Photo Expressions

repeating themes

2009-11-07T22:28:00.001-06:00

The question about influences came up at a workshop I did back in September. I sat and thought about what those pictures were and the paintings in the previous two posts came through pretty strongly as times I remember being in awe of a painting or piece of art. I hadn't really given them much thought in the last decade or more, at least not much conscious thought or making an effort to look at them. One other thing that Susan showed us was that for many artists these initial pieces or favourite pieces of art appear all throughout their photography. She showed artist after artist, first what they'd claim was their favourite influence, then the artist's own work, mirroring those themes. I went home that evening and had a look at some of my favourite photographs from the last couple of years and was really quite amazed by what I saw. I'll post some of those in the next day or so, but I recommend that if you answered the question with some thought, that you go and take a look at your recent images, with this in mind. You might be surprised.

later influences

2009-11-04T08:11:00.001-06:00

The other style of art that I think has had an impression [sic] on me is that of Claude Monet and others. Their use of light and color certainly had a profound effect that I've tried to capture with my camera. I remember seeing the wheatstacks in snow image at the Getty Center in Los Angeles and being amazed by how vibrant and alive it was, in person. The darker images, like the houses of parliment and gare Saint-Lazare images have also resonated over the years.

early influences

2009-11-03T22:17:00.001-06:00

What was the first two dimensional piece of art that really had a strong influence on you?

I thought about this for a few minutes, then one image came really strongly to mind. I remember seeing it in a gallery in Glasgow - very well positioned right at the end of a long hallway. You come around the corner and there it is - Dali's Christ of Saint John of the Cross. Had a strong impact on me at the time. Has stuck with me ever since, on some level. I only really give it much conscious thought again after being asked the question above, in a workshop. Then I actually went back and looked at it and took in the themes.

iPic

2009-11-03T20:05:00.001-06:00

Been a quiet few weeks, photographically. I did get an iphone and have been playing around with the photo apps available for it. Finding I can get quite interesting effects, from such a terrible little lens. The constraints of the format and features can work well, with care. It has taken some effort to work out what the good apps are and how to compose with it. Seems to do well with subjects that are often seen from other krappy cameras, big, bold, simple compositions. Maybe time to pick up the real camera again and see what's going on with that.

I did a Susan Burnstine 'visual narratives' workshop a few weeks ago, that frustrated me quite a bit. Not due to anything I really learned on the workshop, just confusion about what I really want to take pictures of or what direction I want to go in. I've spent the time since then going in a totally different direction, trying to learn to play guitar. Maybe that'll feed back into the picture taking eventually. For now it is a lot of fun and a different form of creative outlet. Last year's working through 'the Artist's Way' exercises kept coming up with questions about music and a desire to learn to play something, just took me a while.

long summer

2009-10-31T21:31:00.001-05:00

an exercise in two parts

2009-09-16T08:04:00.005-05:00

Reading a couple of posts by Paul Lester and Anita Jesse triggered this. I'm going to be light in details in this first post, deliberately. This is part of one of the more eye-opening exercises I did on a recent workshop.

What was the first two dimensional piece of art that really had a strong influence on you?

You might need to sit and think quietly about it for 5 minutes to really get back into your past and think about the first image that got under your skin. It might be a photograph, a painting, it might be a 'cat in the hat' book you loved, or that caterpillar with holes in the pages. But if you give it some quiet thought there is probably one image back in they dusty places in your mind that stands out as the early moment of revelation or awe.

The second thing to consider is what would be the first photograph that really clicked with you and made you want to pick up a camera.

Give it a bit of thought. You certainly don't have to post here. This is not a test and there aren't correct answers. No point in trying to come up with some impressive response. Just think about it and maybe write down the one or two sources that come to mind.

frustrated

2009-09-16T07:57:00.001-05:00

but working through it.

TPS: International competition

2009-09-12T05:58:00.001-05:00

Artist's reception is tonight. Here are the images from the show.

