January 2008 Archives

Chad Neuman

Get the Best Blues in Landscape Photos by Chad Neuman

From the website: What does the weather have to do with the quality of your photos? Plenty. The amount of sunlight (and resulting warmth) can obviously affect your photos, but so can the amount of humidity. It's also important to understand how sunlight affects the saturation of the blue hues in the sky. Here are a few tips on avoiding climate-related problems when taking photos outside in general, and getting a rich, deep blue sky color in landscape photos in particular.

Veerle Pieters

Creating a Photoshop Action by Veerle Pieters

From the website: Are you in the mood for some Action? I'm talking Photoshop Actions :) They are the perfect solution to handle tasks with one click. An Action is a recording of several Photoshop operations and commands. Once the Action is created, one click is all it takes and the task will be excecuted. It's very powerful, can save you heaps of time and it's actually not that hard to create. Oh and before someone asks, this tutorial is written for version CS3. Certain things might be different in previous Photoshop versions.

Alexander Rodchenko

Making strange by Craig Raine

From the website: I begin with a spectacular pair of spectacles and I will end with a pair of spectacles. Even if you have never heard the name Alexander Rodchenko, you may well know his 1924 image of Osip Brik, the husband of Lili Brik, who was the lover of the poet Mayakovsky. Osip Brik was the co-founder of LEF - a magazine whose acronym stands for Levy Front Isskustva, the Leftist Front for the Arts. Rodchenko's iconic image shows these three Cyrillic letters in one lens of Brik's spectacles. Once seen, never forgotten.

Paul Schwartz

Form and Line in the Presence of Nature by Paul Schwartz

From the website: In 2008, I have resolved to be more scholarly (that would be -- less goofy), and this will be a first attempt for our blog, Kodak's 1000 Words or KTW. It is very scholarly and anti-nerdly to assign a TLA (three letter acronym) so obfuscation potential is maximized. My thesis for this blog posting is that form and line present in Nature makes for some awesome images. Learning to recognize the forms and lines may not come naturally though.

Alec Soth

Alec Soth stays sane by staying put by Jeff Severns Guntzel

From the website: From the balcony of a brand new Chanel Boutique one evening this past December, Minneapolis photographer Alec Soth, an invited guest at the store's glamorous opening party, surveys this scene, clad in a black blazer and black slacks he bought with the help of an former intern—"a real fashionable dude."

Scott Strazzante

Scott Strazzante - Another country

From the website: Thirteen years ago, Tribune photographer Scott Strazzante began visiting a family farm near Lockport owned by Harlow and Jean Cagwin. Over the years he took thousands of pictures of the couple and their land and all the creatures that lived there. In 2002, along with writer Don Terry, he chronicled the farm's end. Call it death, if you will. Call it progress, if you must. "I never considered following the Cagwins to their new life," says Strazzante. (They bought a grain farm near downstate Ashkum.) "But I was determined to one day go back to their land and see what had happened to it. Whenever I gave a talk and showed my work, I would tell people that." Last March, after a presentation at the College of DuPage, Strazzante was approached by one of the people in the audience, Amanda Grabenhofer, who lives on what had been the Cagwin farm. She invited him for a visit.

Tony Cenicola

The Capa Cache by Randy Kennedy

From the website: TO the small group of photography experts aware of its existence, it was known simply as "the Mexican suitcase." And in the pantheon of lost modern cultural treasures, it was surrounded by the same mythical aura as Hemingway's early manuscripts, which vanished from a train station in 1922.

Larry & Donna B. Ulrich

A Photographer's Treasure Map by Larry & Donna B. Ulrich

From the website: We're on Island Pass in the Ansel Adams Wilderness in the Sierra Nevada, California. It's evening. The tripod is locked, the camera is focused, and the 4x5 film holders are in hand. Conditions are perfect; it's a photographer's dream. The last of evening light flushes across the foreground, lights up the peaks and the film is exposed. It's a jump-up-and-down, “high-five!” shot. Photographic paradise was ours, and we were taking it home on film. Easy? With a little research and practice, you too can find and photograph paradise by learning to read a topographical map.

Nicholas Nixon

Nicholas Nixon - Patients by Bridget Fitzgerald

From the website: Well, partly because of that. It's a part of life we don't get to see the face of very often. It's moving, we're all vulnerable—it's something that's looming over all of us. I'm sort of an old guy who's on the side of the person who doesn't have much power. I like the stories of the people who don't have connections; the regular people who I think the rest of us might be better off for seeing who they are. I certainly am.

