Clark Little

I first came in contact with Clark Little's work in Sierra Magazine. He says:
"I enjoy the power and beauty of the thick bombs that roll through. Now I can capture some of those heavy moments without getting slammed. Well, most of the time." His url is: http://www.clarklittlephotography.com/

I absolutely love his work. I think its stunning in every way. I think it would be great if I could do similar work, but NJ water is a lot different looking than Hawaii. He had to 'suffer' sometimes for his shots. I don't know if that makes them any more valuable to him or others, but I think it makes them more unique because a lot less people would be willing to gets shots like these, which is probably why they are so special and unique.

Lighting Techniques: Harold Edgerton

http://edgerton-digital-collections.org/galleries/iconic-----
this is where all the images I talk about are coming from.
"While electric lights were used with some success as early as the mid 1900's it was with the Harold Edgerton's 1930's invention of "Stroboscopic" photography that controlling light and time became a photographers greatest tool." I am totally intrigued by his work with strobes and motion in the studio. His athletic portfolio of work is stunning especially considering the time period. The strobe fired rapidly to capture the people's movement. He captures things that we can't see normally at all. He invented to strobhttp://edgerton-digital-collections.org/galleries/iconic/athleticse light and combined science and photography. I like the tennis players because it shows the motion of the racket and the ball. Another kind of actin photography he did was Stop-action. In the photo of a man hitting a softball, he shows how when a batter hits a softball, the bat bends and the ball caves in around the bat. This athlete had an additional challenge. The photo was taken in a darkened room, with the sound of the ball hitting the bat triggering the flash.The golf swing is amazing also because it shows the entire swing of the club and the rotation of the athlete.

Every image I go to I am constantly saying wow! Because these are stop motions that we can't see with the naked eye. I like the diver because it shows each change in direction he makes and shows his athletic ability. His most famous images include the bullet going through the apple. I like the one where the apple is being split, and then in the next image, the apple is exploding. He freezes the motion to show us something we have never seen. I keep saying this, but I think it's main reason for his work. I am also interested in his water droplet series. It isn't just 1 photo, it is a series of images that create motion; each one has been frozen in time. The playing cards!!!! wow, this is amazing! the cards appear to be flying through the air from one hand to the other! I def. want to try to recreate some of his works. It can be called copying, but I want to see how he does it!

Matt Sartain

http://www.mattsartain.com/
Matt is a digital photographer who also does a lot of photo manipulation to create surreal images. He is only 25 years old. I really like his images because he makes them look real, even when they seem impossible. For example, "The Librarian" shows a man walking around with a huge stack of books, way taller than could ever really be held up by a person; however, the way he positions them looks as if they are being balanced by this guy, and as if they could topple over at any point in time. "The Paper Airplane" reminds me of Maggie Taylor's work, but it looks real. It looks like this scene could actually be happening, and yet looking at it, I know it is many photographs stitched together. The majority of his images are backlit, which makes me wonder if he uses similar sky photos for a lot of different images. "The Balloon Ride" looks very surreal as if it should be an illustration for a movie or kid story book. A man dressed in costume with a mask on is talking to two boys who seem interested about going for a ride on the hot air balloon. I think the shadows are very well done. They are long on the ground, showing the lateness in the day, soon to be nightfall, and they are crisp, meaning it is not a cloudy night. "The Shipwreck" is kind of funny, but sad at the same time. The man looks exhausted as he paddles away from the sinking ship, but he is paddling in a little gun powder barrel that barely fits him. I like to see a successful photographer who is young and not a wedding photographer. He is using his imagination and photoshop skills to develop and piece together scenes that I've never seen before. I look forward to seeing more work by him, and trying some of his techniques on my own.

