Words Fail Me

Eggplant

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:27:00 +0000

Or maybe that should be egg-plant. I still have to find a good way to get artwork to reproduce well digitally. So far, neither camera nor scanner has been all that satisfactory.

November Flower

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:40:00 +0000

This blossom was still blooming outside in late November on the Massachusetts coast.

New England Beach

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 16:16:00 +0000

A New England beach on a blustery day Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Study with Girl and Cats

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:54:00 +0000

I used as a source a photo of a friend's daughter napping on a sofa with two cats on lookout. The inherent stillness of them all made me think of traditional still life compositions. It may be a bit hard to make out at first - I was using a very loose constantly moving pen to build up mass rather than taking a strictly linear approach as in a line drawing.

Figure Study

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:06:00 +0000

I did this at a regular life drawing session I attend. Medium was India ink, dip pen, and brush. No pencil in advance, so, as happens with ink, it was a lesson in commitment.

Hand and Foot Drawings from 11/14 and 11/15

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:32:00 +0000

I find myself drawn (pun creation was unintentional, but now that I see it, it stays) to sanguine-colored ink, for some reason. Maye it's the older look of it. Have to try some experiments with off-white to tan colored papers.

The Turner Prize - Bastion of Maleness

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:24:00 +0000

The Turner Prize is given out annually to a British visual artist under the age of 50. It is a Very Big Deal in that country and raises a fair amount of controversy. One of the issues is whether the prize is dominated by men.

I am by no means a "feminist." Nor do I subscribe to the automatic assumption that men do terrible things to women while women are blameless and never injure men. At the same time, I'd prefer to examine a charge before I react. So I went to look at the list of Turner winners over the years.

That list is, to my eye, overwhelmingly male. I'm not suggesting at all that there must be awards ruled by gender parity. But you have to wonder the state of the judges and the decision process. Since the award started in 1984, with no prize given in 1990, there have been three women who won, versus 21 men. I would be suspicious of a perfect 50-50 split, but seven to one? Are male artists really that much better than female? Not from what I've seen in photography, painting, sculpture, video, and other art forms.

There have also been only three years in which the majority of judges were women (though not the same three years as when womeen won). I know that critics, curators, and academics are supposed to be above gender bias, but I think it becomes something that is culturally and even biologically hard-wired. For example, I'm a writer, and I enjoy the work of many writers. But I probably have a closer affinity in general to the work of male writers because they have a tone and approach closer to my own inclinations. I suspect the same might be true in any craft. (Consider your own social circle and how men and women often divide on gender lines over some types of popular entertainment.) If the committee stays generally dominated by male sensibilities, then I wouldn't be surprised if the prize continued to be awarded more often to men. That is wrong and also foolish.

To be fair, I understand that putting together a panel of experts can be difficult. I once moderated a panel on narrative non-fiction at a writing conference and was accused of gender bias because all of the panelists were men. As it happened, I asked a number of leading publications if they could send a representative, and those happened to be the people available. But when that happens 70 percent of the time, you must wonder whether it continues to be accident.

Technique: Using Reflections in Images

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:54:00 +0000

Reflections can take an ordinary image and open a door into a new visual dimension. You can try for the most obvious, like reflections off a lake or pool of water, but look more carefully and you'll see possibilities everywhere. In the photo on the right, I had driven into Boston to do a shoot with a model who was a no-show. So I used the time instead of getting overly irritated. It had been raining, which meant wet streets and another reflective surface. In general, expose for the primary scene and not the reflected copy. Some light gets lost and so it will be a bit dimmer. The one condition you should watch is a light that gets reflected directly from a surface into the camera lens, causing flare and throwing off your exposure calculations. Just reposition yourself or frame the shot a bit differently to get that out of the scene.

If you are using a body of water as the reflector, you might be able to disturb the surface, maybe by tossing a stone, to get a second effect and image after you've shot with the smooth reflection. You can see many more examples of reflection as a compositional element by clicking on the link to a feature in Smashing Magazine. Some of these are outstanding, going beyond reflection as an element of mood (like I did in my photo) and using it to create unworldly scenes, where the original and the reflection meet and turn into abstracted patterns. At the bottom of the feature are additional links to other collections of reflection in images.

Nikon 24.5 Megapixel DSLR

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:43:00 +0000

Whoa! Nikon's come out with a 24.5 megapixel digital SLR that has 51-point autofocus, HDMI output, and 50 MB RAW files that expand out to 140 MB TIFF files - and it can simultaneously record RAW and JPEG images on separate memory cards. Start-up time is 12 milliseconds and shutter lag is 40 milliseconds. It sounds as though it also expands dynamic range but then does some sort of additional image processing to keep shots from looking flat. But the D3x will set you back some $7999 and 2.11 pounds just for the body. That's like hanging a small bag of flour around your neck. Ouch.

