June 2006 Archives

Light - Hiroshi Sugimoto

View the time lapse video of the light changing in the gallery. Look for the yellow and gray symbol on the gallery map on this page.

Increase your sensitivity to light, the critical ingredient in the making of a photograph: Exercises

Light - Strobist

From the website: Welcome to Strobist, where our goal is to promote more effective use of small, shoe-mount flashes.

Mike Francis - Zoom with a View

Photographs of wildlife in Yellowstone National Park

Chris Becker - Painting with Light

From the website: The actual process of searching for a subject or scene is a significant motivation to why I photograph. It is a journey, a search for a location, a story, and, perhaps, of oneself. My search is constant; there may be inspiration, such as my favorite objects in different settings, or a serendipitous discovery of something I've always looked at but never noticed before. My curiosity fuels the journey. Like a force pulling me, I am lured towards my goal and my prize: a fantastic scene waiting to be exposed. It is at the moment of discovering my subject which I want to photograph that I begin another journey -- creating the exposure itself. I am creating a scene or story with characters using the darkness of night as a canvas and my light source to choose the parts or characters that make up the final story. I, too, being a physical part of the process without being seen, am part of the story.

More about painting with light

Joe Holmes - American Museum of Natural History Series

Joe Holmes

Masters-of-Photography documentaries at Netflix and elsewhere:

Diane Arbus

André Kertész

Edward Steichen

Unibind PhotoBook

From the website: Use the Unibind steelbinding system to create PhotoBooks for a fast and sure presentation of your photo albums, contact sheets and portfolios. The black paper on the inside and the stylish cover materials guarantee a perfect presentation of your prints. Four different window cuts and several stamps allow you to personalize your PhotoBooks for both personal and business applications.

Video Demo

New Online Tool Helps Digital Photographers Optimize Broadband

From the website: These tools help digital photographers plan their workflow because they let them instantly measure their broadband connection, calculate the file size of the photos they intend to upload, and then accurately estimate the upload time.

MyPhotopipe.com Speed Test

The Mission Series

From the website: For the American Photo Mission Series, we asked six photographers to go out and create new bodies of work, all focusing on the subject of volunteerism. Our goal was to document the spirit that drives people to improve the lot of others.

American Photo's Editor's Choice 2006

From the website:

Family imagery snapped

From the website: But the nine international artists in "Family Album," a new exhibition at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, delve into the complexities of the nuclear family dynamic and bring the viewer's attention to the intimate moments in between the milestones.

Center for Photography at Woodstock

Chip Simons - Outcast of Originality

From the website: I hated living in New York City in 82'....I thought I would go hang out in the park....I saw babies and dogs playing on the hill....it was sunny and people were friendly. I decided that I would rather be a dog running around and playing, than live in NYC. I put my camera down at the perspective of another dog...and when the dog went to sniff it...I blasted them. I then started to make them different colors...to exaggerate and /or contradict their character. It was so fun. I called it "I am a dog." This led to a lot of my color psychology in other pictures.

Chip Simons

More about painting with light

Photography's Evolution at Philadelphia Museum - Julien Levy Gallery

From the website: Anyone with an interest in the history of photography will want to see the show. It invites meditation on the evolution of 20th-century artistic taste and sensibility. Despite what may seem at first to be a bewildering diversity, the assortment here is the product of one man's vision, and that vision in turn reflects beliefs and attitudes that definitively shaped how photography as an art form has come to be understood.

Carnegie Mellon Researchers Teach Computers To Perceive Three Dimensions in 2-D Images

From the website: They've even developed a program that allows the computer to automatically generate 3-D reconstructions of scenes based on a single image.

Researchers develop system to thwart unwanted video and still photography

From the website: Gregory Abowd, an associate professor leading the project, says the new camera-neutralizing technology shows commercial promise in two principal fields – protecting limited areas against clandestine photography or stopping video copying in larger areas such as theaters.

HOW TO FRAME YOUR DOG - Pet photographer Amanda Jones makes it look easy as canines sit up and say cheese

From the website: What Annie Leibovitz is to rock stars and celebrities and Richard Avedon was to the rich and famous, Amanda Jones is to pets: the best portrait photographer.

Amanda Jones

Frederick Sommer - Photography, Drawing & Collage

From the website: In his photography and collage, Sommer makes use of found objects – often trivial or mundane items - and transforms them through careful construct and correlation, imbuing them with new layers of meaning and open-ended interpretations/ associations.

