Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
31 March 2010
Fluke
04 March 2010
18 February 2010
03 February 2010
Getting the Ball Rolling Again
I was recently backing up my computer when I realized that I hadn't taken a single photo for at least three months! I couldn't believe it! I had slowly sunk into this rut and become disillusioned with my photography to the point where I hadn't even picked up my camera.
That was my "rock bottom". I reached the point where the only way out was up. In the past week I've shot more than I can remember. At first, the camera seemed foreign in my hand. I had lost touch with what had become an extension of my hand. Fortunately, yes, it is just like riding a bike. I've since shot more than I can remember. I've re-familiarized myself with my camera again. The functions, menu items, button locations and feel that had become second nature to me have all come back. I've taken the damn thing everywhere with me. It's like having gotten back with an old flame and not being able to stop touching eachother. Ok maybe that was a little too dramatic and creepy, but you know what I mean.
Another thing I noticed is how my way of seeing an image has also shifted. I honestly don't know how to explain this one, but something has definitely changed. Perhaps it was having the time away from the camera, or seeing so much of other people's work without creating any of my own. I don't know. However, I'm sure that it's going to start showing in my work.
The only down side to all this is all the editing that's waiting for me on the computer right now. I really need to work on my editing.
I guess the moral of the story is... You know what? I have no idea what the moral of the story is. All I know is that I'm back doing what I love with the passion I thought I had lost, and that's all that counts.
30 January 2010
Twelve Photographers
25 December 2009
Newton and Avedon
Any photographer who says he’s not a voyeur is either stupid or a liar. ~ Helmut Newton
A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion …. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. ~ Richard Avedon
21 December 2009
A Decade of News Photography
Photo from: Boston.com - The Big Picture
Another fantastic post is up at The Big Picture titled: The Decade in News Photographs.
17 December 2009
The Big Picture - 2009 in Photos Part 3
Photo from: Boston.com - The Big Picture
Here is Part 3 of the Boston Globe's 2009 in Photos series that I wrote about yesterday. You can find parts 1 and 2 at the following links.
2009 in Photos Part 1
2009 in Photos Part 2
16 December 2009
The Big Picture - 2009 in Photos
Photo from: Boston.com - The Big Picture
The Boston Globe's The Big Picture section has published an amazing three part series on 2009 in photos. Links to part 1 and 2 are below. I'll post part 3 when it comes out.
2009 in Photos Part 1
2009 in Photos Part 2
02 December 2009
Photo Anarchy
If you can't see the video in your RSS feed or email subscription, just use this link.
26 November 2009
In Search Of Eustace
The Anthropologist, a site owned by The Urban Outfitters, "is an online space for inspiring works and inspiring individuals. It is a testament to the idea that revealing the passions of one person can result in the progress of many."
The newest project to be showcased on their site is that of photographer David Eustace.
Scottish photographer David Eustace is a seismograph - his portraits have a way of exposing what lies beneath the surface.
We could only oblige when he expressed a desire to document a three-week road trip with his teenage daughter Rachael, as we couldn't imagine a better gift than an everlasting memory with one's father.
Check out this project titled In Search Of Eustace, it's so worth it!
On the site you'll also find projects by Andrew Zuckerman and Jane Campion. -----------------------------------------------
07 November 2009
Martian Landscapes
Check out this link for some amazing photographs of Mars taken from 300 km above the planet's surface, over a period of years by HiRISE (the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment).
-----------------------------------------------19 August 2009
Rosemount Sydney Fashion Festival Photo Pen
Got lucky to find this shot of the Photographer's Pen at the Rosemount Sydney Fashion Festival taken by Daniel Boud. This is where we're all packed into like sardines. It's hot, sweaty and if you're stuck in the middle like I am, you come out feeling like you just did a 1 hour workout at the gym. You can just see my one eye and lens under the top right video camera's lens and to the left of someones hand.
