From the website: I have seen a trend of education and exploration that has turned "flash" into a naughty word in many circles . . .
July 2006 Archives
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New color correction articles and tutorials:
• Color Correction Introduction
• Color Correction with Channels (Levels)
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Square America Anniversary Exhibit - Found Photographs
From the website: A gallery of vintage snapshots & vernacular photography
More found photographs
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Stan Banos - San Francisco & Elsewhere
From the website: Haven't posted in a while, perhaps it's the summer doldrums, or maybe it's the Photoshop class I'm finally taking. Just as feared, it's hard to absorb anything new in light of all the basic background I've yet to master. Then again- maybe I've just been lulled into complacency now that the world has been made so much safer without Saddam...
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Major revision of, and additions to, the skin tone correction tutorials:
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Photography Is Not Art - Klotz Gallery
From the website: The prints in this show - news photos, snapshots, NASA photos, medical and science photos, postcards, advertising, vernacular and crime photos – will make you nod, scratch or shake you head or all of these in turn, but they will never bore you...
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Protect Your Camera with a Zip-lock Bag
From the website: You've got a snazzy digital camera, but you want to take it into a wet, dusty environment. Protect it with a simple zip-lock bag and a filter.
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Foregrounds - More Bang for Your Buck! by Russ Barker
From the website: One of the most effective techniques for adding that "WOW!" factor to your landscape photographs is to include an interesting foreground which complements your composition and helps the viewer to see what your subject is. If you plan and design your photograph carefully, the foreground can lead the viewer's eye from the foreground, through the image, ending at the subject.
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Robin Rhode - Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo
From the website: Within the smile-inducing humor and nostalgia of Rhode's works, we can glimpse a sensitivity, undoubtedly born of his personal experience growing up as a person of color in segregated South Africa, to deeper issues such as human freedom, dignity, and territoriality. His message now, however, has sublimated into a more universal embrace of freedom that extends its perspective beyond South Africa to a wider world.
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Naked honesty in eye of beholder by Iain Gale
From the website: Mapplethorpe's roots lie with the Surrealists, in particular in the photographs of Hans Bellmer and Pierre Molinier, and if you want to understand his art you first have to embrace their viewpoint. The Surrealists believed sex was intrinsic to art. And they had a point. For more than 2,000 years, sex has been a central theme of artistic imagery. Mapplethorpe's penises may shock you, but they are nothing compared with the huge, erect phalluses which endow the bronze satyrs of ancient Greece. Think too of the excesses of Egon Schiele and Picasso.
Such dirty pretty things by Peter Conrad
From the website: On the Bowery I met Mapplethorpe's younger brother Edward, a deferential, soft-spoken man whose right to exist was challenged by Robert. 'He was 13 years older,' Edward told me, 'so I had very faint memories of him. He left the suburbs and moved into Manhattan soon after I was born. He came home reluctantly, if at all - though he did turn up when I graduated from my Catholic high school, looking like Brando as the biker in The Wild One.
Robert Mapplethorpe - Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
More Mapplethorpe
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On the Edge - Center for Fine Art Photography
From the website: In the old days it was easy to find the edge when the world of photography was flat and "straight" photography ruled. But these days in photography, almost anything goes. Yet technique alone - no matter how elaborate the set-up or how far out or clever the computer effects - is useless if not wedded to content.
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From the website: Remove moving objects such as tourists or passing cars from your photos. Take multiple photos from the same scene and the Tourist Remover blends them into a composite photo without any interfering elements.
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From the website: flickrInspector is a non-commercial website, that displays publicly available data about single flickr users. flickr itself is probably the most amazing photo sharing site. this is by no means an official tool by the makers of flickr (or yahoo), it's just what i, nils k. windisch aka netomer programmed in my free time to enhance user experience.
Via DSLRBlog
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Hellen van Meene - OpenEye Gallery
From the website: Dutch photographer Hellen van Meene has received international critical acclaim for her intimate "fictional portraits" of adolescent girls and androgynous boys that explore the amorphous space between childhood and adulthood.
Viewfinder: Tokyo, 2005 by Hellen van Meene
From the website: In this mysterious and tender portrait, a Japanese girl peers heavenwards through a tangle of branches, the verticals of her neat tresses echoing the silhouetted shapes of the trees. She is presented to us face-on, as impassive as a Bronzino.
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Using Cameras to Turn Tourists Into Travelers
From the website: Of course there will be people who say that a destination viewed through a camera lens inhibits their ability to enjoy their vacation. "I laugh when people say, 'Are you really experiencing a trip when your face is behind a viewfinder?' "he said, leaning forward. "I don't know where to begin to tell them how much richer it is. Travel becomes a very cinematic experience. I am so much more finely tuned to the mystique of the environment around me and the drama of a place when I have my camera."
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Using a camera with Great Noise - Ricoh GR-D
From the website: I bought the GR-D because of it's lens quality and also because it's "noise" is supposed to be very much like film grain. As I like grain, I've been experimenting shooting with the GR-D at ISO800 and ISO1600.