Austin Tri

2009-09-11T22:51:00.001-05:00

Another triathlon. Found a new angle for pictures in Austin - the bridge in the background is an iconic shape (and home to 1.5 million bats). I like how the backlit and overexposed river and bridges work with the fill-flashed athletes. Think I need to start finding something other than triathlon to shoot, for a while. Getting hard to keep it fresh and interesting.

lessons and new ideas

2009-09-05T21:47:00.001-05:00

Lots of things been going on in the last month or so. I finished up the images from the Ironman triathlon project. Well - I finished taking the pictures. I've done the basic editing too, but haven't really looked at them all as a set. Part of the delay has been I've wanted to get a bit of distance from them, but also that I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with them. Initially I was shooting them with the idea that there would be a book, and that may still happen. Then I've been kicking around the idea of a small gallery show or end of season party and show, but that would probably need some sponsorship to pay for several larger prints. I did get one image accepted in the Texas Photo international competition opening next weekend, which is a thrill, but still not really the focus of the project. I'd also been contemplating putting something together for the SlideLuck PotShow coming up here in November.

Things fell in to place a bit more on Thursday night here, when I was at the Gathering of Photographers meetup in Austin. I hadn't been to this group before and had a great time. There were several very accomplished photographers there and I got some interesting ideas. In particular, I spent a while picking Julia Robinson's brain and seeing some of her multimedia slideshows. She was kind enough to put up with all my stupid questions and point me in what seems to be a good direction. I've always really enjoyed the sort of work put out by mediastorm, and the general mixing of still images along with audio. I'm a bit of a 'This American Life' and Ira Glass junkie as well. One thing I've realised in the last couple of years is that I want to try and tell stories with my photography, rather than just being happy with a series of greatest hits or one off images. I think the multimedia format has a lot of potential for that. Not really interested in video yet and there is a lot of power in looking at a still image, with audio that increases or expands upon the information in the image, without going to moving pictures.

Of course, that now means I need to work out how to put all that together. I've taken the pictures, but I didn't record any audio. I have a small Olympus WS-110 digital recorder that I think will be good enough to pick up the audio I need, but I have to go record it. Which now means I'm having to consider doing interviews, recording background sounds and arranging some instrumental backing music. Then I need to learn how to mix all those bits of audio together and sync it up to the images. The prospect of learning all this new stuff has really lit a candle under me - it's exciting! Reminds me of all the book structure and design that I absorbed for the first SoFoBoMo.

This evening, I was at Piercarlo's gallery show CHAN-CHAN. He did it in conjunction with another artist - a painter - Luis Abreux. Combined, they had paintings and photography hanging together. The images were all related to Cuba in various ways, and there was a live band playing music from the region too. It struck me that this was an even more engrossing multimedia presentation of the work. The band really evoked the feel of the area and helped transport you while looking at the images.

On the way home from that show, I ran into a friend of mine who's a great musician. Woode Wood is a fixture on the local running trail, playing his music and working on his videos. Things are picking up for him and he's putting a band together now. We hung out for a while and I was lucky enough to get my first guitar lesson from him. My fingertips are still sore. I was also able to arrange to license some of his music as the backing score for the slideshow - things are falling into place already! Check out his videos and vote for them on YouTube.

survived the Summer

2009-09-04T00:15:00.001-05:00

Another Summer spent in photographic aestivation. But again, Autumn is approaching. Temperatures are dipping under 100F at least before lunch time. I'm starting to feel guilty about this abandoned blog and wanting to write. I attended a really inspiring photography group this evening, that kicked off various ideas in my head. I've got a week off next week, to explore some of those ideas and I'm all fired up and ready to go. Next Friday the Texas Photographic Society international competition opens and I have an image on display, after a couple of years of trying to get in. Things are ticking along nicely. Time to start blogging again.

I've been trying to work out in my head what to do with all the triathlon pictures I've been taking. Finally started to edit them and try to select some and tell a story. Working on what that story might be. Thinking it will be more of a multimedia approach than I'd initially planned. Time to do some more audio work.

a capitol idea

2009-08-09T17:54:00.001-05:00

Trying something new, for me, on a very well worn subject. I was part of an organised photo walk last weekend, that made a beeline for the capitol building. I've shot this so many times over the last ten years but tried to come up with a different approach. This is about 200 frames, exposed at different EV values to give some interest, and composed using Photoshop's photomerge with fairly non-standard settings, to make it work badly. Rather than trying to make one seamless blend of all the images, so that it looks like I had a wide angle lens with me, I like trying to assemble it in a slightly more incorrect way, to give the resulting image some more character. I've done this with landscapes before, using a 50mm lens. Here I used an 85mm lens and just shot away. It's useful to fix the white balance or shoot in RAW and assemble all the images in the same white balance setting, just to avoid colour shifts, unless of course that's what you are after.