More Sommer

Kerri Jamison - off peak (Wisconsin Dells)

From the website: For off peak, I found myself searching for magic and longing for innocence in the Wisconsin Dells: a place I had always dreamed of visiting—as every child growing up in the Midwest does. My first experience with the Dells, however, was only recently (and somewhat unintentionally) on a return trip from Thanksgiving in Chicago with the in-laws. We needed gas and food and found ourselves halfway from home in this sleepy resort town already closed for the season. The surreal quality of the hyperconstructed landscape devoid of people stuck in my head, and soon I was taking the car to fulfill my unrealized, and now altered, dream. At 30, I was less interested in enjoying the self-proclaimed waterpark capital of the world during the height of its summer season. Instead, I imagined myself as explorer of the weirdness and desolation quietly pervading its winter months.

Via Consciousness

1800s Wisconsin Dells - H.H. Bennett

From the website: Went to the Dells...it was terrible, awful, sublime, majestic, and grand.

Photo Opportunity - Coney Island Mermaid Parade

Saturday, June 24th, 2 P.M.

From the website: The Mermaid Parade celebrates the sand, the sea, the salt air and the beginning of summer, as well as the history and mythology of Coney Island, Coney Island pride, and artistic self-expression. The Parade is characterized by participants dressed in hand-made costumes as Mermaids, Neptunes, various sea creatures, the occasional wandering lighthouse, Coney Island post card or amusement ride, as well as antique cars, marching bands, drill teams, and the odd yacht pulled on flatbed.

Ansel Adams: Celebration of Genius

At the Rockwell Museum of Western Art in Corning, NY

From the website: But prepare to discover equally stupendous, (if less well-known) images such as Mud Hills, Arizona or Water and Foam, or the wonderful abstract titled simply, Stained Wallpaper Near Alturas, Calif. Many will be surprised to see that Adams did not confine himself to landscapes, but also made portraits and other subjects as humble as fence posts into images nearly as monumental as his beloved mountain ranges.

Tanyth Berkeley - Orchidaceae

From the website: I love the undeniable truth inherent in photography, the fact of it. I love that within this truth the world can be magical and awe-inspiring, that I can capture this fact, hold it fast on film and reflect on it over and over again. Painting is wonderful in that worlds are created, made from scratch, made from paint. For me as a photographer, I make images from what already exists, so I can be more spontaneous. I love that I can grab my camera and work the street, that I can play with space and time or more subtly capture the light quality of a rainy day.

On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag

From the website: A major force in New York intellectual life for over 40 years, the novelist, essayist, and critic Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was renowned for her brilliant and impassioned writing on photography. This exhibition of some 40 photographs drawn from the Metropolitan's collection pays tribute to Sontag's extraordinary contribution to the history of the medium.

2003 Interview by WNYC Studio 360 host Kurt Anderson

From the website: In 2003, a year before her death at age 71, Sontag spoke with Studio 360 host Kurt Anderson about the evolution of her ideas about how we look at photos of war and disaster. She said she'd been thinking about some reigning cliches.

Tyler Green's Interview with the Curator of the Exhibit

From the website: One of her most important contributions to the field was in thinking about photography not only as art, but as more than art. News photography, travel photography, photojournalism: She treated all these forms with as much seriousness and intellectual rigor as the work of great photographic artists.

© National Portrait Gallery

Character studies

From the website: Portraits are about more than just capturing a face. They are about capturing a life. That's why they are such an invaluable aid to the biographer, says Margaret Forster.

From the website: Increasingly, it is the psychological aspect of a portrait that proves the most compelling - it's the two-way communication between sitter and artist, and sometimes the tension between them, that give the painted portrait its power. Look at the portrait of Germaine Greer by Paula Rego. At first glance, it seems ugly - the sitter's posture, her legs awkwardly splayed, is ugly; the clumpy shoes, with what looks like a hole in them, are ugly; the frizzy, unbrushed, dun-coloured hair is ugly; and the scowl on the face is definitely ugly. But what is happening in this portrait is very far from ugly.

What's Your Favorite Novel?

From the website: A recent survey of men's and women's favorite books points to a more fundamental question—and a fascinating answer.

From the website: In a sense, then, we read novels about Meursault and Heathcliff, Montana Wildhack and Elizabeth Bennett, because they allow us to practice what we do elsewhere in our lives: Figure out the world by figuring out, or at least trying to figure out, what other people are thinking and feeling.

When we look at portraits, do we use the Theory of the Mind to determine what the photographed person is thinking and feeling?

Stephen Shore - 70s Color

From the website: Stephen Shore's color photographs, taken during the early 1970's, mark the passage of time and reflect on a meditative approach to picture making. At the time, Shore was among the very first American photographers who began working in color photography and introduced the medium into the contemporary art dialogue. Shore's most celebrated work captures the intersections, meals, hotel rooms and people that he encountered on his trips throughout the Untied States, the first of which followed Route 66.