Moriyama Daido, mentioned in the above thread, uses a style called Bure Boke, i.e., shaky and blurred. The photographs are blurry, with coarse grain, and very high contrast.
More about Noise
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From the website: This year I am doing a project called "365 Urban Species." Every day I will post a current photo and short article about a different living thing found in the city. Since the photo is a current one taken by my partner or myself, there is a built-in bias toward wherever we happen to be (in other words, most of the species are going to be found in Boston). If you only want to read these, and not my more general posts about life and movies and politics and such, look for the 365-urban-species tag and click it. If you want to see ones from long ago, you'll have to go to my archives and go through day by day. I'm planning on collecting these posts and editing them, along with new unposted material about the experience of the project, into a manuscript to bring to publishers.
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Maxwell Did It!: Photographing the Atlantic City Boardwalk, 1920s-1950s
From the website: The R. C. Maxwell Company produced electric "spectacular" signs and billboards and used the photographs to document construction and placement of those advertising signs on the boardwalk. Documentation of the placement of the signs involved using the photograph to show the client the specific physical location of the advertisement as well as using the photograph to give the client an idea of the pedestrian foot traffic that would see the sign. So, the photographs are a record of the people who thronged to the boardwalk since the early 1900's. Today, these historical photographs provide a decade-by-decade look at the changing landscape of the boardwalk and its culture from the 1920s through the 1950s.
Via gmtplus9
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Revised the How to Buy a Camera section, including the addition of a chart about how many megapixels are needed for a certain print size.
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Canon National Park Photo Contest
Canon Outdoor photography Tips
From the website: The general public has this huge misconception that professional photographers simply walk around taking great photos. To consistently get great photos, you need a plan. Most pros scout an area before taking any shots, pre-visualizing what the scene will look like when conditions are perfect, perhaps at sunrise when the fog is lifting or at sunset when the light is warm and gold. What and where you scout depends upon your interest, but basically, you are looking for three things: a good subject, good lighting, and a good background.
More contests
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From the website: It was that oddly American juxtaposition of the heartfelt and the huckstering, the totally weird and the comfortably familiar, the love of country and the love of self, the individualism and the mass marketing that made the extravaganza of the state fair compelling to me.
From the website: I couldn't help thinking that if aliens ever landed on earth and you only had a few hours to help them understand America, all you would have to do is take them to any state fair. For me, they are a microcosm of America--in all its glory and weirdness--at any given point in time.
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From the website: And without the photographs, "Mohr" would be a different book altogether. Reuss may be in large company as an author whose work is inspired by an old family portrait, but he enters a smaller confederacy when he ponders the essence of photography and its transcendent reality: "What moves you in looking at these old snapshots of people who were long gone before you entered the world isn't nostalgia, but a thrilling sense of connection," he writes. He asks, "Can feelings be preserved in photography, the way love letters can be written on a typewriter?" His answer is ambiguous, for while "Mohr" is a testament to the endurance of emotion on photo-paper, it is also an exercise in invention. The feelings telegraphed by these pictures are strong indeed, but they are enforced by an imagined urgency and an embellished plot.
Discussion of Mohr including Berger's work
From the website: What is the relationship between photography and memory? Or, more precisely perhaps, how do we use photography to prompt or sustain or construct memory?
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Geometry in art is focus of museum exhibit by Fran Heller
From the website: If there is one phenomenon that proves a common denominator throughout the history of art, it is geometric form.
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From the website: The mission of The Canary Project is to photograph landscapes around the world that are exhibiting dramatic transformation due to global warming and to use these photographs to persuade as many people as possible that global warming is already underway and of immediate concern.
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In Atta Kim's Long-Exposure Photographs, Real Time Is the Most Surreal of All by Holland Cotter
From the website: This technique is old. Early-19th-century pioneers of photography experimented with it. So do contemporary artists like Hiroshi Sugimoto, in his well-known shots of movie-house interiors taken while full-length films are in progress. What Mr. Kim brings to the tradition are new subjects — live-model Buddhist sculptures, for example — and dramatically extended temporal parameters, to create ever more complex compressions and layerings of time.
Also see Michael Wesely
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Casey Templeton interview
Part A B
Photojournalism doesn't pay the bills anymore.
From the website: I think a lot of young photographers like myself are going to have to start realizing that they have to start looking at shooting more weddings or shooting more things that aren't editorial. You're going to have to start branching out.
From the website: You can't expect to live off assignments for Newsweek or Time or Life. You have to think realistically. You have to start being open for different outlets to do your photojournalism.
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Photography is art, now that it is valued highly in the auction marketplace?
From the website: "Traditional art photography as we know it is ceasing to exist in our lifetime and I don't think the great mass has realised the fact. But it is one reason why we are seeing such a huge rise in prices."
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The Smith and Telfer Photographic Collection
From the website: By the 1880s, Smith's health had begun to fail and he began to search for a younger partner. He succeeded in convincing Arthur J. Telfer, born in 1859 in Cooperstown, to join the business in 1887. Like Smith, Telfer had become interested in photography as a young man. Telfer had run his own photographic studios in Hartwick and St. Johnsville, New York before returning to Cooperstown to join Smith.
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