dionn

2009-08-03T22:30:00.002-05:00

I'm not normally a big fan of partial colour in black and white images. For T3, blue is such a strong part of the team identity, I think it works, particularly when seen with other images of different people in the team. The blue becomes the unifying element across the shots.

out the kitchen window

2009-08-01T21:03:00.001-05:00

Moved house in the last few weeks, started a new job, went to Puerto Rico to shoot a wedding, finished off my Ironman project in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Trying to manage my way through the aftermath of all of those events in a month. View out of the kitchen window is good.

still alive

2009-07-15T21:57:00.001-05:00

Well, mostly still alive. Just busy and hot. More to come.

inner workings

2009-07-01T07:49:00.000-05:00

One of the more unusual SoFoBoMo books I've seen this year is Paulo J. B. Mendes book, Inner Workings. This is a simple concept, exploring the inner details of electrical instruments from the middle of the last century. Superficially not the most visually exciting idea, but Paulo pulls it off with a simple style. Clean, well lit images illuminate how the instruments are constructed and what's going on behind the metal and bakelite facades. As an electrical engineer I'm probably in a small minority of potential viewers who are fascinated by this sort of thing-I loved this book. I understand if you don't share my enjoyment of this book, but I think that's a big part of what SoFoBoMo is all about. You don't have to make a book that has to appeal to a mass market, but you can make a book that can let you explore what you love and still find an audience. If you are interested in how things work, then take a look at Paulo's book and see what's inside.

everyday ironman

2009-06-30T00:07:00.001-05:00

Finished the shooting for the Ironman project at the weekend, with a few post race celebratory tattoo images. Lots of pictures taken. Many great race stories. So many new Ironmen after the race up in Coeur d'Alene last week. A tough day and nearly everyone came through it strong. The others I'm sure will be back to try again some other day. Now I'm left to try and make some sense out of all the pictures. I had an idea for a book of these images. Maybe now it is just a show of some large prints. Hard to tell at the moment.

bottom up

2009-06-29T23:43:00.001-05:00

If you want a treat, check out Alexandre Buisse's SoFoBoMo book, Bottom Up. Some luscious, otherworldly landscapes. Jaw dropping mountain scenery, blue footed boobies, bright red frigate birds and a 6354m mountain climb. Great images. Makes me want to go and climb a mountain.

ironman coeur d'alene 2009

2009-06-24T07:36:00.001-05:00

Was lucky enough to get to watch a huge group of people from T3 in Austin take part in and do amazingly well at Ironman CDA, at the weekend. I took a few pictures too. Congratulations to all of them.

zig when they zag

2009-06-09T22:18:00.001-05:00

A friend was kind enough to remind me again about picking the path less travelled. We were talking about lens choices for a possible trip to Yellowstone. Considering renting high quality, long telephoto lenses. I mentioned about bringing a 500mm mirror lens. Crappy optics. Not worth using. Manual focus. She pointed out that I'd get different shots to most people. Same with shooting portraits up close with a wide angle lens. (and congratulations to Kate for finishing her first triathlon this weekend)

Some times it is worth picking your favourite piece of received wisdom and doing just exactly the opposite. You'll get something different. You might find something new for you. Maybe it won't work, maybe it will. But you could well be surprised. I like this shot of American football, by Winograd as another fine example of this idea. A friend of mine was lucky enough to study with Winograd and is also constantly trying to go in the other direction to everyone else. His blog is well worth reading as a result.

So your mission, if you chose to accept it, is to go and do something you think 'shouldn't be done' this week. Try doing the opposite of what you think is the right way to take a picture. Let me know how it goes.

taking the narrative machete to the democratic jungle

2009-06-05T07:38:00.001-05:00

Attended the Alec Soth lecture at the Austin Center of Photography last night. They are doing a fantastic job for such a young organization, getting in great photographers who are giving interesting talks. Alec Soth talked about his ennui with photography as a medium. Starting out quite frustrated and negative about image making. Partly this was in the context of what he called the democratic jungle, riffing on William Eggleston's idea of the democratic forest. That everything is equally important as a subject and everything is up for having pictures taken. No need for much in the way of subject selection or thought - everything is a viable subject. In the same context, he showed the 2-billionth picture that's been photographed and uploaded to flickr - it looked a lot like an Eggleston image. This morning I had a look. They've passed 3 billion images now (some time in 2008 - shown above on the right) Facebook has over 10 billion pictures. Ten billion pictures.

