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NPR : Gregory Crewdson's Photo Alchemy You all should check out this article about photographer Gregory Crewdson. While it's not my style of photography I can certainly appreciate the aesthetic of his images. The vivid colors and intricate sets are simply amazing.
This is the opening shot of a series of images I did for my first assignment in Picture Store, my photo class this session. The idea for the assignment was to capture a process from beginning to end and show the transitions in the middle. After an earlier failure I was stuck at home racking my brain for another process to show. Thanks to the military (never thought I'd say those words) an idea struck me: shit, shower, shave. That's a quaint little saying we have for our morning routine. Based on that I fleshed out some ideas about my current morning routine and came up with this set of 5 images.
By buddy Joseph Hollack alerted me to Interactive Narratives a while back, but Joe's last blog update got to me to actually listen to IN's podcast. For people that are interested in the new media that is developing in the journalism world IN and it's podcast seem to be a terrific place to find out what other people - those who are actually creating the content and those that are watching the future - are thinking about all this. Take a look and a listen and let me know what you think. I'll be adding a link to the podcast to my own site.
The latest podcast is an interview with Travis Fox of WashingtonPost.com. The photo and multimedia part of the site is one of the most developed in the world as far as aesthetic of the presentation and the quality of the work. Of course being the Post they should be since they have more informational resources available to them than probably any other printed news source in the world. Fox just returned from Aceh, Indonesia where he was working on a video project about the anniversary of the tsunami that hit that region a year ago.
I was browsing through the site just now and came across this article about wet darkrooms and how, despite digital's incursion into every facet of photography, they are still popular with so many, particularly young students of photography. Very much worth a read. Despite being a technophile I'm still very much in love with wet darkrooms. I love the ease and detail with which I can tone in Photoshop, but for sheer physical pleasure nothing stands up to the smell of developer watching a print appear on a blank sheet of paper; as if by magic. I know that I for one will be teaching kids - maybe mine, maybe someone else's - the joys of the wet darkroom at some point in my life.
There's a great article that's been posted on one of my favorite how-to sites, Transom.org, about setting up a small home studio for recording audio. This is interesting to me in a "how did I do?" kind of way because I recently created just such a setup at my new condo. The article points out all the key equipment you may or may not need - there's some things like a mixing board that certain people such as myself can do without - and suggestions for which ones to get. While their brand preferences seem to run along those of a big studio (Pro Tools, M-audio, Yamaha, etc.) their suggestions for saving money are good for students, and small studios doing multimedia work. If you're interested in doing a home setup for whatever reason take a look at the article.Transom Tools: Setting Up A Small Recording Studio. I put in my 2¢ in the comments section with my setup which includes PreSonus Bluetube pre-amp, PreSonus Firebox, an MXL 990 mic and Soundtrack Pro.
Well, I finally took the time to learn how to embed video into my pages without the help of a service like audioblog.com, which I've been using. While audioblog.com is convenient and looks nice enough when displayed in a web page, it lacks support the mp4 video files I've chosen to use. Normally I'd just use a supported file type like .mov and go about using audioblog.com, but mp4's quality is so vastly superior to .mov, .wmv or any other codec that I feel like I'd be doing my work and my readers a disservice using anything else. As a quick example, the video posted here - my Family Stories project - is a mere 15MB, which is small for a project of its length. But the quality is barely degraded, where as a much larger .mov file would look half as good. Fortunately it isn't terribly difficult to embed this kind of file with some HTML and a little CSS to make it look nice. And since the file type supports audio-only files as well I can use the same process for embedding my audio-only clips.
So, it's goodbye audioblog.com and hello .mp4! The only downside to this change is that the pretty controls will be changed to the standard QuickTime plugin controls. I hope you can live with it.
I removed the embedded video because it was downloading every time the page is loaded, and that's killing both my bandwidth allotment and the user's experience (slowing page load). Instead I've put up the first frame and by clicking on the image you can load the movie if you want to watch it. Check out the page's source code if you want to see how I've done it, otherwise there are some links to help you out:
This is the series I used for our Farmers Market assignment in PHO208. The assignment was to go to any farmers market in the area (and there are lots of them, pretty much every day) and photograph a farmer from the start of the day - setting up the shade tent, the tables, the produce, etc. - to the end of the day - taking down all the afore mentioned items. The story was to progress in a way to tell something about the person who was working the stand; how they interacted with people, how they felt about their work, what kind of a person they are, or anything to that effect. And it had to be done in about 5 images. I've included here some outtakes that I thought were nice, though not necessary as they duplicated some other image that I included in the final edit.
The farmer I contacted initially was from Harry's Berries. HB's is a farm in Oxnard and the man I spoke to, Rick, said his son and another employee would be at the stand the day I was going to go out. When I got there the scene was great: shady street so no super blown out backgrounds, pretty colors from the strawberries and tomatoes the stand had displayed, and it was a nice day in general. The only problem was Chris and Ceasar were both wearing baseball caps and looking down a whole lot - not good for pictures. So, rather than struggle along and get some decent but rather faceless pictures, or face shots but always from below, I decided to hedge my bets and shoot two stands at once. Fortunately the woman working the stand across the street seemed to be a bit slow setting up, so I was able to work with both stands at once, not missing anything I needed at either one. I spent the rest of the day bouncing back and forth trying to get the farmers interacting with their customers, some close-ups of the product and nice candid portraits.
In the end Laura Ramirez did in fact turn out to be the better subject. Actually she was a great subject; she ignored me when I needed her to and we chatted when I wasn't shooting. She had terrific customers and some great guys stopped by throughout the day to help her out. So, here's a quick slideshow of the images. It's a Quicktime movie that should auto start. If you want to watch it again just click somewhere in the window and hit the space bar. I'll figure out how to add a control button to it eventually.
Over the last year at Brooks I've learned at least one lesson: I'm no good at finding stories. Really I've learned a whole lot more, however that seems to be the one lesson that rears it's ugly head every session. You'd think that I'd take that lesson and learn how to not be no good at finding stories; learn from my mistakes, put in lots of hard work and make myself talk to lots more people. I have, in truth, become a lot better at developing stories and talking to people. I'm being more proactive about calling people and finding out when the good times to get the right visuals would be. I'm still a little timid about approaching individuals cold. I'm fine when there's an administrator of some kind to contact; it's their job to talk to people like me. But individuals are different. People don't have to talk to me. They don't even have to be nice to me for that matter. Not that there aren't plenty of nasty office people around, but in general individuals have much more breadth to the reaction I might elicit when approaching them. I'm really not sure what to do about this. It's fairly important for the continuation of my schooling - most of my future classes will involve doing this in some way shape or form - and I have no intentions what-so-ever of tossing it in for something stupid like this. But I can see this as a continued struggle, which I don't like. Does anyone have suggestions? I don't feel like I have a problem expressing myself (usually) but every time I get going on some great idea I have, and come across a situation where I have to just approach people I get very nervous and sometimes shy away from it all together. What am I to do?
This page contains all entries posted to Aaron Paul Vogel in January 2006. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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