More Nixon

Jan De Cock

An Interview with Jan De Cock

From the website: The director who made the strongest impression on me is Jean-Luc Godard. I watched all of his films. Unquestionably, he contributed to my way of making art. In his films it is the form that thinks. It is not the thought that constructs form. Another luminary is Eadweard Muybridge. He is a photographer who worked primarily with the ideas of the motion picture. Aspects of sequence and repetition are present in his work. Many art philosophers, like Hubert Damisch, consider cinema the art form that connects all the others.3 I agree with them. In one of his texts, Edwin Carels even poses the question, "What is the most important thing that remains: the images or a way of looking?"4 In time we will come to consider Godard's 260-minute Histoire(s) du cinéma—a soaring collage of film clips and stills, music fragments, sound effects, on-screen text, and voice-over—to be more important in the formulation of twentieth-century culture than Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Woman with Broken Umbrella by Weegee

Weegee Collection at Amber

From the website: Classic documentary photographs of New York taken between the 1930s and the 1960s. The work was given to Amber by Weegee's widow Wilma Wilcox following Side Gallery's organisation of the first tour of his work in the UK in the early 1980s.

More Weegee

Wouter Deruytter

Wouter Deruytter - Billboards, NY

David Plowden

David Plowden

From the website: Kurt meets up with David Plowden in a city park overlooking Manhattan’s East River, not far from where the photographer grew up. Plowden describes the stoic grain elevators and ferocious steam locomotives he’s captured over the last 50+ years. Many of them are collected in Plowden's striking book Vanishing Point. "Vanishing" because the people and places in it have disappeared from the American Midwest.

Click in the left column to listen to the interview.

David Plowden

More Plowden

Lucas Oleniuk

Lucas Oleniuk - Airsick: An Industrial Devolution

From the website: Twenty days. Twenty thousand still images. A single message. Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk captures the issue of global warming in a video created entirely by using still images.

Lillie Mae Chambers by Will Yurman

Will Yurman - Not Forgotten: Portraits of Life and Death in Rochester

From the website: Throughout 2007, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle staff photographer Will Yurman's goal was to document the stories of the more than 50 homicide victims in the Rochester area. "Every death is a tragedy. But when someone is murdered, it is an act of violence against the victim, their family, their friends and every one of us," says Yurman. "Homicide victims are not just statistics. They are our neighbors and our family."

Will Yurman

Unknown Photographer

Keepers of the dead by Robert K. Elder

From the website: "It should not be about morbid fascination. It's about human ritual," says Anthony Vizzari, 27, an architect and photographer by training, a pack rat archivist by instinct.

More post-mortem photography

Robb Kendrick

Robb Kendrick - Revealing Character

From the website: The character of Texas comes from Texas cowboys. Their determination, work ethic, sense of humor, and loyalty forged the very soul of the state.

Robb Kendrick

Kelly Shimoda

Kelly Shimoda - Last Saturday Night

From the website: In the spring of 2007 the final remaining roller disco skating rinks in New York closes, ending the era that was allegedly born more that three decades before in Crown Heights, Brooklyn at The Empire.

Lewis Hine

Joe Manning - Lewis Hine Gallery

From the website: Here are many of the children (and a few adults) whose descendants I have contacted, or about whom I have found significant information. Click on each photo to see an enlarged photo and the full captions. The captions directly under each photo are my words. Below those, I have added Hine's own telling descriptions, as published by the Library of Congress or other sources. You will note examples of cases where my research has resulted in name corrections, or in the discovery of the names of persons only partially identified or not identified at all by Hine. For some, I have posted considerable information that I have uncovered about their lives (in some cases, family photos). For others, I have added brief stories and interesting nuggets of information. These pages will be updated frequently.

National Public Radio - Labor Photos Shed Light on Family History by Charlene Scott

From the website: Joe Manning, a Massachusetts historian, is tracking down the descendants of those laborers to let them know about their family history.

Counting on Grace, The Search for Addie by Elizabeth Winthrop

From the website: I first saw the picture of Addie in the summer of 2002 at the Bennington Museum. in Bennington, Vermont. She leans on her spinning frame, staring out at the camera, dressed in a filthy, spotted smock.

Through the Mill by Elizabeth Winthrop

From the website: She leans casually on her spinning frame, staring out at the camera, dressed in a filthy work smock. Her bare feet, planted firmly, are slick with black grease.

More Hine

Jack Delano (1940)

Flickr: Photos from The Library of Congress

Darren Siwes

Photographer Darren Siwes's Little Brown Boogey Man

From the website: If you think your uncle always takes forever to snap that holiday photo, consider the patience you'd need for the efforts of Australian artist Darren Siwes: He can spend 12 hours composing a family portrait, and that's after several days of preparation to make sure the location and lighting are exactly right. But Siwes has a lot more on his hands than just a camera; he meticulously designs and photographs tableaux vivants—disquieting theatrical visions of domestic scenes complete with costumed actors, as well as ghostly portraits of himself and his wife. Twelve of these works form a small but intense show at Magnan Projects that's centered around race and identity, two subjects that Siwes, a man of Dutch and Aboriginal descent, has been exploring for some years.

