Rankin

Digital Photographer who lives in london. http://www.rankin.co.uk/bio.aspx. He does advertising, beauty, portraits, lingerie, covers, and fashion. His photographs are very digitally enhanced and manipulated. He shoots for advertising. Everything from Baileys, Cannon, Nike, Dove, Coke, Shampoos, water, sunglasses, clothing stores, BMW, and diamonds. He makes covers for many different magazines including Vogue, Esquire, GQ, Dazed, and playboy. I think his images are sharp and 'hip' like fresh. A lot of modeling and fashion, beauty shots for makeup probably. I like looking at how photography can be used for more than just art. Advertising. It is a way to make money, and I like that there are successful digital photographers in the advertising field. This is a field that interested me 3 years ago when I was first going to college. I took an advertising class and was going to major in that a well. I am happy with my major now, but I think it would be good to learn more about photography and advertising and how they go together in many instances. 

Aaron & Rosie Nace fotography

I found these two artists on flickr.com. I think they are amazing. The way they can digitally composite their own impossible images perfectly is something I strive to do. He puts himself in a lot of his work. I will talk about some of his self-portraits. 

-His face is a puzzle with many pieces, and his hand is holding the piece from center.

-The background is a patterned wall paper, his face is on top, and half of his face is flat and part of the wall. 

-His face with no eyes, nose, or mouth.

-Composite with many old fashion clocks and his torso.

-A remake of Frida kahlo with him in the center and a similar background.

-He has many movie posters with him in them. All very interesting.

Actually, he is in all of his work on his web site. In his blog, he said it gets old taking pictures of yourself.

Rosie is his partner on the website.

All of her photos are self-portraits too... I still like the images. They are for the majority like our assignment 2 with impossible images. They are really cool and realistic for being impossible. I def. am a fan.

http://www.nacedesign.com/index2.html 

Portfolio

I just printed out 14 images of field hockey sports photography! I have 2 more left, but they don't fit on the same page so I am waiting until I have something else to fit on the page so I don't waste any paper. Most of them are 7.5x11@300 dpi. Others are 10x10, and 4x7. I realized something pretty interesting. I started shooting for my portfolio the last weekend in March. When I came home to edit from that shoot, I saw a lot of pictures that I wanted to use; maybe 10. Then I shot the next 3 weekends, and the images from the first shoot didn't seem so great anymore. I think it's a good thing. Each weekend that I went to shoot, I think I got better because of my final portfolio pictures that I decided to choose, only 1 is from my first shoot. The number of pictures I choose to use gets larger as each shoot progressed. Therefore, I think I definitely improved each time I went out to shoot. (Also, I got a new 100-300mm lens for my birthday which helped). I took one shot of my field hockey net on So Sweet a Cat field a year ago that I want to find and use for my portfolio. Overall, I am really happy with the theme I choose because it is something I am really interested in, and I think I improved significantly. I am also happy that I stuck with just the sports of field hockey because it is much easier for each picture to relate to the other. If I shot other sport, it would be harder to make a cohesive body of work. Over the summer, I want to try shooting other sports (Surfing, swimming, biking) I also want to experiment with panning on a tripod. :)

Alfred Stieglitz

"Alfred Stieglitz is often called the father of modern photography because of his driving force in the fight to have photography recognized as an art form. Camera Work was one of the greatest accomplishments of Stieglitz in his mission to bring the level of photographic art in the United States up to the level of work being produced in England and Europe." He photographed clouds to demonstrate how to "hold a moment, how to record something so completely, that all who see will relieve an equivilant of what has been expressed." He was born in Hoboken, NJ in 1864. He is best known for the images, "Winter, Fifth Avenue" and "The Terminal," but after doing my project on clouds for assignment 3, I find his cloud studies very interesting. I like to high contrast between black and white in some of his images; and then he also has some that are full of midtones and very low contrast. The sun is in some pictures: siloetted, or sunlight coming in from the side. In others, there is no sun visable, but still light. I think that everyone has looked up at the sky at somepoint and has found some type of meaning in the clouds. Dark, storm clouds, rainy clouds, sunny, huge, small, cottony, wispy, bright, dull, different shapes and sizes. Some people can spend a lazy afternoon looking at the clouds and finding shapes and animals in them. I think that Stieglitz was a legacy in promoting photography in America. Currently, his cloud work is not for sale, but is priced between $55,000 and $65,000! wow, that's amazingly high for a photograph.