Start of Lighting Techniques and Black ad White Photography Blog

I am excited about taking these two very different courses. I haven't worked with film since freshman year here, so it's been a while, and I have never used the darkroom at Monmouth. I have a couple lenses for my film camera that I want to experiment with for some projects. For the 2 projects I can develop on my own I want to do some new techniques that have to do with time exposures. Everyday I walk past the flag pole on the great lawn and see the flag waving. I wonder if I took a time exposure at night for 10 seconds what it would look like. I think they are fun experiments that I could maybe get cool looking results with. Also night photography could look really good with grainy black and white film. I am nervous but excited about shooting film again.
For the Lighting class, I want to learn about different ways to light people for portraits. I did 1 photo shoot over the summer with 3 people, but I was just playing around and trying new things. I learned a lot from just shooting for that one session. I did some things well, and other things I should have changed. I want to learn where to position people to make them look the best and show their personality. I want to know how to go about positioning a larger group of people who want their portraits taken. Just having different heights can create an obstacle to fix. Then placing one person in front of another means you have to think about focusing differently. I want to learn about shooting food, and making it look good, and what type of lighting is best. I will probably try some products shooting. I have done 1 shoot on peanuts and wine. It would be good to try some more for my portfolio. I want to experiment with the strobes and model lights. If the room is all black, and the shutter is open, when the strobe is fired, a solid image of a figure can be made. Then, the figure can move and another strobe can be fired, making the same person appear twice in the same image. On the other hand, just using the model or hot lights, in a low lighting situation, the person can move and jump around and the camera will capture this motion that we can't even see with our naked eye.

Conclusion of Sequence As a Story Blog

I really gained a lot from writing this blog and researching photographers that interest me. I am really drawn to nature, wildlife, landscape, pattern, water, and time-exposure photography. I think that I got a lot of inspiration for my own work by looking at the artists I have written about here. My goals are to try to experiment a lot with time-exposure photography on different types of water. It is so easy to get stuck in the automatic mode of a camera, and I forget sometimes to change it up and shooting on manual.
For my projects,
I enjoyed the documentary the most. I really am happy with the topic I chose and I had fun going out exploring, and shooting. I hope that my images are beautiful, striking, intriguing, concerning, and action provoking. I want to get across the message that the environment is a beautiful thing and we need to protect it. And right now, we need to do a better job of it.
I am happy we got to work in groups this semester. I think that group thinking is good for brainstorming and team work. I like working and collaborating with classmates and seeing what their ideas are, and making things happen.
For my blog,
I want to travel to all of these National Parks and photograph. But it makes me wonder if I would be able to get anything relatively close to what these photographers have captured. I mean, you can't get better than that! I think that photographers have to find their own style because in landscape photography, it can be easy to duplicate works.

My ultimate goal in the future: I am going to China after I graduate college. I am going to photograph giant pandas in the wild. It is really difficult to do though.Firstly because they are extremely endangered animals. An estimated 1,600 live in the wild. I could just photograph them at the reserves, which I probably will end up doing for a bit, but I want to go hiking in the mountains and really capture and observe them in their natural habitat. This has been a dream of my since I was a little kid. Before, I just wanted to go and see them in the wild, but now I want to photograph them. I think this is really unique. There are a large amount of photos out there os pandas int he nature reserves, but very very few of pandas in the wild. I have been talking to a zoologist who is trying to find wild pandas and put radio collars on them to study their behavior and natural living. She has been going for 5 years and has been unsuccessful in finding one in the wild. This is not promising for me, but I will not be discouraged. I want to purchase more professional camera equipment including a longer telephoto lens and a dslr sensor camera. I am staying with canon forever. I will also need a tripod, a mac, a lot of memory cards, and a really good camera bag. I know it will be expensive to do. I am paying my own way and I am proud of it. There is still a lot of research to be done for my trip, and maybe the first part is researching wildlife photographers so I can work on my own projects.
I am so excited to see where this interest of mine takes me. I don't want money to hold me back. It would be amazing to have the opportunity to travel around the world. I am making a list of locations and parks that interest me, and it is getting really long already.

