax. The end result is a photography of mythical proportions that is camouflaged in paint and operates in singles rather than multiples.
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From the website: DigitalFilm is a professional software for emulating the photographic reversal film. It can make the color effect of digital photo realistically simulate that of photographic reversal film such as Fuji Velvia & Kodak T-Max100.
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From the website: AKVIS Coloriage is as easy to use as a coloring book. No layers manipulation, no complicated techniques, no more hours of frustration attempting to get just the look you want - everything is done with a few brush strokes. Indicate the desired colors by the stroke of the brush; the program does the rest of the work: recognizes the object's border and tailors the new color to the grayscale tones of the initial picture.
Not cheap - $97
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Ted Orland - The View from the Studio Door
Only $12
From the website: Simply put, this is a book of practical philosophy – written by, and for, working artists.
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Ken Light & Melanie Light - Coal Hollow
From the website: Coal is still king in much of Appalachia, yet the heritage and history of the people who enabled the United States to become an economic superpower in the Industrial age are slipping away.
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David Seymour - Reflections from the Heart
At the Corcoran Gallery of Art
From the website: If you look at many of Chim's photos, and ask yourself what happened in the 3 minutes before that photo was taken, you'll mostly come to the conclusion that he made a personal relationship with these people.
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From the website: Between 1847 and 1922, Glenalvin, Wallace L. and William O. Goodridge made thousands of photographs in formats ranging from daguerreotypes to motion pictures. First in York, Pennsylvania, and later in East Saginaw, Michigan (later, Saginaw), this family of African American entrepreneurs demonstrated an extraordinary ability to adapt and change with the times. In doing so they created a rich legacy of images: city scenes and lumber camps, individuals and groups, picnics, parties and natural disasters.
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Rediscovered Faces of Ayacucho
From the website: From 1924 until his death in 1976, Baldomero Alejos was the premier photographer of Huamanga, a provincial capital in the remote Andean region of Ayacucho. His studio was a magnet for locals who wanted to record a life event — a romance, marriage, birth, or death — or to create a memento for posterity.
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From the website: In his own words, David has a "fascination with the undoing of the landscape." He has become most widely known for his aerial work, which includes extended studies of North American mines, clear-cut forests, urban sprawl, evaporation ponds and other peripheral industries of the Great Salt Lake.
From the website: "For the most part, I'm interested in landscape images not merely for what they look like, but for what they make us feel, and for what they might represent metaphorically. I've also wanted my pictures to take the viewer to places and sites they've never seen before, with a resulting sense of alienation or displacement. I'm less interested in being warm and fuzzy than in being harsh and cruel! [laughter] Those possibilities don't exist when looking at the familiar."
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Free Printable Cardboard Lens Hoods
From the website: This site contains PDF documents that can be printed and cut out to make lens hoods for a variety of 35mm and digital SLR camera lenses. Lens hoods give better quality photographs by reducing flare caused by nonimageforming light.
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The Guardian's arts coverage is great.
Modern Classics: The Idea That Won't Go Away (Main Link)
From the website: The world was in disarray, shattered by the first world war and heading into a second. Out of this chaos came the modernists - a group of utopian designers with thrilling new visions of what the future could hold. But was anyone ready for this brave new world?
Paradise Now (Robert Hughes)
From the website: But gradually the meaning of "modernism" settled down to its present form, based on utopian fancies, standardisation, industrial materials like chrome and plate glass, abstraction and a vehement ambition to make a new world, not just a new art.
Lost in Translation (About Albers and Moholy-Nagy)
Albers did a wondeful book about color.
From the website: The room full of his photographs is a journey to the lost world revolution. A bather floats in a swimming pool and legs lie on a diving board at 45-degree angles in which nature copies supremacist art; the shadows cars make on a street shot from above and the spiralling telephone wires in photomontage-drawings create infectious motion. It is all so optimistic about the modern world that will eradicate misery with science.
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Major Update to Digital Domain's Qimage - v2006.250
From the website: Qimage is our world renowned batch printing and processing software. Qimage Professional Edition offers these features and more . . .
Don't let the old-fashioned website design steer you away.
Qimage is known for excellent resampling (interpolation).
Photoshop Elements users can use it to do soft proofing.
Only $49.95
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Read the captions!
From the website: MY FIRST MONTAGE [above]
From the website: I first saw Paris in 1954 – after a three-day tour of brothels and bars in several cities between there and Frankfurt where I was stationed as a GI. It wasn't until I realized that I had no money left and only nine hours to report back to barracks that I decided to take a few pictures of this illustrious city. I had the idea of shooting several rolls of film of only one object in order to create a photo from a new and strange perspective. Besides, I was still so ripped from the night before that I couldn't stand up anyway. The photos for this first montage were done from a hotel room in the Hotel de Suede. To this day I can't remember how I got to the hotel or who the people in the room were, but the view overlooking Notre Dame was tremendous. I would have taken more pictures, but since I'd already emptied the glasses of my sleeping hosts, I figured it was senseless to stay.
From the website: While in the stockade (I was a little late getting back to base) I realized my life had taken an artistic direction from which I would never escape. After getting out of the army, I immediately signed up for classes in Paris – which I never went to – and lived off the GI Bill. Fortunately, the abundance of cheap booze, beautiful women and easy money gave me the artistic freedom I needed.
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Free
From the website: RawShooter - essentials 2006, is a RAW workflow software tool that sets new standards for digital photography. It is a fully functional RAW converter which allows any level of user to get excellent results with the minimum of effort and knowledge. It provides the highest quality output and fastest conversion time for any RAW converter on the market today.