More Stephen Shore

'Unknown Weegee,' on Photographer Who Made the Night Noir

From the website: From the 1930's into the 1950's, he was a photographer for New York tabloids, the kind of papers Ralph Kramden might have read. Tireless, loquacious, invasive, he cruised the wee hours. For him the city was a 24-hour emergency room, an amphetamine drip.

More Weegee

Peter Feldstein - Time and Again

From the website: He asked people to dress as they would on a typical Saturday afternoon. Clarence Schropp wore his wife's wig, and Calvin Colony brought his 300-pound pet lion, but mostly people were, well, themselves. Over three months, Peter photographed 670 people—a unique portrait of an American town, as comprehensive as any ever attempted.

An Iowa Town's Story Told in Portraits 21 Years Apart

The Oxford Project

More projects

Jill Freedman - NYC

From the website: One of the things I love about New York is its street life. It is great theater, and I love catching those little moments of real life.

Hey, Hot Shot! - Emerging Artists at jen bekman

From the website: I'm glad you found the actual process of entering to be interesting - I do think that there's a lot of value in it. In my experience, artists often struggle with their bios and statements - it's my hope that having the structure of the competition is motivating and that the information that they organize and put together is useful beyond the entry alone.

See the interviews on the Hey, Hot Shot! blog

The above photograph was done by Ian Baguskas. In the interview, he wrote:

From the website: It was more of a gradual decision. I'm still interested in painting and especially printmaking (I like layers), but I don't do those things at the moment. I had grown up being interested in both art and natural sciences. It would have been cool to be a field researcher, but my younger sister took that job anyway. Photography is the closest to being a field researcher that I'm going to get and it actually feels pretty close. I'm really interested in the strangeness of reality and photography seems to be the best way for me to capture that.

Thomas Ruff - jpegs

From the website: Just as the computer, the human eye requires only a relatively small quantity of data points per image unit. What is necessary for recognition is added during interpretation by the visual center of the brain. In the jpegs-series, Ruff concentrates on this imprecision. When the images are enlarged by Ruff, the compression process (using raster graphics) results in visible pixel lines and the emergence of a chessboard pattern. In other words, the effects of compressing digital pictures and the resulting irretrievable information loss become apparent.

Photography Using the Moon:

Wayne Wilson-Wong - Nocturnes

From the website: The digital photography process excites me greatly and is an area of production in which my work has been firmly situated for a number of years. Recently my practice has involved in experimenting with ideas of digital low light exposures that go beyond the possibilities of conventional film promoting new ways of seeing under nocturnal conditions.

Liliana Gelman - Ships, Dreams, Water

From the website: Ms. Gelman's work is a meditation on the spirit of place, the mystery of the sea, and the magic of the harbor.

More about photographing with moonlight

Process adds life to old photographs

From the website: Imagine if you had an old shoebox of photos. Let's say you had 1,000 of them - if you scanned them by hand it would likely take you two weeks, and you'd be cross-eyed when you finished. We can do that in about 30 minutes.

PhotoExperts

They're in Canada.

Couldn't locate a NYC lab with the machine.

Picture Perfect - Which Web sites create the best photo albums?

From the website: The photos in this book are almost National Geographic quality: bright, clear, and crisp. The book-production software was also easy to use and had lots of options, from photo collages to full-page, borderless pictures.

Museum Mile Festival - NYC

Tuesday evening, June 13th

From the website: One day a year, for the past 27 years, nine of the country's finest museums, all ones that call Fifth Avenue home, collectively open their doors for free to New Yorkers and visitors for a mile-long block party and visual art celebration. This traffic-free, music- and art-filled celebration fills the street and sidewalks of Fifth Avenue from 82nd to 105th street, the mile now officially designated as Museum Mile. Over 50,000 visitors attend the festival annually.

Digital Journalist - June

Featuring the work of Burk Uzzle

From the website: He is fond of quoting Charles Harbutt's saying, "I try to let the pictures take me rather than me take the pictures." It's probably more accurate to substitute the word "find" for the word "take" because Uzzle goes to great lengths to take the picture once it finds him. He roams the back roads, never flying whenever he can drive to a destination, and often factoring in, at his own expense, several days to arrive at a location for the few annual reports that he will undertake each year in order to sustain his wandering ways. The strange and wonderful sights that he finds are usually not available to those who ply the interstate, but on the road less traveled "the stuff just kind of pops up at me." He relies on his intuition when he arrives somewhere. "There's a feeling I will have or not have about a place. I'll come into a small town, and if it seems interesting and it's a nice time of day, and the light's nice then I'll just start driving up and down the side roads. It might take me an hour and a half to get to the other side of a small town because I'll go down every little street. I find an awful lot of stuff by just being stubbornly thorough in what I'm looking at."