Idea for Advent Calendar

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 10:32:00 +0000

A Kodak blogger had an interesting idea: take a picture of the George Eastman House and use its 24 windows as a traditional advent calendar. That made me reaize that if you had any object with the right number of repeated elements, you could do the same. That could be trees in a forest, cars on a lot, or what have you. If you don't have enough elements in a grid, then you could get a row of several and then set the row out multiple times.

Caravaggio Used Photography?

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 13:33:00 +0000

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was an Italian artist at the turn of the 17th century who ushered in baroque painting and true realism. According to an Italian art scholar, he may also have been an early practitioner of photography, using firefly powder to produce short-lived fluorescent images that he could then turn into a sketch and, ultimately, a painting. He was known for working directly on canvas and not developing a series of preparatory sketches.

DIY High Speed Photography

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:27:00 +0000

Makezine.com has an intriguing feature on do-it-yourself high speed photography - like capturing a balloon in mid-burst or a water drop as it just hits the surface of a container of water. Curiously, they used a disposable camera because its flash won't last as long as that of a commercial flash unit, which ends up letting the subject blur.

Time Q&A with Annie Leibovitz

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:40:00 +0000

Time Magazine had a Q&A with Annie Leibovitz in which readers sent the questions. I* wouldn't call it incredibly revealing, but it was interesting, and at the end there's a link to a video interview with her.

LIFE Photo Archives Online

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:27:00 +0000

LIFE Magazine was famous for its own photography. In addition, it had one heck of a photo archive. Now some of that work is available online, stretching as far back as the 1870s (long before the publication came into existence).

Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.

I'm finding that the description doesn't quite mesh with what I can see on the site. No matter how I search, whether by decade, year, or topic, the maximum number of photos that come back seems to be 200. For those who need old pictures for projects, remember that in the U.S., anything from before 1923 is in the public domain.

Renaissance Portraiture: Propoganda and Photography of the Times

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 13:33:00 +0000

Jackie Wullschlager has an interesting piece in the Financial Times on an exhibition of Renaissance portraiture at the National Gallery in London in cooperation with the Prado Madrid. Looking at oil paintings of faces and figures, it takes some imagination to get out of the current associations and see them as they fit into society of those times:

Humanism and the medium of oil paint were more or less born together. Each enhanced the other as the greatest artists of the day embraced a medium offering un-rivalled scope for depth, naturalism, refinement, psychological complexity. Early likenesses were destined not for the wall but to evoke absent loved ones or – as in Holbein’s treacherously flattering “Anne of Cleves” for Henry VIII – to prepare marriage alliances; once surveyed, or when the subject turned up, they were stored in boxes: thus the small size. In the 16th century, however, their purpose evolved to became more decorative, larger, and more subtly propagandist.

There was no photography, so paintings were the equivalent. I did a quick check in Wikipedia on the history of watercolor painting. Although the earliest examples were ancient, it really began in the Renaissance, yet they were seen as a medium for naturalist work - producing images of wildlife and plants. So oils remained the choice for portraits. I wonder how much economics and time sensitivity played into the smaller image format. Certainly the easy of storing images when someone was around had to be part, much the way we keep snapshots. But also a full-blown large oil portrait would have taken much longer to make and been far more expensive.

One overarching story is the dissemination of portraiture down the social scale. By 1554, satirist Pietro Aretino, whose own sumptuous portrait by Titian hangs in the Palazzo Pitti, lamented that “even tailors and vintners are given life by painters” – and indeed, a highly engaging work is Giovanni Battista Moroni’s courteous “The Tailor”, caught still holding scissors and cloth, to incline his head to listen to us.

I suspect that and the need to create images in shorter periods of time were similarly large driving factors of the format. The article has some real insight and makes me wish I had business taking me to London and dropping me off briefly at the National.

Color-Coordinated Art Buying

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 11:10:00 +0000

The Guardian's Arts Diary has a short piece that is both amusing and distressing at the same time. According to someone from Christie's, well-heeled collectors have some small reasons that guide their choices in large investments into art. They prefer bright, cheerful colors over brown; get confused if you have to plug something in; and want items smaller than the average Park Avenue elevator. Nothing like elevated aesthetics.

Leonard Nimoy's Full Body Project

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:14:00 +0000

Wandering in Northampton, Mass. the other day I stepped into the R. Michelson Gallery because I noticed that it had a showing of Leonard Nimoy's photography. The building is an old bank and the photos were in the vault - a collection of images from several of the photographer's topic projects. Some of teh new material is a departure from his typical work and shows a new range for his eye.

In the past, Nimoy has concentrated on studies of the female figure - well lighted, shot, and printed, and certainly imaginative. For example, there are images from his black & white project and the Shekhina (Jewish concept of a female spirit of God) project. But after a point you have to start asking how much more can be done with the perfect body of an actor, dancer, athlete, or model. It's just that so much has been said visually about the subject that finding something new becomes difficult.