-----------------------------------------------14 July 2009
The Festival of San Fermin
The Festival of San Fermin attracts thousands of visitors to Pamplona, Spain every year. The nine-day festival includes a carnival, bullfights and of course, the famous Running of the Bulls. Deeply traditional, it has been held since 1591, and remains a popular, if dangerous and controversial event. This year, dozens of runners and revelers have been injured, and one has been killed - a 27-year-old man who was gored in the neck, heart and lungs on Friday. Animal rights groups continue to level criticism toward the event, in which dozens of bulls run through small, packed streets toward a bullring where they will be killed during later bullfights. Collected here are some of the scenes from this year's Festival of San Fermin.
Photos from The Festival of San Fermin, 2009 from The Boston Globe.
12 June 2009
Published in People
Had a nice little surprise in my inbox this morning. One of my shots from the 2009 Sydney Film Festival got published online in People! A big thanks to Mick and Frazer for all your help.
11 June 2009
The Premiere
Well it finally happened. It took over a year to get the ball rolling and have the planets align just right, but in the end it all worked out.
I shot my first red carpet premiere for Elevation Photos.
Covered the 2009 Sydney Film Festival and shot the likes of Hugo Weaving, John Woo, James Nesbitt, Miranda Otto and Teri Hatcher.
You can see some of the shots at the following links. I'll upload some more to my site later on.
Link 1
Link 2
21 May 2009
Being Present and the Life Poetic
This is an excerpt from a fantastic piece found on Scott Kelby's Photoshop Insider blog. It was written by Vincent Versace. Links to both are at the bottom of this post.
The Tao of Paying Attention. The Poetry of Being Present.
Complicated equipment and light reflectors and various other items of hardware are enough, to my mind, to prevent the birdie from ever coming out.
— Henri Cartier-Bresson
What is the shape of a name?
We are the landscape of all we have seen.
— Isamu Noguchi
Creating an image is like writing your name in water. The act of writing is there but simply cannot be seen. Only the water is seen and the ripples felt. A photograph is such a thing, the ripple of how the photographer was moved moves the viewer in the same way, as if he and not the viewer was there when the image was captured. Photography should not be about simply taking photographs; it should be about simply being taken by them. It is about allowing yourself to be consumed so completely and totally that the decisive moment pulls you through the lens and the image is captured along the way. From head to toe, mind, body, and spirit—everything that is you must be engaged, all creative cylinders firing at once and as one. Or, as it is referred to in Japanese Zen Buddhism, being in a state of Shibumi: the act of thoughtful thoughtless thought. Doing the right thing in the moment without consciously thinking about the doing the right thing. It is a state of grace.
It is in this state of grace that photography becomes not about merely looking but about seeing, because to just look is simply a visual experience, while seeing, on the other hand, is a creative process. Seeing is believing, and not, as we have been told, the other way around.
The question is, “How do we make the leap from looking to seeing and from taking to being taken by our pictures?” The answer exists at this very moment within us; it is as much a part of us as breathing. We need to approach the way we learn the same way we live—poetically and not rhetorically.
Play a game with me for a moment. I want you to say out loud, to no one in particular, “Hi, my name is ____,” saying your full name, and then pause for a moment. Now after you’ve done that, this time, again out loud say, “Hi, my name is Izzy Smith.” Unless your name is Izzy Smith, you should observe a difference in the way those two statements feel. The former statement most likely felt “right” while the latter felt empty.
The difference is that the former statement—your name—is inhabited, and the latter statement—a made-up name—is just some words, verbs and nouns with no meaning to you whatsoever. Your name is your personal icon, the icon of everything you have experienced up to that moment. Another way to look at it is that your name has a shape and when you say it, it contains everything you have ever said and done. The shape of your name reflects the landscape of all of your experiences and all you have seen and felt, every lesson of your life expressed whenever you utter it.
We live life in a total or global way. Our lives are not determined by what happens but by how we react to what happens. We are not defined by what life brings to us, but rather by the attitude we bring to life. If we have a positive attitude, that positive attitude causes a chain reaction of positive thoughts, positive events, and positive outcomes. It is a catalyst, a spark that creates extraordinary results. The images we create are a reflection of how we live our lives.
