Notes from Notchcode

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Quote of the Week:

All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.

-Gaston Bachelard

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Notes from Notchcode

1.27.2010

For all you former SCAD photo majors out there...

...The Photo Monitors at Bergen Hall have a Blog. When I was there, we barely had computers. And they were made of stone tablets. The internet was a series of volcanic lava tubes....

I'm just tickled that the people there, nearly 20 years after we installed the department in the "new" Bergen Hall, still call the darkroom checkout office "The Cave".

Labels: photography, SCAD

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5.25.2009

Remember to Remember

Happy Memorial Day.

photo of the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial by Rob Hogeslag
Labels: holiday, photography

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5.18.2009

Wet-plate photography from my alma mater, SCAD

Check out this series of wet-plate images made by Ellen Susan over at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Professor Craig Stevens (pictured) was my mentor there, and he has a long love of historical techniques. If things keep going the way they have been in the photographic industry, pretty soon any of us who like using film will end up making our own negatives...because at some point companies will stop mass-producing them.

Labels: photography, process, SCAD

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3.09.2009

It's a busy week.

I won't be posting much, peeps. I have a huge workload this week, which is good for me, but bad for you (or perhaps good for you, depending on how much you cringe when you see another post from me come down the feed-pipes). I plan on being back here next week to come up for air. If you have some interesting tidbits, send them over to me so I can be distracted once in a while!

In lieu of posting thoughts, I'll be posting some of my favorite images shot over the last few years by myself. Not much of the photography with a capital P, but moreeveryday images. Here's one from last year's Passover seder:

Labels: flickr, photography, work

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2.24.2009

Come up with the best photography "dream assignment" and Lenovo/Microsoft will give you $50K

I'm not usually one to hop onto the contest bandwagon, but this one looks interesting. Not sure how they are going to determine what the "best" "dream assignment" is, but for me it would probably involve a couple thousand sheets of old-emulsion Tri-X, a new Canham 11x14 view camera, and a year of small mountain town across the U.S.....

Current SCAD students: you could do a lot of shooting with a $50K budget! I suggest you enter.

Sign up to get notified about competition rules, etc., here.
Labels: contests, photography, SCAD

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2.20.2009

More of my Architectural Photography is up at the Library of Congress

I was doing a search for some images I made up in Estes Park back in the early 1990s, and found that the Library of Congress has digitized more of the HABS/HAER work I did for the National Park Service. It's nice to see these again, since I haven't laid eyes on them since I turned them over to the project manager about 15 years ago. You can see all of the McGraw Ranch images here, including work done by myself as well as several other photographers who worked on the project (the photo datasheets are yet to be digitized, but generally in this series I shot most of the ones that are absent any snow, I think).

I also did quite a bit of work up in Grand Teton National Park, of a sprawling 1930s holiday "homestead" , (home to the first woman to climb the Grand Teton)as well as a now-burnt-down farming homestead on Antelope Flats, and other structures up near Jenny Lake. It was some of the most fun I've had with a camera!

Labels: colorado, habs/haer, photography

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2.15.2009

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes."

...from Scott Adams.

Also, as posted earlier, advice via Merlin Mann on Creativity and Courageous Sucking.

image via veen.
Labels: advice, creativity, photography

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2.10.2009

There's some new art at the Denver Art Museum

I headed over to the Denver Art Museum this afternoon for some inspiration, and was pleasantly surprised to see some new art on the walls of the Western American Art collection, notably this contemporary realist oil painting by Chuck Forsman, titled "Aggregate":

Forsman is represented locally by the Robischon Gallery.
I'd love to see more contemporary realists featured there, as they tell many of the same sorts of stories I tell in my photographs.
Labels: art, photography

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2.02.2009

Photography, and the Tolerance for Courageous Sucking

Another great post about why it's okay to fail:

Photography, and the Tolerance for Courageous Sucking: "
"As I’ve started shooting photos more often, I’ve picked up on some interesting patterns: habits, if you like. And, as I struggle to absorb the insane physics of capturing light with some glass and a black box, I accept upfront that the improvements to my actual photos will be slow, incremental, and, largely undetectable to anybody but me — a fact that’s never more painfully clear than when I swoon over the work of the more talented friends who inspire me (Heather, Ryan and Chris each come to mind here).

