Do Images Move You Too Much?

At Men with Pens, there is this interesting little post. Read it all... very nicely done.

Do Images Move You Too Much? | Men With Pens: "When you look at this picture, what do you see?



Depending on your perception, your mood, your frame of mind and a thousand other factors, you might see a duck or a rabbit. It’s all up to you and how you perceive the world.

Art is like that.

Writing is extremely subjective, and what might seem like creative apocalypse to me could be absolute trash to someone else. Faced with anything that evokes emotion, compels feelings or that represents something deep inside us, we each make personal decisions.

Photography is like that, too. Professional photographers and people steeped in the hobby of capturing emotion on film work many hours and take many shots with all sorts of variables to grab the very concept they want in one photo."

Read the whole thing.

LIGHTING ESSENTIALS : For Photographers - Hey, We Got Freebies Too!

We are starting to offer monthly Lighting Essentials Desktop Calendars over at Lighting Essentials. How fitting we start Summer off with a pair of swimsuit shots.

LIGHTING ESSENTIALS : For Photographers - Hey, We Got Freebies Too!: "Yes… we got free stuff. Who can’t use a great desktop calendar? And when it features a lovely model like Briana, you can’t go wrong.

We have two June, 2008 calendars available in many desktop sizes. I will also give a lighting tutorial for each of the images after the break…"

Now that's great marketing

If you know anyone who is getting married, send them this link. Great idea, Cicely.

It's A Good Life: Ask Away!: "Friday, May 30th at 12:00pm and again at 5:30pm (both Arizona Time), I will be opening up my Instant Messengers to receive and answer questions from the public regarding wedding and event planning at no cost. This open forum is available to Brides, Grooms, Bridal Party Attendants, Parents, and anyone else associated with or planning a wedding or special occasion event. There is no catch and it is absolutely free and each session will last 45 minutes. I want to be available as a resource to all to answer questions or to assist with any advice. It’s my way of giving back for a successful spring to help those that are in need of guidance from a professional for their special day."

Interview with Heidi Volpe - Art Director, L.A. Times Magazine

I love these interviews. Rob does a nice one with Heidi Volpe of LA TIMES Magazine. You'll enjoy it.

A Photo Editor - Heidi Volpe- Art Director, L.A. Times Magazine: "I’ve known Heidi for quite awhile now, we worked on and off together at Outside Magazine over a few years and still talk frequently about photography and the industry on the phone. She has an impressive resume of magazines where she’s worked that includes: Philadelphia Magazine, Men’s Health, GQ, TimeOut NY, Outside, Outside Traveler, Men’s Health 18, Muscle and Fitness and finally the L.A. Times Magazine. LA Times MagazineI think the makeover she’s given the LA Times Magazine is nothing short of brilliant. Sure, I’m biased towards full bleed images and minimal design fuss but her 18 Society of News Design awards last year proves the design community is behind that aesthetic as well. What’s even more remarkable is that a place as troubled as the LA Times would allow Heidi to continue to do such brilliant work. I think it’s more a testament to the power of a strong willed Art Director than it is any genius on the part of the management."

Two New Posts at Lighting Essentials

Natural Lighting for a Beautiful Portraits

In Mexico we had wonderful white Casitas to stay in courtesy of the Las Palmas Resort. They provided some remarkable shooting areas as well as natural light bouncing off all the white walls and railings.

I personally love natural light for all kinds of portraiture, but especially for headshots. The way the ambient light works the modeling of the features of the subject is something I especially like.

Beating the Sun on a Sunny Day

At the Mexico workshop we decided to do some morning shots on the Beach. Precilla and Jazmin wanted to do this hat shot and I thought it would be fun to use the dramatic sky as a compositional element. I had left my meter back at the casa and didn’t want to walk back for it.

No matter, it is easy to figure out how to do this with your camera only. I started by taking a photo of Precilla with the background as the most important element.

What is a Denial of Service?