Photography Portfolio

I am interested in shooting sports photography. I love sports and I love photo, so I tried combining the two, and I really enjoyed it. So, I am doing a portfolio on sports photography. I wanted to push the action idea and possibly shoot 'still life' in sports. I was imagining close ups, b/w, macro, pattern, etc for this idea. Examples would be a pile of field hockey sticks with all different colors and logos. Another example is sports equipment close up in b/w. 

My next idea is just shooting emotion in sports. People celebrating after a home run, fans cheering, coaches yelling, dad teaching his son to catch, lifting massive amounts of weights, crying after a lose, exhaustion, and frustration. 

My last idea is a photo essay where I will photograph a single sport or possibly a single sporting events and show all aspects of the sport: emotion, action, still life. Strong opening image, throughout the game, and a strong closing image. 

I decided to pic the last idea. I like the other ones, but for my portfolio, I want to shoot just field hockey and try my best to get prime action shots, emotion, and still life. I have shot at 3 different tournaments so far, and I have one more to go this weekend. I have edited over 200 pictures and have 10 solid ones. I am finding that it is best to just shoot and eventually I will get a good one. Until I get better at this type of photography, I am just shooting as much as possible. I think my images from the first weekend up until last weekend did improve a little. I am excited to see these printed out. I will have possibly 3 different sizes. 10x10, 7.5x11, and 4x7. Some images have better quality and resolution than others; I need to balance them out.

Proj 3

For the next project I am doing #3 which is post print manipulation. In the past I have done a Polaroid manipulation where I heated up the picture with a hair blow dryer and  then took a golf tee to make swirls and textures on the print. So when I first heard about assignment 3, this is what I thought of...but we are printing on the epson printer on matte paper so I didn't know what to do. 2 weekends ago, on a drive home from temple, the sky was looking really amazing. So I took out my camera and took some pictures. When I was in class trying to think of something to do for assignment 3, I looked at my pictures of clouds that I had taken and decided what I was going to do. I printed out 4 large images of the sky and interesting clouds. 2 of the images where from that weekend, and the other 2 were from about a year ago. No I have the images printed and my post print manipulation is going to be painting with an acrylic medium glossy gel. On Thursday after I buy the gel, I am going to use a thick paint brush and I will make several layers of gel to create a texture that looks like the clouds. Hope it works out how I want it to.

Project one is done. I stuck with the dead/ alive theme. Overall, I am happy with my project. The second project is the impossible image. I was def. overwhelmed with the possibilities of this assignment. It's unlimited. And I wanted to challenge myself. What I have right now is 2 images of levitation. One is a boat floating above the water, the other is a car floating above the street. I duplicated the shape of the subject and filled it with black and transformed it into the shape of an appropriate shadow. I used a gaussian blur and lowered the opacity slightly.  I used the blur tool to add extra blurred edges. For the boat over the water, I used the liquify tool to just mess up the edges of the shadow a little so it looks like it belongs on top of the water. 

My next image is a man and dog silloette out; they are walking into the sunset on top of a lake. They also have a shadow, and I used the same techniques for this one. My last image I just completed is 2 sting rays who are flying in the air and a couple birds who are swimming underwater. The sting rays also have shadows. I really like making fake shadows. I think these image are pretty strong; not great, but realistic for an impossible image. I am going to keep exploring my skills in this subject. For example, I made Tiger Woods have a furry tiger face. haha. I would like to do more than 4 images, but I would rather have 4 solid pieces than more mediocre images. As for assignment 3/4... I don't know what I am doing yet. Be back soon, because I am really behind on these blogs. No worries yet though.