"But, being instantly great at this couldn’t be further from the point. Although I started taking photos to become a better photographer, I keep taking them because I’ve learned to love the process. And, luckily, at least as far as I can tell, dedication to the process can’t help but make you a better photographer — or a better whatever, for that matter. "

Read the rest here.

(Via 43 Folders.)
Labels: advice, photography

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1.14.2009

The first official presidential portrait taken with a digital camera

The incoming President, Barack Obama, has many "firsts" under his belt. I won't go through the most significant ones here, but from a photography standpoint, I found this one to be a nice "first" addition from the Obama-Biden Transition Team's press release on the topic:

"Today we are releasing the new official portrait for President Barack Obama.

"It was taken by Pete Souza, the newly-announced official White House photographer.

"It is the first time that an official presidential portrait was taken with a digital camera."

(emphasis added)

Souza was President Regan's official White House Photographer, as well.

More on Pete Souza here [browser-resizing flashy site].
Labels: photography, politics

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12.17.2008

Website refresh: BalePhoto.com goes live!

I created a website a couple of years ago for Andrew Bale, an excellent photographer and teacher in Pennsylvania. After it was up and running for a while, we both wanted to make some tweaks.

The refresh of the website has just launched, and it looks and works great. Check it out at BalePhoto.com.

The main differences are in the portfolio categories, and in the way we present the images. They are similar to the galleries I used for CarlSanderSocolow.com, but more refined: we have back/forward/close functionality (both by clicking on the image, and using the keyboard). And the load time is better.

Andy was great at letting me know what he wanted the site to do, and what his priorities were. In some cases, you have to sacrifice one preference in favor of another, and he knew what he wanted. I was also able to show him some alternatives that presented opportunities for usability and presentation that make his images look good.

But, really, a photography portfolio site is only as good as the images in it; Andy has some lovely and compelling work, and I hope you head over and check it out!

Congrats, Andy!
Labels: branding, interface, photography, web design

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No place is boring

"No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film."

- Robert Adams

Note: The New West
was just re-released by Aperture this year. It's an excellent reprint of a seminal book dealing with modern american landscape photography. Go buy it for yourself, or for your favorite photographer.
Labels: advice, photography

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11.14.2008

Product Booklet with photography--lots of fun from start to finish

Over the summer I worked with a great client in Golden on a product booklet for an industrial lighting fixture that they designed and engineered. I created the look of the brochure, with a design concept that fit the product perfectly.

As a bonus, I got to shoot photography for all of the product images in the booklet. I want to devote a longer post to the process, as well as show off some of the interior spreads that I think worked particularly well in terms of conveying information to the target market in an understandable and compelling way....but for now, I just had to show off the back cover shot. Shooting lighting fixtures is notoriously difficult, but I think we pulled it off (with a big assist on-set from one of the fixture's designers, who knows more than I will ever forget about the science and application of optics, refraction, reflection, etc. etc. etc.):

Labels: b2b, b2c, design, photography, print

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11.13.2008

Photos that Work

I love getting out into the field, and actually put my degree in Photography to good use for my clients.

This past spring I went out near Blanding, Utah, and photographed the wonderful staff of the Utah Office of Gas and Mining's Abandoned Mine Land Program. Basically, they close up old mines that are hazardous or are releasing pollutants into the air or water. Here are some of the shots from the trip. They were all shot with a large-format camera (my Deardorff 5x7, fitted with a 4x5 reducing back and a readyload holder), using available light, on Fujichrome Velvia 100:

Labels: photography

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11.10.2008

New branding for a B2B client: Walker Media

I wrapped up a branding effort for a new client in the Denver area a couple of months ago, and wanted everyone to have a look:

Walker Media is an independent consulting firm that helps public radio stations nationwide improve their fundraising and outreach effectiveness. Previously, I had worked with the firm's principal, Karla Walker, when she was with the Classical Public Radio Network, and she asked me to create her new brand when she began her new venture.

Here it is:

We used the initial caps as a standalone graphic device in a number of areas, as well, such as on the letterhead:

It's a simple, clean, and effective typographic solution for this business, and reflects (pardon the pun) Karla's approachability, flexibility, and professionalism. It also raises the bar for her competition, which in comparison, has been left in the dust.

