free portraiture training

As I mentioned in a previous posting, I love portraits. People are so interesting, and their faces only scratch the surface. Mood, setting, lighting - among other things - affect the outcome, and I have found myself looking at Corbis Outline to get a sense of what photographers are producing these days. This is what I consider to be free training - studying images and imagining the shoot setup in order to understand the combination of elements that create a compelling portrait (of course, the subjects themselves are the make or break element).

Wow - I'm on a roll; three postings in one day!

on the other side of the lens

For the past two years, I've volunteered to pose for Iwan's Commercial Photography course at American University. It's fun for me since I'm usually the one behind the camera. I really enjoy meeting the new crop of students, seeing their enthusiasm, and helping them learn to direct models in a studio setting. Last year, Subairi of Urban Escape salon (Washington DC)and Nicki of Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spa (Friendship Heights, MD) gave the students an overview ofthe importance of hair and makeup, respectively, and demonstrated their skills - on me. Check out the last thumbnail photo on the Urban Escape website. I look like an Asian Diana Ross circa 1978!

free - photoshop express beta

Adobe has just launched a free beta program for Photoshop Express. This program is intended to allow online storage of up to 2GB, edit, and share/distribute at no cost to the public. The company imagines that social networking users will embrace the free software program.

Access the beta program here.
View the press release here.

cool wall art

Just stumbled across this very cool site. Jan Bekman owns a very prominent gallery in NYC, but is making art available to all at 2x200. At this site, each piece of art is on sale for $20. Yup, $20. You could buy 4 cups of coffee at Starbucks with that. Larger editions of available prints are available, but prices increase at that point. I particularly love this one. Looking at the thumbnail I thought it was a painting, but it's actually a backlit photograph of a kid against a museum diorama. This would look so cool hanging above my bed! But I can't afford the $2000 price tag for the large print. I also really like this piece, but its a bit macabre in a very pretty way. But who cares, I own Matt Sesow paintings (just one, actually) and one could argue that his work is quite dark...

i miss the darkroom...

As a key-holding Lab Assistant at American University's Photo Lab, I had total free reign of the darkroom and processing lab and would be in there on weeknights, weekends, sometimes til 1AM the week before final critiques. There was a group of us always there, hanging out in the hallways, commenting on each others' prints, dodge this, burn this, just do another print this one's not worth it. It was fun and really, the most vivid memories I have of AU are at that lab. I miss the smell; stained hands and clothes from mixing chemicals; jumbled sounds of the exhaust fan sucking the fumes out of the lab, music blaring on the 10-year old boombox (which by the way is still there and being used) and the staccato beeping of the timers; faint red light peeking out over us as we stood by the chemical trays; the intimacy of the partitioned enlarger stations...

Most of all I miss the process of creating a physical product. I admit that I was/am terrible at rolling film onto spools - AU had different spools from the ones I used in high school at ISB and I never quite got the hang of them. Half the fun was seeing if I had rolled my film properly. I probably shouldn't admit that. Yes, I got pissed periodically, I specifically remember ruining half a roll of film that I had taken in Halong Bay, Vietnam, but I was able to salvage a section of it and make prints from that.

The darkroom itself was a romantic experience; minimal lighting, picking out the frames I wanted want to see in full size, printing images I was in love with... the excitement of dipping the paper into the developer to see if it was the correct exposure, slowly, slowly, tipping the tray back and forth to ensure even development... by the time the print went from the developer to stop bath to fixer, I was so anxious to have the print in my hands and it seemed like it took forever for a fiber print to dry. Oh, but it was so worth it, all the effort it took to get an image from negative to paper...

That tactile experience is hard for me to translate into the new world of digital photography. These gadgets require precision, they require a new learning curve, they require money... I absolutely understand the value of digital but the personal relationship I had with images printed in the darkroom is hard to recreate through the computer.

weekend stuff in dc from tara's camera

Eyeless fish at SW Fish Market


Antique store interior


Cnr 14th + T

seriously??

Another example of celebrity "art". Dominic Monaghan (known best as Charlie from LOST and a hobbit from Lord of the Rings) just opened a photo exhibit at the Hamilton Selway Fine Art dealers in Hollywood. I went through the gallery site with a basic level of optimism, hoping that my initial scepticism would be proved wrong. I admire that 20% of proceeds goes to charity, but where is the other 80% going? To the "artist"? Is he not making enough from rights and syndications from sales from his very popular show/movie platforms?

Take a look, but it's all redundant and absolutely forgettable.

Yes I'm ranting - probably incoherently as well - but there are so many talented young artists out there who produce MUCH better work and could benefit from gallery exposure. I am also really upset at the gallery itself for this cheap promotional stunt of using celebrities to put its name on the map.

I don't like to talk poorly about other artists because it's really not up to me to decide what is good art or bad for anyone else. But there are standards that have been established, and I can appreciate technically well-executed art despite my personal tastes. As a formally educated and working professional photographer, I don't see any of the techniques that are taught in basic photography courses. What I see is the result of someone's discovery of Photoshop 7 tricks.

What do you think?

ellis island

When we lived in Tokyo, my mother studied ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement. She taught me that flowers are considered to be most beautiful when they are in the transitional state between full bloom and wilting. Stephen Wilkes' photographs of Ellis Island remind me of this philosophy. The lighting is absolutely stunning, and the scale and details are so delicate and intimate; just amazing. I can only imagine how his large prints must look in comparison to small jpegs. The place has the potential to be a creepy backdrop for a horror movie, but he found the beauty in its decay. I literally stopped breathing when I saw this photograph.

Published with a full-page spread!

DC Magazine, March 08 issue - p. 134.

Read my blog entry about the event - Sugar and Champagne -back in my January archives.