Xmas Wish List: more

While I'm at it, here are some other things I'm hitting Santa up for this year:

Imacon scanner

Crumpler 5 Million Dollar Home bag

Nikon 50mm lens

1 TB External Hard Drive

Polaroid transfer machine + Polaroid film

Lifetime supply of custom framing

Xmas Wish List: Photo Books

**Cape Light
Photographs by Joel Meyerowitz
One of my most favorite photography books, and I still don’t own it.

**Travelers
Photographs by Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz
Miniature scapes in a "snow globe" environment = Fascinating. This book is getting a ton of buzz; I can't wait to get my hands on a copy.

Domestic Landscapes: A Portrait of Europeans at Home
Photographs by Bert Teunissen
Beautiful, nostalgic environmental portraits of people and their homes.

Hellen van Meene: Portraits
Photographs by Hellen van Meene
Simply beautiful portraits. The blasé attitudes of the subjects, in tandem with lighting and texture, play so much into the overall mood of the images.

Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979
Photographs by Susan Meiselas
I just really like her work, and my selection is most likely influenced by the fact that I’m traveling to Nicaragua next week.

People of the 20th Century – Volumes 1-7
Photographs by August Sander
My dear friend and fellow photog, Marisa, owns this, and I wish the set was small enough for me to hide in my bag so that I can borrow them indefinitely ;p August Sander is probably the only photographer I really remember from the History of Photography course I took back in undergrad.

The Places We Live
Photographs by Jonas Bendiksen
I’m fascinated by the concept and multiple definitions of home. This is just one book of many in this list that explores this topic.

Tinyvices: Amelia's World
Photographs by Robin Schwartz
Ok, I confess, the chimp got me.

View PDN’s picks: http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/content_display/features/featured-in-print/e3i0731a97427122625299575f27caced9f

View Aperture’s selection: http://www.aperture.org/books/books-new

** Indicates the books I would really, really like to get as a Xmas present.

Annie Liebovitz on Portraits

She says it so much better than I ever could! (read my posting on Portraits)

"My work is criticized sometimes for being too on the surface, but I sometimes find the surface interesting. To say that the mark of a good portrait is whether you get them, or you get the soul or whatever, I don't think this is possible all the time... Can you imagine getting the soul every single day?"

Hear the entire interview here.

Source: PDNPulse.

Fancy features on new Olympus E-30 digital SLR ?

Olympus has released information on its new SLR offering, the E-30, which promises to deliver to the new generation of visually acute consumers. This new SLR features the following... It sounds cool, but I'm not sure how I feel about having these built into the camera.

Art Filters
* Pop Art: Enhances colors, making them more saturated and vivid, creating high-impact pictures that express the joyful, lighthearted feeling of the Pop Art style of the 1960s.
* Soft Focus: Creates an ethereal, otherworldly atmosphere that renders subjects in a heavenly light without obscuring details.
* Pale & Light Color: Encloses the foreground of an image in flat gentle light and pastel colors reminiscent of a flashback scene in a movie.
* Light Tone: Renders shade and highlight areas softly to lend an elegant air to the subject.
* Grainy Film: Evokes the feeling of documentary footage shot in monochrome with grainy, high-contrast film.
* Pin Hole: Reduces the peripheral brightness of an image as though it were shot through a pin hole, connecting the viewer intimately with the subject at the center of the picture.

Multiple Exposures
...alter space and time by combining images shot in different locations and moments, lending your photos another dramatic dimension. For instance, take one shot of the full moon with the E-30 and the image will appear on the camera’s LCD. Then take another shot while the moon still appears on the LCD and superimpose a close-up of an owl perched on a tree branch. The two images will merge together seamlessly to form one dramatic image that has the haunting effect of a Halloween night...
The E-30 can combine up to four images in a single photograph, overlaying various subjects to create a montage that blends all the elements together.

Not only does the E-30 include these nifty image-altering features, it also has a swivel LCD screen like most HD video cameras have these days. Ooooh!!

Olympus says, "The creative possibilities are endless and only limited by your imagination."

I hear you, loud and clear, mon frere.

Paranoid about plagiarism

I've always been paranoid about posting my images online for fear that they'll be stolen and used without my knowledge and/or permission. As such, the images on my website are teeny (suffering the risk of lost detail in my images) and programmed so that they cannot be saved by a mere right-click of the mouse. A new colleague advised me that at this point in my career, I shouldn't focus on this and that I should be posting at 600px resolution so as not to obscure details and the full effect of my images.

However, Kevin German's recent experience with blatant theft of his images - from a friend of his! - is making me totally paranoid again; it's unbelievable that this happened. Read his story here.

anticipation 2008

All images copyrighted Tara Kocourek 2008






All images copyrighted Tara Kocourek 2008

SI SE PUDO!!!!

WE DID IT!! Last night, Barack Obama was voted in as the 44th president of America. It wasn't even a tight race; he won by over 180 electoral votes. My friends were crying for joy; he represents so much hope and and signifies the beginning of an entirely new cultural shift in the United States. Sebastien was spot on when he said that this is our generation's movement, our contribution to the cultural history of the USA. My family, which is largetly Republican, asked me why I voted for him. As a multiracial, multicultural person, how could I not?? I present the following excerpt from the New York Times; this expresses it better and more succinctly than I can:

“People feel he is a part of them because he has this multiracial, multiethnic and multinational dimension... He represents, for people in so many different communities and cultures, a personal connection. There is an immigrant component and a minority component...

... a successful negotiator of identity margins...

... for America to choose as its citizen in chief such a skillful straddler of global identities could not help but transform the nation’s image, making it once again the screen upon which the hopes and ambitions of the world are projected."

I got some great shots from our mini-election party at an Irish pub in VA, the swing state that voted Democratic from the first time since 1960. I'll post these shortly.

Graphic from Washington Post online, 11/5/08