We also did some quick-turnaround product photography for her as well, showcasing pre-loaded iPods that she sells to stations for their premium subscriber benefits:

Labels: b2b, branding, photography

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11.06.2008

Flickr and the President-Elect: Behind the scenes on Election Night

While professional photojournalists often get the most incredible shots, which discerning photo editors then cull through and present to us the most incisive of the bunch, what happens when there's no "professional" around to capture history?

This has often been the case throughout the last 169 years, ever since the birth of the photographic medium. And even more so since the masses popularized photography as a cultural phenomenon--ever since flexible film was developed by George Eastman in 1885 and sold by his company along with the soon-to-be ubiquitous camera, the Kodak Brownie (slogan: "you press the button, we do the rest"). Once everyone and their brother started running around with their little black boxes filled with rolled film, we started accumulate a record of the lives normal, interesting, boring, and even exceptional people.

Well, Flickr has been around for a long while now (it's probably a hundred years old in Internet Years), and it's the flexible film of the 21st century. "Isn't the digital camera a better applicant to the "new flexible film" moniker", you ask? Not really. Before photo-sharing sites like Flickr, I would say that while, yes, the digital camera allowed you to very easily take LOTS of images, that wasn't really any different than what you could do with flexible film-based cameras (although digital cameras made "processing" the images a lot cheaper).

No, Flickr is more of a game-changer than the digital camera. Why? Because it allowed people to easily share their images (even ones scanned in from "real" photos made with film). It also allowed the rest of us to find those photos we were interested in. Combined with some interesting search-and-show algorithms for presenting images with more "interestingness" to us, those abilities make Flickr a witness to the history, both sacred and profane, both amazing and mundane, that is being made around each of us, every day.

And now we get to the title of this post. While there have been some great photos of the presidential contenders this year, There's been one candidate that--very early on--got their own flickr account, and started documenting their journey to the White House: Barack Obama. The images that show up in Obama's flickrstream are (almost certainly) not taken by him, but by the people around him: campaign staff that follow him from town to town, local organizers who pass along shots of work being done in small towns and big cities, and perhaps a professional or near-professional photographer or two, as well (David Katz took these, and many more in the flickrstream...anyone know anything about him?).

This has given us a wonderful peek behind the curtain of a campaign's facade. A very closely-managed and controlled peek, of course--these shots were vetted at some level by the campaign, and shouldn't be considered to be objective (as if that term has any real meaning in photography). Despite that caveat, Obama's Flickr photos show him at times when no other cameras are around. Case in point was the scene in their hotel room at the Hilton in Chicago, on Election Night, as the networks called the race for Obama. The photos aren't always properly exposed, the framing isn't necessarily graceful, but they give the world a glimpse of the back room of history, as it's being made. We got some great images from that night, and because of Flickr, some nice insights into the more private moments, as well.
Labels: flickr, photography, politics

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9.20.2008

Visual Editing

A large part of a graphic designer's job (or anyone who traffics in visual information) is to curate the visual elements that are brought to the project table so that they are useful and understandable to the viewer. One such effort I am currently undertaking is the creation of thumbnail images for a photographer's website (not just any photographer, but the great photographer Andrew Bale, whose site we're retooling already has some beautiful work).

The current navigation scheme for moving throughout Andy's bodies of work uses an empty and full visual metaphor to show you what images you've visited, and which ones you haven't. It looks a bit like this:

The dark gray square shows the image you're looking at. The white squares are ones you've seen already. The blank ones are yet to be seen.

The new navigation uses snippets from each image as a representation of the whole image, so people can anticipate (or have their curiosity piqued). There are some good reasons not to use thumbnail crops (people want to see the whole image), but the advantages (you get the essence of an image, and can use it for navigation in a smaller area) are greater than the disadvantages--at least for this application.

In the case of this site, we're using a thumbnail image that is 64 pixels square. Andy's images are usually not square, so a crop is inevitable under this rule.

The issue here becomes what 64 pixels in a given image will evoke the larger whole, and that's where my job moves from being a production monkey to something that requires an understanding of the aesthetics, intent, and forms inherent in each image.

Take, for example, this image:

This is the same image you see above. I've rendered it here at the new enlargement size, which as you can see is a lot larger than the current view. Another improvement in the site that takes advantage of the growth in computer screen real estate since the initial site was developed.