We experience life poetically, not rhetorically. Poetry is the language of heightened emotion, poetry is the form of expression we use when conversational language cannot even begin to contain what we feel. Poetry is representational in its symbolism, where few words can mean an immense thing. Whereas when we express things rhetorically, the words and symbolism we choose become presentational; we use many words to describe a single thought or thing. A poetic approach is expansive, dynamic, and felt within us, while the rhetorical approach is constrictive, static, cramped and, at best, a literary event.
But life is not a literary event. It is dynamic and not static. It is not made up of series of events that occurred in a linear manner that add up to what we are. Life is all about the way in which the experiences interact with each other in a nonlinear way, and that interaction causes the poem that is who we are. Just like a beach is made up of grains of sand, every experience we have is a grain that makes up the beach of our lives. They interact and move and shift, changing the landscape of who we are.
A Grain of Sand Is Not Made Up of a Beach
A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?
— Ernst Haas
A picture speaks a thousand words.
If the above statement is true, something I have come to personally believe to be self-evident in its truth, I would suggest, then, that a photograph is a visual poem. The greatest of which are ones that move us the way the photographer was moved when he clicked the shutter. So if we operate under this premise, I would argue that we should approach our formalized learning of photography in the same manner we approach life—poetically instead of rhetorically. More specifically, I am talking about the way we approach learning how to express our creativity within the images we create.
F.A. Porsche said, “If you analyze the function of an object, its form often becomes obvious. Form follows function.” The word photography literally means “to write with light,” and the function of the object of photography, the photographic image, that which we have written with light, is to emotionally move the viewer of the image being looked at. If this is the function of photography, then the form of photography must be a poetic one. Therefore, if form follows function and the function of photography is to create visual poems, then the images we create are a reflection of how we live our lives. It is therefore incumbent upon us to learn how to express ourselves poetically visually. The problem, however, is that traditionally when we are taught about creativity in photography we are taught in a rhetorical, or granular, manner and not in a poetic, or global, manner.
Basically, there are two ways to approach learning: granularly and globally. I’m not talking about the learning of the lessons of life, which we call “experience” or, as the Reverend Knight put it, “Experience—the thing you get 10 seconds after you needed it.” Those lessons are by their very nature total, or global, events. What I am discussing is specifically the way we “school” ourselves when we want to learn how to do something.
When it comes to this type of learning, the way we are traditionally taught is in the rhetorical or granular way, i.e., “Do these steps this way and you will get this result when doing this thing this way.” Lots of words used for the explanation of a small grain of knowledge.
The problem inherent with this approach to both learning and teaching is when we learn in a granular way, what we learn tends to stay attached to the experience we had when we learned it. The knowledge we gained rarely travels into other things; it is confined to the doing of things exactly like or very similar to the first time we learned it. If we are not careful when we learn this way, what will happen is things that are simply technique become revered as if they are an art form unto themselves. Also, the images that are created by following this path tend to be derivative, repetitive, and not at all innovative.
What further occurs after we put ourselves through this type of learning is that we hit the glass ceiling and gilded cage of photography—the perfection of technique to the point were we can always take and create pretty pictures, technically excellent but somewhat sterile in their beauty. We find ourselves doing the same things over and over again, expecting the result to change. We become frustrated with our work and ourselves, we are tourists within our own creativity, defined by a set of arbitrary rules that tell us all about how a thing should look. We don’t create the images that we are capable of creating because the rules that define us say we shouldn’t.
Don’t get me wrong, in the beginning we need to learn things in grains of thought, but from the outset of our journey we need to be open to something more. It is being open and receptive to that something more from the beginning of our granular learning experience that will show us how we break through the glass ceiling of creative stagnation. It is this beginning openness that is the pathway to connecting more deeply with the world—both within and without—and allow that connection to be held like an expectant breath within our images.
A Beach Is Made Up of Grains of Sand
Every thing you need to know you will know, when you need to know it if you choose to simply be present at the time you first experience it.
— Tad Z. Danieleweski
Let’s approach the poetics of learning to create another way. In fractal geometry there is concept called chaos theory. Very simply put, chaos theory posits that there is order and great beauty in what looks to be total chaos; if we look closely enough at the randomness around us, patterns will start to emerge.