Nimoy finally realized this and had a chance to shoot what he calls the full body project: images of large women who are part of a burlesque review. While some of the photos are homages to classic images, I found that the personality of the participants came though with a sparkling strength - far different from his other work. Instead of images of nude bodies, he achieved images of nude women. They aren't classically beautiful, but they are in many ways far more interesting than physical "perfection," and help remind that the very concept is ephemeral. (Just look at the work of Rubens.)

Nimoy is working on a new project - Who Do You Think You Are? - in which he tries getting people to reveal secrets about themselves in front of the camera and show their "other selves." It seems to me that this new direction of more confrontation and exploration of people relates in a way to his background as an actor, where he had to become a vehicle to allow a character not himself to come forth. His latest work is a visual aspect of the same process of discovery and creation.

A New Twist

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 14:28:00 +0000

I'm going to put more effort into this blog but am expanding the scope. Instead of just photography, it will also cover more traditional art forms as I find myself spending a lot more time with a sketchbook and pen/pencil/charcoal in my hand.

Reporter Arrested for Photographing Senators, Donors at Democratic Convention

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:50:00 +0000

Once again we see a heavy hand coming down on those daring to use a camera in public. This time it was Denver police arresting an ABC News producer for taking pictures, on a public sidewalk, of Democratic senators and big contributor.

A police official later told lawyers for ABC News that Eslocker is being charged with trespass, interference, and failure to follow a lawful order. He also said the arrest followed a signed complaint from the Brown Palace Hotel.

Nothing like trespassing on a public sidewalk. This is just one more in an alarmingly growing series of people taking photographs being hassled by authorities. Maybe it's the memory of how video has captured police in brutal activities, or perhaps it's a thought that power brokers should be able to hide from public site even when out in the open. But it's bad.

SFMOMA Bullies Photographer?

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:48:00 +0000

Supposedly, San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art had a photographer forcibly ejected from the establishment because the man had the temerity to take photographs, even though the museum's own web site made it clear that it was permissible! The link comes via boingboing.

In that vein, I'll applaud Boston's Museum of Fine Art for generally allowing photography and only prohibiting it for specific exhibitions. One of my own favorite photos came from shooting a piece of modern sculpture on a first floor gallery.

Building Artificial Faces

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:55:00 +0000

Don't like your face online? There's software that can automatically swap out features from a library of other people's mugs. It looks like a variation on morphing, only the software is taking eyebrows, eyes, mouth, nose, and so forth, from one face and blending them into another's. It could be used to protect privacy -- but it also increases that unease over the nature of reality when that world meets a digital realm. Don't like your face on Match.com? Change it. I understand the desire for privacy, and yet I also appreciate how quickly we are slipping through the looking glass into a place where nothing is as it seems, literally.

Photographing an Eclipse

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:35:00 +0000

I've done a lot of night photography, and been known to shoot the moon, literally, but was taken with the idea, in an article, of photographing a solar eclipse. Personally, were I readying myself to head to Siberia or the North Pole (where the viewing is supposed to be particularly good), I'd probably set up both digital and film cameras to get all the advantage I could. As the author says, the only way to really get a good image, and not just glare behind a black disk, is to use mathematical modeling, which is similar to what the human vision does in registering differences in illumination and then turning that, via the brain, into an image.

The article's author is an academic who has done a lot of research and whose web site has some astoundingly good eclipse photos.

Photojournalism Pros Fade Out

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:21:00 +0000

Many editorial outlets look to microstock photography and sites like Flickr these days to pick up cheap (or free) images for their use. That means less work for professional photographers - a lot less. Here's an interesting article asking the question of what will become photojournalism in an age of amateurs.

SanDisk Introduces Non-Erasable SD Cards

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:15:00 +0000

SanDisk has come out with a write-once, read-many (WORM) SD memory card for cameras. Given the format, I think it's clearly taking aim at the prosumer and professional markets. Why would you want a card that would only record and never let you erase or modify an image? A couple of reasons come to mind. One, mentioned by the Engadget post, is in situations - law enforcement, legal uses - where you want to "prove" that the contents could not have changed. But there's another: when you are shooting something critical and you want to ensure that you've minimized the chances of losing data. Grant you, that would be seldom, as immediately dumping the contents onto one of those standalone back-up drives is generally enough, but when you want both the best and suspenders for peace of mind, it's nice to be able to get them both.

Afghan Art Price Competition Includes Photographers

noreply@blogger.com (Erik Sherman) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:51:00 +0000

A person who helped create a national art price in Afghanistan had a piece in the Financial Times describing it. Two photographers are involved, and if you scroll down the piece, you can see a shot from one of them: two soccer players looking playfully out of place in the mountainous landscape. It's a photo with humor, cultural relevance, and pleasing composition. It's one of the rare times I've seen a "rule of thirds" composition look so natural and unplanned, with leading lines helping to focus the eye. A very nice image.