So, what portion of this image evokes the whole? The blurry gondolas? The lamp on the right edge of the frame? The dark water below? Well, it's open for debate, surely, which is one thing I love about this job, but here's what I selected:

I think the darker mooring pole on the right, combined with the lighter one (in motion, slightly) to its left, along with the misty air and hazy building in the background, these elements evoke the whole of the image to me.

It's also mysterious enough that is makes you want to see more. It's a little call to action, without even having to use the words "click me!"

Visual editing doesn't just apply to photographs. Any time you consider using a visual element like a logo, color bar, or illustration, you have to "curate" its placement on the page, making sure it works in harmony with the other elements (text, page proportion, browser capabilities, paper stock, etc.) you are using. It's, simply put, the essence of any design problem.
Labels: advertising, creativity, graphic design, photography, visual information

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8.29.2008

Corn Dogs and Ice

Corn Dogs and Ice
Originally uploaded by notchcode
It's Friday, so get yourselves out of town and enjoy life! The Colorado State Fair is happening down Pueblo-way, with all the cotton candy and corn dogs you can eat. C'mon, you know you want some!
Labels: advice, photography, typography, vacation

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8.15.2008

5,000 masterworks of Photography

If you can stand wading through the german language of this site, you'll be rewarded with over 5,000 masterworks of photography, organized by photographer.

Image: Chartres Cathedral, by Edouard-Denis Baldus.

via Metafilter.
Labels: photography

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African Kings: Portraits by Daniel Lane

Daniel Laine’s African Kings:

NYIMI KOK MABIINTSH III

King of Kuba

D.R. Congo

Check out the whole series of images, each with a historical and biographical summary. Great portraiture.

(Via Design You Trust™ - Design Blog & Community..)
Labels: africa, photography

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8.12.2008

Photography as a Weapon

Errol Morris has an interesting conversation with Hany Farid, a Dartmouth professor and an expert on digital photography. The conversation centers around the doctoring of the Iranian missile test photos printed (as authentic) in many newspapers around the globe last month. Here's one of the best bits, from Faird:

you don’t need Photoshop to editorialize. We can go back to Mao and Stalin and Castro and Mussolini, and all these guys. All the dictators doctored photographs in order to effectively change history. So why is this a big deal? Is it because of the power of visual imagery, the fact that it resonates so much? Maybe that will change with the next generation. Maybe this new generation will be thinking about images differently. There is a savviness about what technology can do. Kids now are growing up in digital age where they routinely see doctored images in their mailboxes, in the media, on television, and so on and so forth.

Lazlo Molhoy-Nagy, the bauhaus photographer, told us way back in the 20s and 30s that visual literacy would be the most important tool free-thinkers and informed people of the 20th century could have. And he was right. Visual literacy is still important today, and knowing how to put it into context with visual disinformation and other factors is something that we 21st-century citizens need to master.
Labels: photography, visual information

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7.28.2008

What We're Reading Online

I thought I'd share some of the content that is informing our work, seeping into our consciousness, and making us smile.

The Big Picture. This visual blog takes advantage of the fact today's monitors allow us to see big images onscreen. Each Big Picture post presents several images with a common theme. It's a wonderful bit of online photojournalism, and a big inspiration. Some recent favorites: photos from the Tour de France, Xenophobia in South Africa, and Images of Jupiter.

The Denver Egotist. This anonymous blog shows and tells various design/agency projects coming out of the Denver area. it's occasionally juvenile and snarky, but lately has been growing up into something more than a space for ranting, trollbaiting commentators. They bring some interesting design and campaign news to our notice, and for that we'll overlook the occasional misfire.

Logo Design Love. It's all about the visual identity here. Good posts on good logos, bad logos, and occasionally similar logos.

Cool Infographics. A well-executed infographic is better than a good-looking piece of design. And it's more than art. It's a visual expression of hard data or process that makes the viewer come to a more complete understanding of that data or process.

In that same vein, there's Subtraction, the blog of nytimes.com's design director, Khoi Vinh. As the person responsible for guiding the interactive visualization of the New York Times's content, Mr. Vinh has a lot to shoulder, and he does it well. Not only does he have some great talent backing him up at nytimes.com, but his personal expressions of visual information design show he's the captain of the ship there, as well.