PhotoEspaña2006

Joyless, creepy - and sublime

From the website: In contrast, you feel worn out by Paths of Nature, Olafur Eliasson's show at the Fundación Telefónica. Eliasson, the Danish artist behind the giant sulphur-yellow sun that lit Tate Modern's Turbine Hall three years ago, travels to Iceland every summer to take pictures of its glacial topography. There is nothing bucolic about these raging rivers, deep ravines and empty expanses of scree stretching to the horizon. Instead, you are transported by their majestic, craggy beauty.

More festivals

Marc Yankus - Time & Again

Yankus combines surfaces from old photographs and prints with new photographs.

Exhibit at Clampart

Hans Bellmer - Minatures

From the website: Ubu Gallery announces an exhibition of approximately 70 small-format, vintage photographs by Hans Bellmer (1902-1975), whose overt influence on current art trends still far outweighs the recognition of his emotionally- and intellectually-charged oeuvre. The exhibition will present the earliest examples of Bellmer's photographic output—specifically, miniatures created in 1934 in connection with the realization of the original German edition of Die Puppe and contact prints of images made between 1935 and 1938, which were considered for inclusion in Les Jeux de la poupée.

Teun Hocks - Constructed Imagery

From the website: Teun Hocks is a pioneer of the photographic practice of 'constructed imagery' in which many artists today work. Using sets constructed in his studio, Hocks photographs himself as the hapless everyman combating the absurdities of daily life. Hocks then embellishes his black and white photographs with transparent oil glazes creating surrealistic portraits with dark comedic undertones. Included alongside the large photographic works, Hocks has created small endlessly looping animations. Like footnotes to the larger pieces, these playful videos transcend his initial work sketches, frame by frame, into cartoon film shorts.

PBASE Magazine - Issue #5: PDF Zip

Topics include framing, contrast masking, profiles, and interviews.

Unseen Pictures, Untold Stories by James Rainy

From the website: "Writing in a headline that 1,500 Americans have died doesn't give you nearly the impact of showing one serviceman who is dead," Van Hemmen said. "It's the power of visuals."

Show Me the Bodies by David Carr

From the website: "Every editor — whether a photo editor or their superior — who made the decision not to publish this picture had a reason. They might all sound different after one listen. But listen again, and you will hear the grinding wheels of the free market turning American journalism into dust."

Never Coming Home - What it's like to lose a son in the Iraq war.

From the website: Never Coming Home is about the families of five young men killed in Iraq. Each day this week, Slate presents a short documentary that focuses on the bereavement of the parents, or in one case, a brother. This portrait of grief and sacrifice is brought to life through the use of still photography and the recorded voices of family members.

Meetup can be a good way to get feedback about your work.

Andrew Ng went to a group.

From the website: I've been a Meetup member for a long time but I have never been to any of the events until today. I recently joined the south bay photography meetup group and it is actually a very active group.

More ways to connect with other photographers in person and online

Why Art Isn't a Great Long Term Investment: A Case Study, Part 1 of 2

Why Art Isn't a Great Long Term Investment: A Case Study, Part 2 of 2

From the website: Almost every new collector asks the question at least once. "Is this piece of art I'm considering going to increase in value?" And almost any decent art advisor or dealer is going to answer in the same way. "It might. But don't buy art as an investment. Buy it because you love it."

Poster boy

From the website: His face has become an iconic image, used both as a symbol of protest and a fashion accessory. Richard Gott traces the story of Korda's photo of Che Guevara

We Skate Hardcore: Photographs from Brooklyn's Southside

From the website: We Skate Hardcore: Photographs from Brooklyn's Southside features photographs by Vincent Cianni depicting the lives of a group of young Latino men in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Taken over the course of more than eight years, the photographs follow their stories as they dedicate themselves to becoming virtuoso inline skaters -- building impromptu skate parks, honing their skills, and using sport as an alternative to the temptations of drugs and crime. Cianni's work also provides a compelling portrait of their relationships with friends, girlfriends, and families, told in part through their own words written on the margins of the photographs.

Tom Chambers - Photomontage

From the website: As an artist I have created photomontages to reveal a personal vision about the nature of children, animals, and their interactions. These images illustrate the fleeting moods that can't be captured by a traditional camera or seen by the naked eye.

New Web site aims to take the anxiety out of art

From the website: "I started asking people in the beginning of the year," she says. "The rules were that it had to be 300 to 500 words, and it had to be a story about something you might talk about over a drink or coffee." Of the 30 people she asked, the only one who declined the invitation, she says, was an artist who told her, "It's a great idea, but I'm too neurotic to write about myself."

Artjaw

CoolPhotoblogs.com

From the website: CoolPhotoblogs.com, born of the popularization of photoblogging around the world, is a practical platform for photoblog sites promotion. Our mission is to enhance the communication among global photobloggers community and to encourage the development of this community together by way of this website.