We hear about it and read about them all the time. Those DOS attacks that can bring down a complete online company. While most of us think we know what that is, here is a wonderful description of how one nearly brought down a legitimate company doing business... by a company dedicated to stopping illegitimate file sharing. To say that the offending company overstepped their rights is a complete understatement. I hope they get sued out of existence and live in the streets for a few years... Good God, people.... We can't let this kind of cyber-crime go on just because they say they are one of the good guys.

Saying is one thing. They ought to do it as well. Be a good guy and no one will need to hear you proclaim your 'good guy' status.

Revision3: "On the internet, computers say hi with a special type of packet, called “SYN”. A conversation between devices typically requires just one short SYN packet exchange, before moving on to larger messages containing real data. And most of the traffic cops on the internet – routers, firewalls and load balancers – are designed to mostly handle those larger messages. So a flood of SYN packets, just like a room full of hyperactive screaming toddlers, can cause all sorts of problems.

For adults, it’s typically an inability to cope, followed either by quickly fleeing the room, or orchestrating a massive Teletubbies intervention. Since they lack both legs and a ready supply of plushies, internet devices usually just shut down."

RIP Cornell Capa

From my earliest thoughts of being a photographer, I have been inspired by this giant man. You will be missed Mr. Capa, God knows you will be missed.

imaginginfo.com - Article - Renowned Photojournalist Capa Dies at 90: "Renowned Photojournalist Capa Dies at 90

May 24, 2008--Photographer Cornell Capa died on Friday, but his legacy lives on in the museum he founded -- the International Center of Photography in New York City -- and in the images he'd taken during a quarter-century with Life magazine.

Capa covered everything from a coup d'etat in Argentina to the Six-Day War in the Middle East, from political portraits of Adlai Stevenson to celebrity shots of Marilyn Monroe.

In an interview in 1994, National Public Radio's Jacki Lyden asked if he was ever haunted by what he'd seen through his lens. 'I remember every picture that I have ever taken,' he said. 'It is a terrible load to carry.'"

Photoshop Insider: Joe McNalley has some insights

Read the whole thing. How many of those books have you read?

Photoshop Insider: "A career in photography is a journey without a destination. No idea where the road goes. But I have a notion about where it started, and from the panoramic future gazing promontory known as Photoshop Insider, I thought I’d look, like, backwards. (Threw the “like” in there. I’ve got a teenage daughter.)

Back to the work that has gone before. Not that I’m disinterested in current work. There’s a ton of great work being done, from the battlefield shooters of Iraq to the Hollywood gang filling the glossy pages of Vanity Fair. But for now, I’m talking about work that…"

A Photo Editor -Charis Weston Interview

Looks like APE has the interview. Ahhh Charis, what a muse you were.

A Photo Editor - Interview with Edward Westons Wife and Muse, Charis Wilson: "Photographer Renée Jacobs interviewed 93 year old Charis for London based Photo Icon magazine (website here). Here’s an excerpt.

AT THE AGE of 93, Charis Wilson has seen more than most people ever will - and the art world has seen more of her than almost any other woman in the history of photography. As Edward Weston’s lover, writer, companion, driver (Weston never learned to drive), and model from 1934-1945, Charis left an indelible imprint on Weston’s work and the way in which his photographic nudes are examined. Charis is the subject of more than half of all of Weston’s nudes, including some of his most famous – the Oceano Dunes series and Nude in a Doorway. His portrait of her at Lake Ediza is well known (if somewhat misunderstood). Charis grew up in a literary family, surrounded by adults and few children to play with. She was a sickly child and developed her strength by bicycling - and swimming naked out to the kelp beds in Carmel Bay. When she met Weston, she was 19 and he was 48, already an accomplished photographer with one book to his credit and a growing reputation as a new breed of modernist photographer. Her literary skills helped secure Weston a Guggenheim grant in 1937 – the first ever awarded to a photographer."