The Design Observer. This design blog is edited by three of the biggies in the design world: Michael Bierut, William Drenttel, and Jessica Helfand; and lists contributors that anyone who has picked up an AIGA annual in the last ten years would know by their designs, if not by name. Ms. Helfand's nostalgic post on the good old days of press rooms filled with make-readys made me remember my earlier days, and made me a little wistful for zipatone and rubylith, too.

So, there's your reading list for today, young blog-reader. Enjoy!
Labels: advertising, creativity, denver egotist, design, information graphics, photography, print, printing, writing

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7.09.2008

Andy's back from Toulouse

And he has made some amazing photographs. If you haven't purchased his Five plus One portfolio, which will include a surprise image from his recent trip to Toulouse, do it now. I've been given a sneak peek at his "plus One" image, and it's beautiful.
Labels: photography

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6.20.2008

Weegee: Still one of the best photojournalists ever.

The NY Times is running a nice overview of Weegee's life and career online right now. If you are jaded about the main stream media, it's like a nice little palette cleanser--from the 1940s.
Labels: photography

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6.05.2008

Photography in Public Places? Yep, Still legal.

Bruce Schneier's posts are some of the most thought-out essays providing an antidote to the official Sky Is Falling message that the TSA puts out there regarding national security. Today he talks about why the current infatuation with harrassing, assaulting, and imprisoning photgoraphers making images of public buildings in public places is not productive:

...[If] terrorists did photograph their targets, the math doesn't make sense. Billions of photographs are taken by honest people every year, 50 billion by amateurs alone in the US And the national monuments you imagine terrorists taking photographs of are the same ones tourists like to take pictures of. If you see someone taking one of those photographs, the odds are infinitesimal that he's a terrorist.

Read the whole post here.
Labels: photography, tsa

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5.23.2008

Make your own Photographic Film

Sad that the original Tri-X isn't being made anymore? Don't fret: just build your own film coating machine, and make as much as you want. Of course, being a retired chemist with a lot of time on your hands helps, too.

Unfortunately, it looks like the film base being used on this machine is just four inches wide, so I'll have to look elsewhere for custom-made 5x7-inch sheet film ;)
Labels: DIY, photography

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5.19.2008

Red and Blue makes the Southwest Landscape

I got back from the four corners area of Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado last Friday, where I was working off-site. I was able to spend some time touring around Monument Valley with some compadres who know the place well, and it was eye-opening. I made some interesting images with my large-format camera, which I had along on assignment, and hopefully I'll hit the darkroom in the near future to see what became of my vision. I'll post any good results here. Bad ones, well, we don't talk about where those go.
Labels: photography, travel

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5.07.2008

Digital versus Film: Like comparing the Avs to the Red Wings at playoff time (and we all know which is best, right?)

I have a client who has asked me for some on-location photography of their staff, in a remote location. I recommended large-format film, because they want to use the images on large exhibition display graphics. For the resolution required for such a display, you'd have to use a 22.8 megapixel camera to get the needed pixels per inch. There is one available, by the way, for about $27K, and if you want, feel free to buy one and send it to this address.

With large format film, you get a functional resolution that (still) beats digital (for now). Notice the caveats? And if you were only ever going to use the images online or in a smaller printed piece, like a brochure, well, digital is fine, in most cases. I think that black and white film has higher fidelity over color-sensor-based digital cameras, so there's that caveat in the other direction. But I am fine (from a commercial standpoint, anyhow) advocating for whatever option fits the project best.

Apparently this client is having to listen to other competing photographers gripe about the large format requirement. I can almost hear them saying "It's sooooo heavvvvyy! And you have to take all this tiiiiiime to set it uuuuuup!" Well, I've been shooting with a large format rig for nigh on 20 years, and I can setup and shoot a scene in about 2 minutes, which is hella fast, at least in the large format world. But there are other reasons to shoot large format film...aesthetic ones, ones which relate to previsualization, that I won't go into here, because this is a discussion about the pragmatics of large format vs. digital. And like I said: if anyone wants to buy me the digital Hasselblad, please please please, send it over. I'll convert immediately.

Except for my personal work of course, in which case you'll have to pry my Deardorff from my cold, dead hands.
Labels: photography

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5.02.2008

I'll be heading out to Southeast Utah in a few weeks...