Magnan Projects

La Révolution Surréaliste (1930) by Man Ray

Lee Miller - Exposed

From the website: "She had the gift of finding beauty in a wasteland, and her eye tends to petrify what it looks at," Thurman writes.

Philadelphia Museum of Art

More Miller

Ori Gersht

Ori Gersht - Time After Time: Blow Up

Frozen flowers, exploding

Spencer Tunick

Naked Ambition - Why doesn't Spencer Tunick get any respect? by Mia Fineman

NSFW

From the website: One hundred fifty people get naked in Times Square. Seven thousand bare it all in Barcelona. Eighteen thousand pose nude in Mexico City. Even if you don't know Spencer Tunick's name, chances are you've heard about his work. He's the guy who photographs huge groups of naked people in public places around the world, an art form that has proven to be the ultimate media catnip. Tunick began shooting public nudes in 1992, when he posed a naked man in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Two years later, he was photographing small groups of nude figures on the streets of New York, as in this image of prone bodies snaking down the center of Manhattan's First Avenue.

Nicholas Nixon

Nicholas Nixon - 'Brown Sisters, Thirty-Three Years': Images frozen in time by Robert L. Pincus

From the website: The concept couldn't be simpler: The photographer poses four sisters every year, once a year, for a group portrait. They take the same position in each of the pictures.

More Nixon

UCLA Library

Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs, 1920-1990

From the website: The selected photographs depict historically and socially significant people, places, and events, as well as preserve glimpses of everyday life in Los Angeles. The images fall into broad categories that document politics, urban and economic development, arts and culture, the entertainment industry, crime and law enforcement, religion, sports, gender issues, and popular culture and trends.

Joyce & Ed Morrill

Joyce & Ed Morrill - Infinite India: An Excess of Reality

United Nations - South Lobby Gallery
1st Ave. at 46th St.
Admission is by appointment on weekdays.
Please call Anand Pandey at 917-770-6507, Promela Suri at 212-963-2230 or Man Soni at 212-963-6765.
Opens 1/14
Closes 1/25

Photographer Not Credited

The secret lives of us by Kate Connolly

From the website: Through her work, Tavakolian hopes to challenge western preconceptions about Iran, and particularly about Iranian women's lives. Far from being a portrait of domestic abuse, her photograph illustrates the national obsession with beauty. "You often hear the saying, 'Kill me, but make me more beautiful,'" she says.

Mike Harrison

Photoshop Montages by Mike Harrison

From the website: Cut-&-paste creativity has always had a bad press – but digital artist Mike Harrison shows that it can be used to generate inspirational surreal images.

Collages: Tips & a Tutorial using Photoshop Elements

bikewalls.com

Do You Really Need Photoshop? by Scott Gilbertson

From the website: Photoshop has a reputation for being an incredibly complex application with a steep learning code. However, once you've overcome that learning curve Photoshop's second reputation comes into play — it can do just about anything.

From the website: But how much of Photoshop's appeal is its functionality and how much of it comes from that intangible Leica cult-like status? In short, do you really need Photoshop or do you want it?

Try Photoshop Elements, the easier to use version of Photoshop

A New Geographical and Historical Grammar by Thomas Salmon (1749)

Copyleft Instead of Copyright? by John Rettie (PDF)

From the website: Whether we like it or not, the genie is out of the bottle, and in today's worlds people are both consumers and producers. Ultimately, the is newfound freedom is for the better of society.

Creative Commons

The Creative Commons and Photography by Dan Heller

From the website: Though it's been around for much longer than most people realize, the Creative Commons has been getting some traction in the photography world. With a boost of visibility by the prominence of flickr.com, more people are assigning one of four variations of licensing terms described by the Creative Commons to their photographs, which means that they are making their photos "free to use" under some minimally intrusive restrictions, such as giving photo credit ("attribution").

Creative Commons

Ray K. Metzker

Ray K. Metzker by Judith Turner-Yamamoto (PDF)

From the website: What happens when a photographer who is known and respected for his ongoing documentation of the the American urban landscape abruptly shifts subjects and approach?

Nicholas Farnham

Nicholas Farnham

Robert Coughlin

Robert Coughlin

Kevin Connolly

Kevin Connolly - The Rolling Exhibition

From the website: Everyone tries to create a story in their heads to explain the things that baffle them. For the same reason we want to know how a magic trick works, or how mystery novel ends, we want to know how someone different, strange, or disfigured came to be as they are. Everyone does it. It's natural. It's curiosity.