Tutorials:
RAW v. JPEG
RAW Processing - An Introduction
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From the website: "What are Museums for?" was the question set by the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust Award in 2005. The winner of the annual essay prize established in honour of the former Editor of The Times who died in 1985 is James Delingpole, a novelist, freelance journalist and regular contributor to this paper.
The conclusion:
From the website: What I realise now, though, is that the problem isn't the many different answers the museums industry is finding to answer this question. The problem is the question itself. To ask it is already to presuppose that a museum can only justify its existence in some form of utilitarian value; it implies that culture can be measured; that a museum can be submitted to cost benefit analysis; that it ought to be micromanaged by the state if, according to the political precepts of the moment, it is found wanting. But museums are above all this nonsense. At least they should be.
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The Theater of the Street, the Subject of the Photograph
Photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia was sued by the man pictured above.
From the website: "I never really questioned the legality of what I was doing. I had been told by numerous editors I had worked for that it was legal. There is no way the images could have been made with the knowledge and cooperation of the subjects. The mutual exclusivity that conflict or tension, is part of what gives the work whatever quality it has."
More about photographer's rights
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From the website: We distributed hundreds of disposable cameras to two groups on different sides of the U.S.-Mexico border: undocumented migrants crossing the desert into the United States and American Minutemen trying to stop them.
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David B. Brooks - Raw Converter Software; From Adobe, LaserSoft, Bibble Labs, & DxO Labs
From the website: I must admit that I was taken by surprise by my tests. Starting out with no intention on my part to do so, each of the four software packages produced virtually identical image results via the use of quite distinct tools and processes. The fact that this can be achieved with three different digital SLR cameras makes it even more amazing. My recommendation is that users choose any of the four options entirely on the basis of what best serves their individual needs and work preferences.
Tutorials:
RAW v. JPEG
RAW Processing - An Introduction
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Colorful and Clashing: Looking at Africa
From the website: IF Martians tuned in to our television news broadcasts, they'd have a miserable impression of life on Earth. War, disease, poverty, heartbreak and nothing else. That's exactly how most of the world sees Africa: filtered through images of calamity. "Afro-pessimism" is the diagnostic term that Okwui Enwezor, the Nigerian-born art historian and curator, uses for the syndrome. And he has offered bracing antidotes to it in two major photography exhibitions.
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From the website: "I scout around, find an area that I like, that I think will work, then I come back, again and again, waiting for the light to be right—or the right person to show up. I'll come back five, 10, 15, even 20 times to find the perfect light."
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From the website: Above photographs from DxO Labs
Lens Distortion Correction Software
From the website: PTLens is Windows software that corrects lens pincushion/barrel distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting. PTLens is available as a standalone application or Photoshop plug-in.
From the website: Flo's UnDistort is a plugin for correcting deformations of photographic images: 1) Barrel and pincushion deformations, 2) Perspective deformations (keystone effect), 3) Chromatic aberrations (also known as "color fringing")
From the website: A perfect lens would render straight lines as straight, no matter where they occur. Most practical lenses aren't that good, though, and instead bend lines outwards (barrel distortion) or inwards (pincushion distortion). Wide-angle lenses and wide-range zoom lenses often suffer particularly badly from this.
Photoshop CS2 Lens Correction filter tutorials:
Lens Correction filter in Photoshop CS2 - Colin Smith
Adobe - Correct lens and camera angle distortions in one simple process (PDF)
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Be a National Geographic Photographer
From the website: Take your best shot—and send it to us. Your Shot features editors' selections from the first 5,000 photographs submitted online each month. This month's theme, for photos to be published both online and in the July 2006 print issue, is "My Family."
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Martin Parr - Fashion Magazine
From the website: In recent years, fashion photography has become an increasingly important context for Parr to explore his particularly witty brand of social commentary. Thus in 2005, he created the aptly titled Fashion Magazine, a one-off magazine with advertisements, short essays, interviews, and discerning, often humorous photographs — all done by Parr.
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From the website: Executed between 2000 and 2004, these works consist of images of the faces of her three children Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia. Selected works from her "Battlefields" series are on view as well.
From the website: Perhaps because of the lengthy exposures (as long as 6 minutes and never less than 3), the images possess a transcendent timelessness. It may be this sense of suspended time, as much as genetics, that renders the faces of Mann's children eerily interchangeable. Enigmatic, they seem to be awaiting the viewer's glance to wake from their shadowed stillness and take their next breath.
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Slideluck Potshow is on Saturday, March 18th, from 7 P.M. to midnight at Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
The theme for this slideshow is MISTAKES.
From the website: The CSV is one of the greatest incubators of the arts in NYC, with 53 visual artists and numerous theater groups in residence. They have been generous enough to donate two large auditoriums for your viewing pleasure. Please join us with a bottle of your favorite something to drink, a tasty dish for the potluck, and an appetite for another outstanding slideshow. We ask that you also note that due to increasing costs of production, there will also be a suggested donation of $5 to $10.
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Robert Adams: Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance
From the website: For more than 40 years, Robert Adams (born 1937) has photographed the landscape of the American West, particularly in California, Oregon, and his home state of Colorado. His work is inspired both by his joy in the inherent beauty of the landscape, and his dismay at its exploitation and degradation for residential and commercial development.
More Robert Adams
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William Wegman - Funny/Strange
Be sure to see his video, Milk/Floor.
From the website: The retrospective of William Wegman's multifarious career that opened yesterday at the Brooklyn Museum simultaneously confirms why Mr. Wegman hasn't always received the respect he deserves and why he deserves it. The short explanation — on both counts — is that he has been too innovatively funny for too long and on too many levels (visual, verbal, commercial and arty) for people to see the serious artist behind the inveterate jokester. He's also been funny in too many mediums for his achievement to be easily grasped.
Also at Senior& Shopmaker
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