...for a photo shoot near Lake Powell. But not close enough to Lake Powell to actually enjoy it. Anyone have any good ideas on where to go and what to do near Blanding, in my spare time? Not that I'll have much (the Canyonlands and Moab are probably out of my range)... send me your fun-in-the-desert ideas and if I do them I'll post a photo here.

photo of typical Blanding activity by takeitez
Labels: photography, travel

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4.27.2008

Jill Freedman: Back in New York and looking for a publisher

Jill Freedman made some incredible images in the 60s, 70s and 80s in New York and Washington, DC. A recent New York Times article gives a brief overview, but you can find a more comprehensive collection on her website. A show of her work is also up right now at the Higher Pictures Gallery in NYC if you're nearby and want to have a look, by the way.

She says elsewhere that she is shopping a compilation of her images around to publishers at the moment; it would be a coup for any house to get it and make it available. Jill: if you need a book designer, well, I'd love to do it. If I were you I'd send it over to Richard Benson and have him make the separations, though ;)

Freedman mentions she is going to resume shooting in NYC, after relocating back there from Florida recently. There's a lot there to shoot, Jill. It may not be quite the same as the late '70s, but it's just as compelling. I know you'll find something interesting to say about the Big City.

image: Busted During Demonstration, 1968, by Jill Freedman.
Labels: photography

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4.14.2008

Site Launch: CarlSanderSocolow.com photography

I completed a gallery site for Guggenheim Fellow Carl Sander Socolow this morning, and I encourage you to check out his work, entitled Scenes from Civic Life.

His latest project involves documenting the town of Mata Ortiz, in northern Mexico. He writes,
This work is a photographic study of the ongoing transformation of a number of heretofore isolated northern Mexican villagers into a community of world-class ceramic artists. This transformation is having a profound historic impact on their lives, the life of their village and on the social, economic and cultural life of the surrounding region. I began this project three-and-a-half years ago with the ambition of depicting the harmonies and paradoxes shaping these artists and their village as both are inexorably compelled, by virtue of an event in the history of art, to confront the modern economic and cultural world and find and take their place within it.

In a town of 3,000 people, more than 400 potters are now working in what has become recognized as a form of high art, he continues. This has an enormous impact on the economic and social life of Mata Ortiz, and Carl's documentation of it it touching for its humanity, artfulness, and compassion. These are real people in his images, not just stereotypes or one-dimensional characters. They are potters, fathers, mothers, daughters, cowboys, baseball enthusiasts, and more.

His other work from the US and europe are also worth viewing. His scenes of a debutante ball and of Venice are especially compelling.

Some notes on the site: we experimented with several navigation methods, including a sliding scroll of thumbnail images on the right side of the window, but eventually settled on an arrangement of squared-off elements of each photo, set in a grid, with links to the full image from each photo element. A Java Script runs the enlargement, which also includes title and date information. This format is hierarchically simple, and will make it easy for Carl to add more images whenever he wants by simply adding a thumbnail image to the grid, and linking it to a full-size image with the included script.

above: Courtship with Dog, Mata Ortiz, Mexico, 2004, © 2004 Carl Sander Socolow. All Rights Reserved.
Labels: art, clients, interface, photography, web design

posted at 10:55 AM Leave your comments here: 1 comments

4.09.2008

Good Times

I did this sort of thing everyday, once upon a time. Now, with my practice focused more on branding, design and interactive experience, it's a treat to get into the photo studio when I can.

This shoot was a day-long affair for a client of mine. They are a small skunk-works operation made up of obsessed lighting engineers. They have a new product coming to market, and asked us to create a product booklet, brand, and shoot the images for the piece as well. They are a fun crew to work with, because they are so passionate about their work, and are obsessive in their attention to detail. At the same time, they are very open to collaboration, new ideas, and new perspectives. This is a great combination: obsessive and open.

In any case, I spent a day with Kevin from the group, and two sets of freshly-minted fixtures, down at Camren in their large studio. We shot digitally, and reviewed our shots in realtime, making it easy for a film-boy like me to make decisions on tweaking lighting positions, intensities, and so on. Needless to say it's also a bonus to have a lighting engineer on hand to look over your shoulder as you figure out how your strobes are going to refract through the product's diffuser, say. All-told, we had about ten set-ups, and shot about 200 exposures that I kept. All this for about seven final images for the booklet and their website.