Then

Now, by John Walker

The Craft of "Then and Now" Photography by John Walker

From the website: If you have access to old post cards or other photographs of your locality, it's a rewarding project to make “then and now” documents which compare them to present-day views you've photographed from the same viewpoint. There's more to reproducing the perspective of century-old photos than you might think at the outset; I've learnt a great deal in the process of preparing this photo gallery of Lignières. This document describes the techniques and tricks I've developed, and discusses challenges you may face in accomplishing a similar project yourself.

More rephotography projects

Collection of Robert E. Jackson

Visual Trophies by John Updike

From the website: Among the homely staples of twentieth-century life that have been unceremoniously retired by the microchip revolution—the typewriter, the pressed-wax record, the card catalogue—the camera loaded with film has met a swift and stealthy end. Digital cameras look much like their analog predecessors, but the viewfinder is different—a tiny TV screen, held at arm's length—and we don't have to wait for the mistakes to come back from the drugstore before discarding them. We didn't, in fact, often discard silver-based snapshots, but kept them, with their negatives, in boxes and drawers to await a definitive culling that rarely came. They began to slide into obsolescence before the turn of this century, and had already become "collectibles," with a fellowship of collectors and dealers feeding on the shoals of these silverfish as they raggedly rose from the depths of the private realm to surface in the marketplace.

Steve Foss

Wolf Encounter: The Story Behind the Photograph by Steve Foss

From the website: Head down, the wolf trotted toward me, right down the middle of the Fernberg. You know the way wolves trot, that bicycling gait. No effort. I’d just pulled over and gotten out of my vehicle to photograph an interesting tree trunk formation when I saw the wolf about 100 yards away. As long and hard as I’ve been trying to put myself close to wolves, I blinked back surprise that it seemed to finally be happening.

Hau Mitakuye Oyasin = We Are All Related

Pieter Hugo

Pieter Hugo - My Hyena by Alan Gilbert

From the website: The prudent response when encountering a pit bull straining at its leash is to cede the right of way. So imagine walking down the street and seeing somebody with a hyena at the end of a heavy chain. When South Africa–based photographer Pieter Hugo heard about a group of men in Nigeria who roam the country with a small menagerie of hyenas, baboons, and rock pythons, he felt impelled to find out more.

Francis P. Burke

David R. Phillips - Rescuing history by Kevin Nance

From the website: Hunks of American history, much of it in Chicago, were literally destined for the dustbin over the past 40 years. Sizable collections of glass-plate photographic negatives documenting life in these United States, some from as early as the 1850s, were too bulky to store, too fragile, heavy and cumbersome to move. And so they were set to be tossed in the trash, even recycled to build greenhouses. Almost no one knew or cared what history, what knowledge, what patrimony might be lost forever.

Harry Fowler Woods

Harry Fowler Woods - A Family Album Is One for the History Books by Roberta Hershenson

From the website: The old photo albums were such a familiar part of the Woods family's Adirondack camp that no one paid them much notice. But when the 21-year-old James T. Stever took a closer look at the nearly 1,000 rare photographs that his great-great-grandfather Harry Fowler Woods had taken a century ago, he saw them with fresh eyes.

Erik Jacobs

Riva Berkovitz - Macro Photography, Microscopic Details by Ian Austen

From the website: "I needed to capture it but I realized I couldn't paint it," Ms. Berkovitz said. "So I decided to buy a digital camera."

Riva Berkovitz

Kevin Ames

Get Light Right for the Best Photos by Kevin Ames

From the website: Photography has undergone an earth-shattering sea change in its transition from film to digital. At the same time, the foundation of photography -- light -- remains the same. Photography literally means "light writing," which means that photographers are light writers. The ability to bend light to our vision is what makes us photographers. After all, anyone can buy a high-quality digital camera. Very few can light a subject well. You might say light writers light right.

Kevin Rivoli

Kevin Rivoli - Photographing the Life That Rockwell Depicted by Kathryn Shattuck

From the website: With his allegiance to dewy-eyed innocence and earnest sentimentality, the illustrator Norman Rockwell has often been mocked for creating an America that never was and never will be.

From the website: But Kevin Rivoli, a photojournalist in upstate New York, will tell you that's just not true. He knows because he's documented it.

O. Winston Link

O. Winston Link - A Happy Accident, Carefully Planned by Ken Johnson

From the website: GENIUS in photography often means a knack for being in the right place at the right time. For the commercial photographer and train buff O. Winston Link (1914-2001), that was Staunton, Va., in 1955. Having traveled there on assignment from his home in New York to photograph window air-conditioners for Westinghouse, he took a side trip to nearby Waynesboro, a stop on the last large steam-powered railroad in America, the Norfolk & Western. Over the next five years, until the railroad completed its conversion to diesel-powered engines, Link made more than 20 trips to Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland, producing more than 2,400 images of Norfolk & Western trains, stations and related sites.

More O. Winston Link