January 2007 Archives

IMA's broad brush: Artwork goes online

|


IMA's broad brush: Artwork goes online by Erika D. Smith

From the website: By year's end, you'll be able to search and browse collections from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum and the IMA all at once.

steve - The Art Museum Social Tagging Project

From the website: "Steve" is a collaborative research project exploring the potential for user-generated descriptions of the subjects of works of art to improve access to museum collections and encourage engagement with cultural content. We are a group of volunteers, primarily from art museums, who share a common interest in improving access to our collections. We are concerned about barriers to public access to online museum information. Participation in steve is open to anyone with a contribution to make to developing our collective knowledge, whether they formally represent a museum or not.


What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann

Premieres Wednesday, January 31 at 7pm (ET/PT) on CINEMAX

From the website: Her newest undertaking, the provocative photo series "What Remains," is a meditation on death that explores the way in which nature assimilates the body once life has left it, while directly confronting American attitudes towards dying. It includes: new photographs examining the scars left on her property after an armed fugitive was hunted down by the police and then shot himself; ominous landscapes from the Civil War battlefield of Antietam; a forensics study site showing the process of human decomposition; images of the bones and skin of a beloved, long since departed pet greyhound; and, in a closing, life-affirming gesture, close-up portraits of her children.

More Mann

Guess the World Press Photo Winner

|


Guess the World Press Photo Winner

From the website: The World Press Photo of the Year has followed some predictable patterns. Typically, the judges choose an image that symbolizes a crisis or disaster by showing a lone suffering individual. A look at the World Press Photo 50-year gallery of winners shows that certain motifs have won numerous times.

World Press Photo 50 Years Gallery


Bruce Osborn: Oyako - Portraying Japanese Generations

From the website: There surely are extensive sociological studies of the Japanese society: figures, numbers, tiny print on countless pages and lots of dry charts, too. But what about a more artistic, visual approach? In 1982 American photographer Bruce Osborn began what has become his lifelong work: the Oyako series. For the last 25 years he took pictures of one parent with one child in a white studio setting. Bruce even introduced its own version of the Japanese "Oyako No Hi" (parent and child) day: he organizes a huge photo session every year. After some time, Bruce would even repeat the same parent-child shoot to reveal the significant changes in the relationship between mother and daughter for example, the differing characteristics of fashion changing over the years or simply documenting people getting older.

Oyako Photo Gallery

Bruce Osborn

The art of the fashionable

|


The art of the fashionable

From the website: This question has long divided opinion. In general, the fine-art arena has turned a stony face towards the notion that fashion photographers are true artists. Fashion stuff is too commercial. It lacks a serious cultural history. It's all about selling product and is little more than ephemera. That's the nub of the case against.

Face of Fashion - National Portrait Gallery, London

Kylie: The Exhibition, Victoria & Albert, London

Fashion at Michael Hoppen Gallery, London


Maryland teen is young wildlife photographer of year by Tracy Grant

From the website: "I photographed the drama as the frog dangled in front of me, but Rubio (his friend) was unable to resist helping the victim and gently touched the snake, which promptly dropped its meal and slithered away," Rick wrote in describing his photograph.

Mili-MIT Museum Cell Phone Photo Contest

|

Fred Herzog - Vancouver flashback

|


Vancouver flashback by Brian Lynch

From the website: During the half-century in which Fred Herzog has been photographing Vancouver, the city has not simply matured or evolved, as urban places are commonly said to do. Rather, it has mutated from one species of town into another. Formerly considered a kind of outpost or backwater, its waterfront girded by industry, Vancouver in recent decades has become one of the models of North American urbanism, a place vastly more cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and cultured than it was when Herzog first trained his camera on it. Yet, to Herzog's eye, the city has also surrendered something that was once essential to its core, a singular, organic social energy that animated its central streets and public spaces.

Fred Herzog


David Burnett - Photojournalist: Interview by Jeff Golden

Part One (mov)

Part two (mov)

Or JPR_6815067 (mp3)

From the website: A consideration of truth and integrity in the rapidly changing world of digital media. The guest is photojournalist David Burnett, a veteran photographer for Time, Life, and other magazines. In 1976 he co-founded Contact Press Images. His awards include Magazine Photographer of the Year, the World Press Photo of the Year, and the Robert Capa Award.

A Measure of Time at the Schneider Museum of Art of Southern Oregon University

More Burnett

Via The Big Picture


Using Targets and Charts in Digital Photography by Douglas Rea

From the website: Before digital cameras, computers, and electronic printers, color management was tangible in most respects. Films were designed and manufactured with a specific color balance, letting us choose between daylight and tungsten-balanced products. Today, professional photography relies less and less on the traditional techniques like fast film processing services, contact sheets, proof sheets, and those formerly ubiquitous ink-jet prints to assess the color of their photographs. Instead, photographers view and soft-proof their images on computer monitors. One way to establish a color baseline is to use targets, charts, and color samples that let you calibrate your equipment to an established set of color values.