I had a great day; great enough that it makes me want to do more work like this. So: you need some photography? I might know a guy.

P.S. Once we get the booklet out, I'll post some of the shots from the shoot. -a
Labels: clients, creativity, photography

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3.25.2008

Yeah, Barack has a posse, and I'm on it.

Just in case you were wondering about my ability to win friends and influence people:

Labels: flickr, humor, photography, politics

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3.21.2008

Simplicity, and Beauty in the "Mundane"

Piper photograph - 2
Originally uploaded by notchcode
A few photographers have said this better than me, but here it is anyway:

Look for the beauty in what is around you, right now. Questing for it elsewhere just makes for a longer trip.

Piper, my four year-old daughter, took this image. With all my training, I couldn't have done better.
Labels: creativity, photography

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3.20.2008

Why cropping can be bad, and why failure can be good

Two items of linklove for you guys:

Matt Soar: Fail Again, Fail Better, in the Design Observer

"Jonathan Hoefler says, 'Increasingly I think about the work that I do not so much as a directed effort, but as the ability to recognize accidents and interpret them productively. Even failures have their place, since without them there’s no progress: anything that’s truly 'experimental' has to run the risk of failure.'"

Cropping: A Duh Moment, in the Online Photographer
(referencing this amazing image)

"Once you start cropping, why stop? You've entered context-elimination mode; you're engaging in the activity of denying information to the viewer; why not take it a little further, and then a little further than that?"
Labels: creativity, graphic design, photography

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3.13.2008

The new Zeiss Ikon Z1: Me Want

The Online Phoptographer has posted a review of the Leica-like Zeiss Ikon Z1. Ever since Carl came through town with his Leica over his shoulder, I have returned to lusting after small film cameras again. The Z1 is less spendy than a Leica, and according to the review, possibly just as good (don't tell Leica owners that). And if I am going to shoot 35mm film (I already shoot 5x7) why not use some of the best optics in a well-designed camera, too?
Labels: clients, photography

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3.04.2008

Help out a great photographer and get some great art--all at the same time

My good friend Andrew Bale just got a commission to create work for a show at the Espace Ecureuil in Toulouse, France this summer. It's a pretty cool gig: they pay for a fair amount of his travel and his stay while in France. What they don't cover is expenses related to hauling hundreds of rolls of film around the countryside, printing the final images, and so on. Andy is raising money to fund his trip in a novel way: for a limited time, if you send him $185, he'll send you five images from his Europe portfolio, plus another photograph from his upcoming project in France.

Now, even if Andrew weren't my friend, I'd sing the praises of his work. Beautifully-crafted images, sought out in the wilderness, industrial backyards of Pennsylvania, and streets of America, Ireland, Paris and Italy. He and I both print using the lush platinum/palladium contact printing process, and he has also become an expert in digitally-printed archival ink pigment prints too. The images from this Five plus One portfolio consist of the latter.

Usually Andy's images sell for between $125 and $450 each. With this offer, you are getting six images for the cost of one. That's a pretty cool deal, and a great way to jumpstart your collection. Head on over to the portfolio page to see the images, and read more about the project and the artwork. Then buy a set and become a partner in Andrew's latest project.
Labels: art, photography

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2.29.2008

Out-of-this-world Photography: Developing film in space

Some of the highest resolution images of the moon still in use by our intrepid scientists were shot by five Lunar Orbiter Spacecrafts, launched by NASA in 1966 and 1967. Did they use some sort of really advanced digital imaging technology to make these images? Nope; that sort of tech was years--decades--away, at least if you wanted to put it into a satellite small enough to escape the earth's gravity well and get all the way to the moon. These orbiters used film to make their high-res images.

These spacecraft were the world's first extraterrestrial mobile foto-mats: they exposed, developed, and printed (by way of scanning the film line by line into a tv transmission beamed to earth) photographic images so fine that they are still in use today. The scanned images were beamed back to earth, reassembled on a kinescope, and then re-exposed to terrestrial-based film.