Panoramic Mind: Masumi Hayashi

Her work is a combination of images into 1. A panorama where the viewer can see all of the images that were combined. I am interested in panoramic photography work, bu t in mine, I usually take the images I want and combine them in photoshop to make 1 cohesive print. I don't want the viewer to see the images that were stitched together at all, just the overall effect.

Here is what this artist was going for in her very different approach to panoramic photography:

Masumi Hayashi's panoramic photo collages explore the incongruity between appearance and reality in the American experience. She does this by creating photographs of contested sites: abandoned prisons, post-industrial landscapes, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund Sites, and the remains of American concentration camps. Yet, the resulting panoramic photo collages exhibit tremendous beauty, laced with both precise detail and abstraction. Without overt or critical commentary, they explore both the surface and the reality behind such places, whether they be panoramic landscapes or haunting interiors.

A key characteristic of Hayashi's work is the fact that her photo collages refrain from overt commentary. She creates work of tremendous beauty and simplicity, even though the landscapes she selects are primarily sites of conflict and contestation. Her work does not preach or condemn. Rather, it entices the viewer to learn and question through attraction to the physical, and often haunting, beauty of a site-whether it be the inherent beauty of the landscape or that which results from the transformations of her artmaking.

To create her panoramic photo collages, Hayashi's process is both systematic and open to change. She begins at the horizon line, shooting approximately two dozen photographs in a horizontal circular rotation until she ends up where she began. She then angles upwards, then downwards, continuing until she has fully captured the landscape around her. After she returns to the studio, she collaborates with a printer to produce the component photographs and begins the final phase of assembling the collages. Rather than submit to a rigid framework, Hayashi plays with the discrete images to determine what might make-first and foremost-a convincing work of art. The resulting photo collages range from a 100 degree to 540 degree rotation and include as many as 140 individual photographs or as few as five.

Hayashi's use of multiple images underscores the insufficiency of a single photograph to capture complex experiences and realities. Viewers must simultaneously process the individual component parts as they try to make sense of the vertiginous perspectives produced by the circular rotation. This is especially the case in Hayashi's photographs of interior spaces, where the camera distorts what the eye and brain naturally process.

Mark Adamus

Marc Adamus is a landscape photographer based in Corvallis, Oregon. The visual drama and artistry of his photographs are born of a keen eye for the many moods of Nature and a life-long passion for the wilderness. This passion shines throughout Marc’s work and has attracted a wide audience around the world.

His talent for rare captures of amazing light and fleeting atmosphere imbue his portfolio with a sense of the epic, majestic and the bold. His success derives from patient single-minded pursuit of all the unique moments that generate the magic and energy of the wilderness, often spending months immersing himself in the landscape he shoots despite the rigors of season and weather.

Marc’s photographs have been published extensively worldwide in a large variety of media ranging from calendars, books, advertising and the publications of National Geographic, Outdoor Photographer, Popular Photography and many more. Marc has been acclaimed as one of the most talented landscape artists of his generation.

"Mood and emotion are the primary elements I seek to capture in all of my work, and for me, these are the images that evoke that emotional response the strongest."

My Favorite images:::
1) "Great Beyond" Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming. WOW! This creates such a mood of mystery and beauty. The starry sky is stunning and the waterfall coming from the background into the front in a good trail for the eye. He says he combined 2 exposures for this which I would guess. He needs 1 for the night sky and another for the landscape at twilight. The exposure used for the sky took in more than 5 times as much light as is seen by the naked eye, using an extremely high ISO, a big aperture of f2.8 and keeping the shutter opening for 45 seconds.
2) "Ethereal" Central Oregon Coast. Dramatic twilight skies and a long exposure create the surreal, otherworldly mood. I like the ghostly water on the rocks again.
3) "Magic Mountain," Mount Rainier National Park. Taken as the moon was setting. I like this particularly because the clouds are clear and divide the mountain. It looks like the mountain is rising over the cloud horizon.
4) "The Storm Wall" Glacier National Park, Montana. Again, a longer exposure created the movement of the water and waves. The black and white gives the feeling of being cold and stormy in this image.