Some Advice on Working Through the Downturn

Q&A: Howard Bernstein on Surviving a Recession: "Q&A: Howard Bernstein on Surviving a Recession
By David Walker
May 02, 2008
Photo District News

The mortgage crisis, rising oil prices, falling consumer confidence and other bad economic news of late has raised the prospects of an economic recession. And recessions can be painful for photographers. To ask about survival strategies, we talked to Howard Bernstein, a veteran rep and principal of the New York agency Bernstein & Andriulli.

PDN: Are there signs of recession in advertising or editorial photography now?
Howard Bernstein: I would say yes, real or perceived, advertisers and magazines are using the economy—the recession—to drive costs down.

PDN: How likely is it that the recession will affect the average photographer financially and psychologically?
HB: It's going to hurt them. Clients are going to ask to get more for less money, and photographers need to be mentally prepared [for] that, even with their best clients, especially if they're in a business such as the fashion industry or the car industry where you have repeating clients. Be prepared. Even if they love you and you've done a great job for them for five years, they're going to call you up and ask you to reduce costs."

Read it all...

Interesting discussion on Copyright Law

It’s Time To Rethink Copyright Law: "Normally I’m on the side of whoever’s against the copyright holders and their agenda of ever-expanding rights on these types of issues. They will stop at nothing to preserve their expired business models.

In this case, though, I’m just as afraid of YouTube, which still aims to get rights to show all, or virtually all, professionally produced television and film content. Their goal is simple - copy the adsense model and get the same stranglehold on advertising around video that they have around search.

That may be more difficult for Google than sewing up search was, since there are so many players determined to stop them before they get a proper foothold. The music guys got hooked on the iTunes fees and still haven’t been able to get off the juice. Their tv and film cousins are fully aware of what happens if a single middleman gets too much power."

Living the Prolific Life: at Zen Habits

Read and learn, Grasshoppers.

Living the Prolific Life: A How-to Guide | Zen Habits: "The prolific life has been characterized by abundant inventiveness and limitless creativity. Prolificacy has also been unnecessarily enshrouded in a veil of mystery and the sources of artistic inventiveness are too often viewed as out-of-reach for the average person. Perhaps it’s for this reason that artistic inspiration has frequently been attributed to muses, the channeling of spirits, beelzebub, etc.

In spite of perceptions surrounding prolific creativity, there are several documented commonalities that consistently appear in the lives of prolific people. Indeed, the psychological literature has some definite insights into commonalities of the prolific. My investigation into this literature has yielded these . . ."

7 Signs of SEO Scams: Read this!

This post is wonderful. Small, concise and to the point.

7 Signs of SEO Scams: "As a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), my job is to make use of a number of methods in order to help a site rank higher in the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.).

I’ll save you some of the boring parts, but SEO is a pretty important aspect of any serious business venture with an online component. However, my business is also a pretty strange one. It requires a lot of experience, research, and patience to effectively get a website to rank highly. Because of this, a lot of what I do is still a mystery, even to clients I’ve had for over a year.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of “SEOs” out there taking advantage of the unknowing site owner, leaving a bad taste in their mouth about what SEO is and how it can help. With this post, I would like to give you a few signs that someone is trying to rip you off. These are seven signs of SEO scams.

1. We can rank your site in 48 hours!
Boy, I wish this was possible. ...

There's more... read it all.

How can someone be a totally anal perfectionist...

... and be dumb as a bag of rocks at the same time?

Hmmmmm....?

Then blame everyone else for their shortcomings and utter cluelessness.

Sheesh.

OT: this is what I find when dealing with Photography students as well

And it makes no difference what school or what program. Most of the crap that the Universities teach doesn't help anyone but the University... to keep the money flowin... Idiotarianism at it's finest form.

Students Fail -- and Professor Loses Job :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, and Views and Jobs: "One reason that this does not happen (outside Aird’s classes) is that many professors at Norfolk State say that there is a clear expectation from administrators — in particular from Dean Sandra J. DeLoatch, the dean whose recommendation turned the tide against Aird’s tenure bid — that 70 percent of students should pass.