Whenever I am out on assignment for a client shooting a seemingly impossible subject, from a seemingly impossible angle, I am comforted by the fact that at least I'm not trying to expose, develop, and scan my photos 246,000 miles from earth.
Labels: photography

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2.04.2008

Adobe to discontinue Stock Photo service

Macworld is reporting today that Adobe will stop selling stock images and illustrations via its Bridge interface as of April 1, 2008.

I had used Adobe Stock Photo off and on since purchasing my CS3 upgrade, and found it a bit slow. As in "slllllloooooooooowwwwww". Especially when you did a search for something returning more than about a dozen images. The server up at Adobe seemed to be going out and taking the photo, developing the film, cropping it, getting it licensed, and uploadingit to my computer each time I clicked the "search" button. I won't be particularly sorry to see it go.

The service relied on a host of other providers, such as Getty Images, or GettyOne, or whatever they have branded themselves as this year. If I bought a ton more stock each year, I might have found the trade-off of speed vs. an all-in-one-place solution acceptable, but for my needs, not so much. While my clients use a bit of stock photography, they also use a bit of assignment photography, especially location work, which I am happy to provide. And for those with tight budgets, the lure of shutterstock.com and istockphoto.com (even if they have relatively crappy images) is hard to resist.
Labels: adobe, photography

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1.17.2008

See what your grandparents saw, in color.

Not blogging much this week due to the new baby, but something caught my eye that related to the photography side of what we do here:

The Library of Congress has released a large number of images (but still a tiny portion of their overall visual catalog) onto the internet, via Flickr. favorite set so far is the 1930s and 40s in color. Think everything was black and white back then? Then (aside from not knowing your photographic history) you are wrong: check them out and see some amazing kodachrome snaps from the era. Then go get your grandparents to check it out and have them reminisce!

Since I do HABS/HAER work on occasion, I actually have some images in the Library of Congress archives. But this stuff is way cooler than mine, because it's from (from my perspective) long ago, and shines a light into our recent history.
Labels: photography

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12.27.2007

The Space Between the Sky and Me: Photos by Steffanie Halley

A few months ago I was cycling along, doing my brisk late fall morning ride through Crown Hill Open Space, when my phone rings. It was SCAD MFA candidate Steffanie Halley calling me to see if I'd be interested in looking over her body of work. She was in town, and her adviser and my prof-of-old, Craig Stevens, had told her to look me up and get my reaction to her images. She was about four months out from staging her thesis show, and had a lot of images to work with. Later that week, I met Steffanie in south Denver and checked out her photographs. They were large, color location portraits of women. Some were fairly straightforward, and others were more fragmented. I saw two or three possible thematic groupings, any of which could turn into a nice show. They struck me as wonderfully mysterious and narrative, with a strong sense of composition and color. Pretty cool, all in all.

I got a postcard from Steffanie this afternoon for her thesis show, titled "the space between the sky and me". Judging from the four images on the card, it looks like a nice tight show, with some great images. I wish I could go and see it for myself. If you are in Savannah in January, go check it out. It's at Alexander Hall Gallery, 668 Indian St.. The opening is on January 11th, from 5-7. If you see Steffanie, congratulate her for me!
Labels: photography, SCAD

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10.11.2007

Diana: Not just for Lovers

The classic Diana camera is back, and they're taking pre-orders for it now. Move over Holga!
Labels: cameras, photography

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1.24.2007

Photographer of the Day: Phillip Toledano

I ran across Mr. Toledano's site tonight, courtesy of stumbleupon, a lovely Firefox associative linking tool.

Toledano spent a decade as an art director at the higher end of the agency atmosphere, and is now back to making images. He does it full time. Which is lovely inspiration for a creative business owner who has a BFA in Photography. The collections that caught my eye tonight were his video gamers portrait series, and his work up above the arctic circle. Lovely, inventive, and playful. The portrait above is from his video game portrait work. Go and have a look.
Labels: photography

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12.01.2006

Whisky Photo

I have learned that a photo of mine will be appearing in a book about whisky (that's Scotch to you infidels), to be published by Appletree Press in 2007. Can't wait to see it in print!

The image, of a bottle of Cask-strength Glen Grant, is pictured here. Glen Grant is one of the best, and rarest, whiskys I've had the pleasure of hosting in my pantry. It's almost gone, so now you know what to get me for the holidays, eh?
Labels: book, photography, whisky

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