As he tried to lighten the dark mood, he proposed that he thinks the narrative machete is the way out of this democratic jungle. That using photography to tell stories and create sequences of images is the only way forward, to do anything interesting. There was a section of 'understanding comics' shown to support this and then off to the portraiture. I'd looked through a lot of his portraits again, before going along to the talk. I'd been struck by how just slightly out of the normal each of the subjects were, often in their placement or relationship with the camera. He described much of his portrait process as really trying not to connect with the subject. Working with a large format camera, hiding under the fabric, not talking much. Waiting until the subject disconnects and withdraws into their own thoughts, before taking the pictures. He described trying to not take a picture of the person, but of the space between the person and the camera. That does a good job of describing what I'd felt was slightly odd about all the portraits. The disconnect with the subject, viewer and photographer, that repeats in his portraits.

He also delved into various parts of his published work, describing the process he follows to find images (something of a freeform word association with a slightly odd twist) and how those themes repeat throughout his work. It was interesting to hear how he uses overarching, obvious themes to help explain the work, even when often his own personal motivation is something quite different. This seems to come from early shows that he had a hard time explaining. So something like 'sleeping by the Mississippi' is superficially about that river, but mostly he's trying to explore other concepts - that are quite visible in the images. Similarly with Niagara. All in all, a fascinating and insightful chat about photography. Inspired me to try harder and depressed me about the whole state of photography in equal measure.

I think the ACP is doing a great job. Mary Ellen Mark talked about how great things were in the past and complained about how things are, how frustrated she is now - towards the end of a career. Alec Soth was much more interesting. He's at the middle and currently at the height of his career, 1 year after being accepted at Magnum as a full member. He just talked about how things are, exposing all the troubling flaws in this easy access visual art and describing his way forward. Next up, in September, Elliott Erwitt.

mama-san say...

2009-06-03T19:50:00.000-05:00

Deb Hall has put together an inspired portrait of her mother, for SoFoBoMo. Some lovely images, great individual portraits that made me laugh out loud, and wise words combine to give an insight into the person that her mama-san is. One of the best parts of SoFoBoMo is getting to see what other people are capable of putting together within the constraints of the challenge. This is a fine example and worth taking the time to look. Great.

on the edge

2009-06-03T18:54:00.000-05:00

April Siegfried's SoFoBoMo book, On the Edge , starts out with some dramatic design and bold typography. The strong edge placement sets the tone for some very well thought-out layout. The images don't disappoint either, making me smile, feel sad or amused in new ways on each page. She has brought a good eye for colour and light and applied it to a very simple concept - edges. The turns that this simple concept takes are delightful, finding new twists on the idea through the book, enough to keep things interesting. This serves as a great example that projects don't have to have lofty goals or broad remits. The project idea is just the thing that motivates you to go and take the pictures. It doesn't have to be addressing world peace or famine. I think sometimes we get caught up in needing to find something worthy, when the theme really isn't that important at all, as long as it gets you moving.

17 to Portland

2009-06-03T18:50:00.001-05:00

Amy Sakurai's love affair with Portland continues in her 2009 SoFoBoMo book, 17 to Portland. Last year she sent a love letter, this time around we go for a ride with the city, along the number 17 bus route. I thought this was a great idea to tie the images together on a theme. I also enjoyed how she used a graphic of the bus stops to tie the sections together as a repeating design element. The writing is good, too, giving some insights into the shooting and hectic schedule. I was particularly tickled by the driver's bemusement about why she was shooting just the #17 route. Because it is special. That captures one of the things I love about photography. We can use it to explore anything in such detail that what might appear to be mundane can be made special, just by the attention and care. Amy does that in this slice of life in Portland.

clear light, high country

2009-06-03T08:45:00.001-05:00

Ron Dowd is a lucky man. You can tell this by looking at the stunning scenery he got to explore while making his 2009 SoFoBoMo book, clear light, high country. This ten day trip around New Zealand takes in a lot of ground. Mountains, lakes, farmland, all unroll in front of Ron's burnt orange Camry and camera. I'm struck how much New Zealand reminds me of Scotland, not just because they seem to have pinched many of the same place names. Dramatic light, high mountains, threatening clouds and snow all conspire to provide a great road trip and some lovely images.