So rather than trying to fit all the things we learn into a neat set of ordered dogma, why not allow them simply to be just what they are, a fact that is what it is, nothing more and nothing less? The best way I know to accomplish this is to choose to simply be present at the time you learn or discover something new.
So what does being present mean? It means that you simply choose to show up with no preconceptions and you allow yourself to be open to the experience of what you learn when you learn. It means that you choose to operate with the assumption that even though you realize that what you have learned has specific significance to the lesson at hand, it may have the same or greater significance to things you have yet to experience. It means approaching learning as if it’s a giant cloud of knowledge or an infinitely expansive beach of ideas in which things are always in flow.
A beach is made up of grains of sand; a grain of sand is not a beach. When we learn things, they are grains of thought—pieces of knowledge—that if kept within the confines of where and when we learned them, we would do little with them. If, however, we allow them to pile up and interact with each other, we will come to a greater, more global way of seeing. If we allow the things that we learn to simply be—to exist in our minds without being anchored to one way of doing them—they can interact, collide, and perhaps create something bigger. If you allow yourself this level of presence, that being to simply show up, what will start to occur is that everything you need to know you will come to know when you need to know it. Because out of the apparent randomness, the patterns of knowledge will form as the need for them arises.
(....)
Confucius said, “It is from the grain of sand a pearl comes.” It is from a grain of knowledge the pearl of wisdom comes. But that pearl is created by the friction of colliding with other grains of thought, which cause the many layers that surround that grain that ultimately becomes the pearl. One thought leads to an experience that, over time, causes many thoughts that ultimately becomes a way of doing things.
There is a revolution in photography happening. We are witnessing it now; the digital image for the first time allows anyone onto the pathway to creative greatness. A place where impossible is merely an opinion, an opinion that is held not by the viewer of the image but by the creator of that image. Which means that personal imagination is then the only limitation. It is important to not merely focus on technique for technique’s sake, but to discover what it means to see rather than merely look. It is in that direction that you will come full circle and find the voice within you that yearns to be heard and needs to be heard. Once you discover that technique is merely a detail—a consideration, nothing more—then in that moment the voice within you, the visual poet who fell in love with photography, will be free to create images that will change the world of those who view them.
Become a beach that is made not just of grains of knowledge but of ever-changing pearls of wisdom. Create images where what you felt is written in the water of the poetic moment and the viewer of the images is forever taken by your image as you were.
I invite you to give yourself permission to become that photographer. We are all waiting to believe with you in what you see.
Written by: Vincent Versace. The full article can be found on: Scott Kelby's Photoshop Insider blog.
22 January 2009
Artsy Wisdom
"Photography is about savoring life at 1/100th of a second."
Marc Riboud
The question: "How can I take more intersting photographs?"
The answer: "Become a more interesting person."
Jay Maisel
"Brickwork can be done as a laborer or as an artisan."
Anne Lamott
"Ask yourself what makes you come alive and go and do that. For what the world needs, is people who have come fully alive."
Gil Baile
"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."
Edgar Allen Poe
"Lady, I smile with my eyes."
Ben Harper (told to a lady taking his picture and insisting for him to smile)
"All children are artists. The problem is to remain one when you grow up."
Pablo Picasso
17 December 2008
The Aftereffects
I've stolen these words. Yes that's right, stolen them straight from someone else's mouth. For reasons unbeknownst to me, I can't tell you from whom or where, but I can tell you this: she takes delicious photos.
"You get to know strangers when you take their photo. You get to know yourself when you edit their photos."-----------------------------------------------
26 November 2008
The Big Picture
The three links below are to U.S. newspapers that have adopted the use of BIG pictures on their blog sites. The first link from the Boston Globe was the one who started the ball rolling and the other two being the Wall Street Journal and the Denver Post have since followed.
Whether they post a 30 image photo essay or just photos of the day, they have some beautiful imagery and it's worth the occasional visit to see what's new.
The Big Picture - Boston Globe
Photo Journal - Wall Street Journal
Captured - Denver Post
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Anyway, I hope you like where this is all headed. More tk.