Wolfgang Suschitzky - I got into places people never go by Andrew Pulver

From the website: But, 70 years on, it's his British street work that stands out, remarkable for its impulsive humaneness and quiet intensity - whether scrutinising a fairground dancer watching from the wings, or a tense couple in a Lyons Corner House.

Wolfgang Suschitzky at Frank Pictures

Common Cents - Resolutions

|


Common Cents - Resolutions

From the website: I resolve to not accept assignments that pay less than my Cost of Doing Business.

More about the business of photography

Also: How to Become a Pro

Two Photography Business Blogs

|

Stephen Shore by Jay Cornelius

|


Stephen Shore by Jay Cornelius

From the website: I discovered that this camera was the technical means in photography of communicating what the world looks like in a state of heightened awareness, and it's that awareness of really looking at the everyday world with clear and focused attention that I am really interested in.


Convert any Photograph into a Text Portrait

From the website: Ascii-o-Matic is a Flash application that reads your JPG image and creates an interesting plain text portrait filled with just ASCII characters.

ASCII-O-Matic.com

How grue is your valley?

|


How grue is your valley?

From the website: LANGUAGES divide the spectrum up in different ways. Welsh speakers use "gwyrdd" (pronounced "goo-irrrth") as a general word for green. Yet "grass" literally translates as "blue straw". That is because the Welsh word for blue ("glas") can accommodate all shades of green. English-speaking anthropologists affectionately squish "green" and "blue" together to call Welsh an example of a "grue" language.

More about color

Interview: Rob Finch

|


Interview: Rob Finch

From the website: Now, to the harder part of the question. Where is it headed? My advice is that we all must embrace change. Don't push video/audio/whatever away. Celebrate what it can do. There are two specific camps of people in our still picture world. There are people who love photography and there are people who love to tell stories. People who love photography only for the act of photography might have some trouble in the future assuming they want to work at a media outlet. Those who want to tell stories have a bright future

Jocke Berglund - Hurricane Tree

|


Jocke Berglund - Hurricane Tree

The World in Our Hands - Winner
2006
Natural History Museum, London

From the website: Flying over Småland photographing the devastation, Jocke — who specializes in aerial photography — saw this 'remarkable oak tree print'. It formed partly by the storm brush of nature and partly by the impact on the soil of the forestry machines retrieving logs. 'It's as if the heavens had sent a message to the forest industry reminding them that, in this area, deciduous trees would have withstood the winds much better than pine'.

Galen Rowell - The Art of the Possible

|


Galen Rowell - The Art of the Possible

From the website: "When I made that switch from taking pictures randomly and then picking out the ones that looked the best, to saying, okay, how's this going to look in a photograph, and understanding in my mind's eye how it was going to look, that was the turning point in my career."

The boy in Brad Washburn

|


The boy in Brad Washburn by David Arnold

From the website: HE WAS a small man, well under 6 feet with never an ounce of extra fat tacked to his lithe mountaineer's frame. Every time our paths crossed I always wondered: How does this guy continue to wrap his arms around the planet?

Two Night Photography Articles

|


How to Shoot Nightscapes by Michael Soo

From the website: It's very simple: Setting smaller apertures will create and exaggerate the star-like radiating shafts of light that can appear to emanate from small points of light in a scene.

Please, don't buy a star filter unless you work for Hallmark.


Ten Tips for Better Night Photography (PDF)

More night photography

An Interview with Stephen Perloff

|


An Interview with Stephen Perloff, Editor, The Photo Review and The Photo Collector by Michael Jason

From the website: There are numerous undervalued photographers, people like Duane Michals, Larry Fink, and Bruce Davidson have had a tremendous influence on the medium but are only moderately recognized in the marketplace.

PBase Magazine #8

|


PBase Magazine #8

From the website:

Michael Richard - Blind Ambition

|


Michael Richard - Blind Ambition by Martin Elkort

From the website: Now, with only about 10% vision in his left eye, photography, which was always a secondary artistic interest for him, has taken front and center as a major influence and creative outlet.

To Photograph Is to See: A Portrait of George A. Covington

Let Your Camera Do the Seeing: The Worlds First Photography Manual for the Legally Blind, by George A. Covington, is free to all legally blind and physically disabled people through the Library of Congress National Library Service Division of the Blind and Physically Handicapped (cassette RC 17386).

Gert Rietveld - Running from Camera

|

Camera Toss at Flickr

|
Ascendent

Camera Toss at Flickr

From the website: The group and administrators are not liable for any damage to yourself or photographic equipment if you choose to attempt the things pictured here. Also please read this word of caution regarding my experiences and the probability of destorying your equipment.

Glass Bead Photography Tips

|


Glass Bead Photography Tips

From the website: Taking good quality pictures of glass beads can seem intimidating. However, there are some simple techniques which even amateur photographers can use to obtain dramatic results with minimal effort. The following examples show the basic setup that should allow anyone to achieve results they can be proud of.

Regular photography can be boring.

|

Pablo's punks

|


Pablo's punks

From the website: Modernism in the arts is 100 years old, because Pablo Picasso's painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is now 100 years old.

From the website: Mos