Aird said that figure was repeatedly made clear to him and he resisted it. Others back his claim privately. For the record, Joseph C. Hall, a chemistry professor at president of the Faculty Senate, said that DeLoatch “encouraged” professors to pass at least 70 percent of students in each course, regardless of performance. Hall said that there is never a direct order given, but that one isn’t really needed.

“When you are in a meeting and an administrator says our goal is to try to get above 70 percent, then that indirectly says that’s what you are going to try to do,” he said. (Hoggard, the university spokeswoman, said that it was untrue that there was any quota for passing students.)"

FOTO8 starts tomorrow in Brooklyn, NY

From the Blog:

foto8 - What's up at DUMBO?: "For more than 150 years, photographers have engaged with the question: 'Is photography art?', championing what in each era photographers felt to be the unique or defining characteristics of the medium. As times change these characteristics fall away into the categories of photo and art history, from pictorialism to modernism to surrealism to every other -ism. These categories as they have congealed make sense of how the past was made sense of in it's own time. Some photographers have disavowed art; others have insisted on it.

Abiding throughout all these permutations, however, has been the notion that a photograph derives some important part of its effect from its insistence that something happened before the camera, and that despite the idiosyncrasies and patterns of technologies and style and the categories of visual knowledge and information, something was there before the camera.

Photojournalism and documentary photography have taken many forms but at their heart of all witnessing is this nugget. Despite all of the forms that photography can take that can be called 'documentary', if there is a claim to the real then that indexed moment is given enormous respect. Concerned photography celebrates human accomplishment and decries injustice by bearing witness through authorial eyes. The 'decisive moment' celebrates the intuitive alignment of composition, information"

Classic Car Shot with subtle lighting

hotrod
Originally uploaded by phciccone

Paul shot Malisha against the old car on the streets of Sunnyvale at yesterday's workshop. there are two strobes placed one on her face and one on her legs. The exposure is so carefully balanced that it doesn't look strobe lit. Very cinematic look - and that is what Paul loves.

Learning to control the light to make it what you want it to be is the most important thing to learn about lighting a photograph.

Working Under Pressure

Priscilla at Sunset
Originally uploaded by Alex Bussa Photography

We could literally see the sun moving toward the surface and we were desperately looking for a parking place.

Alex knew what he wanted and when the sun got to this position, he placed Precilla exactly where he wanted her and then lit her with a very nicely placed flash. The result is stunning on many levels.

There was a lot of stuff going on and lots of intense angling for the shooters, but when you have a plan and a shot in your head, the intensity becomes more of a catalyst instead of a hinderance. Very cool shot, Alex.

Taking chances and getting the shot...

Jazmin kneeling in the surf
Originally uploaded by geroco

I was spotting the waves for Jerry as he would dip his camera down so low, that the small surf would have washed over it. It was scary and intense... but he would drop down and get the shot between waves... no more than a few inches off the ever-changing surface of the water.

Was it worth the risk... ?

Oh, hell yeah!

Hey! Get that beautiful model off of the roof!

Hey! Get that beautiful model off of the roof!
Originally uploaded by Evan Romine

Sometimes you see a shot and just know you gotta get it. Problem is that it may be somewhere that other folks have reasons, some valid some not, for you not to get that shot.

I understand the dilemma. Do you get the shot as quietly as possible without bothering anyone or do you just go get the shot anyway you can. Only options I can think of.

Evan and Alex and Jasmine decided the roof of the Cabana would make a great shot. they were right, but climbing on the roof is a no-no (and we wont do it again, Loren... sorry) but it kept calling to them. As security is approaching, they kept shooting quickly and ended up getting this shot before being removed from the roof.

Great shot. Those two guys work really well together, and Jasmine... well, you can't really take a bad picture of her.