Some new CGI work

Just thought I would post some CGI projects I have been tinkering with.  The Lebron shoe was for Nike and was never published so I just added that to the front page.  I tweaked on it to add the "Lava" texture the other week which I thought made it more interesting.  Shoe is from a photo shot by Ryan Unruh.

The text piece is a interior study where I am working on getting the floors and lights working right.  Having a issue where I can't get the light working right in the bottom left. The abstract is just a study in making abstract art in CGI that I banged out yesterday. Both of these are entirely CGI.

Sculpting with Light

For 35 years, I’ve been a fine art and commercial studio photographer and for 24 of those years, I’ve used Light Painting (I like to refer to it as “Sculpting with Light”) as my method of lighting subjects. Many years ago, I discovered that light painting was not only a great tool for solving problems (which was initially the reason I started experimented with it), but it also was a way to enhance, reveal and celebrate certain aspects of subjects that weren’t visible to me under normal lighting conditions! There is a transformational quality to the light, and ordinary objects can become extraordinary when seen in this “new” light.

Vermeer’s Secret Tool: Testing Whether The Artist Used Mirrors and Lenses to Create His Realistic Images

David Hockney and others have speculated—controversially—that a camera obscura could have helped the Dutch painter Vermeer achieve his photo-realistic effects in the 1600s. But no one understood exactly how such a device might actually have been used to paint masterpieces. An inventor in Texas—the subject of a new documentary by the magicians Penn & Teller—may have solved the riddle.

Necessity brings him here, not pleasure

Paintings by Samantha Keely Smith

Title: Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, Canto XII, line 87

VIA: But Does It Float?

I am a sucker for Turner-esque paintings like these.  

Source: http://butdoesitfloat.com/Necessity-brings...

Rick Rubin Interview

I never decide if an idea is good or bad until I try it. So much of what gets in the way of things being good is thinking that we know. And the more that we can remove any baggage we’re carrying with us, and just be in the moment, use our ears, and pay attention to what’s happening, and just listen to the inner voice that directs us, the better. But it’s not the voice in your head. It’s a different voice. It’s not intellect. It’s not a brain function. It’s a body function, like running from a tiger.

 

“There’s a tremendous power in using the least amount of information to get a point across.”

Great stuff here for anyone in the arts.

Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013...

Weekend Personal work

Been busy as all get out here so I have not been posting as much, many apologies.  But in trade have some images I made this weekend.  

Most shots are from a hike at Wahclella Falls on Saturday with a dead phone booth on Alberta on the same day and a 3d render test from Sunday night. The render is noisy and unacceptable but I still enjoy the direction it is heading.

On the Constant Moment- Clayton Cubit.

Imagine an always-recording 360 degree HD wearable networked video camera. Google Glass is merely an ungainly first step towards this. With a constant feed of all that she might see, the photographer is freed from instant reaction to the Decisive Moment, and then only faced with the Decisive Area to be in, and perhaps the Decisive Angle with which to view it. Already we've arrived at the Continuous Moment, but only an early, primitive version.
Evolve this further into a networked grid of such cameras, and the photographer is freed from these constraints as well, and is then truly a curator of reality after the fact. "Live” input, if any at all, would consist of a “flag” button the photographer presses when she thinks a moment stands out, much like is already used in recording ultra-high-speed footage. DARPA has already developed acamera drone that can stay aloft recording at 1.8 gigapixel resolution for weeks at a time, covering a field as large as 5 miles wide, down to as small as six inches across, and it can archive 70 hours of footage for review. This feat wasn't achieved with any new expensive sensor breakthroughs, but rather by networking hundreds of cheap off-the-shelf sensors, just like you've got in your smartphone.

​

Photo Project: Tattoo Machines

Portland Tattoo Artist Jason Leisge, owner of OddBall Tattoo asked me to photograph some of his hand built Tattoo Machines before he left for a convention in NY.  Here are the results of a two hour shoot. ​I hope to continue this project with the title, "Machines of Ink and Blood:  Images of custom built Tattoo Machines."

Photo nerd notes: Shot with a Canon 5dm2 with the 90mm tilt shift lens and lit with a few Dedolights. I love my Dedolights!  Shot a few frames for focus stacking then made the background in Modo.  

​Sweep, gun block model and lights in Modo.

Composited it all together and there you have it.  Fun stuff.  If you build your own Tattoo Machines please drop me a line, I'd love to photograph them.​

Russian Criminal Tattoo Archive

Between 1948 and 1986, during his career as a prison guard, Danzig Baldaev made over 3,000 drawings of tattoos. They were his gateway into a secret world in which he acted as ethnographer, recording the rituals of a closed society. The icons and tribal languages he documented are artful, distasteful, sexually explicit and provocative, reflecting as they do the lives, status and traditions of the convicts that wore them. Baldaev made comprehensive notes about each tattoo, which he then carefully reproduced in his tiny St. Petersburg flat. The resulting exquisitely detailed ink drawings are accompanied with his handwritten notes and signature on the reverse, the paper is yellowed with age, and carries Baldaev’s stamp, giving the drawings a visceral temporality – almost like skin

 

Various cat tattoos. The cat is one of the oldest symbols of criminal world. They are the personification of the thieves’ fortune, prudence, patience, the speed of their actions, their ruthlessness and rage. At the same time they represent the expectations of their victims. The abbreviation KOT (tomcat), which is found in tattoos, is the language of thieves, it means: Korennoy Obitatel Tyurmy (Native prison inhabitant).

Top right: Text reads ‘NVOVDO’.

This is a rare acronym, understandable only to the initiated: NVOVDO – ‘Do not touch the thief, he will always make you surrender!’ 1950s.

Bottom left: The symbols on the hat worn by the cat signify the bearer of the tattoo is otritsaly – a thief who refuses to submit to, and is a malicious infringer of the prison rules.

Bottom right: Text reads 'All power to the godfathers!’.1980s.

Judge Rules William Eggleston Can Clone His Own Work

About a year ago, I mentioned a lawsuit by a collector, filed after William Eggleston decided to re-print older photographs, using inkjet printing and a larger size. A judge now ruled that the photographer had the right to do that. On the surface, that’s great news for photographers. It also blows a huge hole into the whole editioning game that galleries have been relying on. (more) Most photographs can be printed in large numbers, so it’s not all that obvious why someone would pay a lot of money for a photograph. Editions provide an easy solution: Even though there could be thousands of copies of a single photograph, the promise is that there will be merely, let’s say, eight. If you buy a print you got one out of only eight, and this - artificial - scarcity then justifies your investment. Thus, as a photographer you need to think about editions if you want to work with a gallery, since that’s part of the game.

What this means is that if you want to re-print a photograph that was issued in some edition you can’t - unless, and here’s the trick, you can show that your new edition is very different. That’s essentially what the Eggleston lawsuit was about. And why wouldn’t a somewhat different size plus a somewhat different process truly be a different edition, right?

 

Source: http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/2013/04/judge_...

Photoshop illustration of Contra

This is pretty awesome to watch and it's pretty much what I do all day, lol!​

Each frame in this video represents 10 seconds of work. The image spans across 3 PSD files with over 500 layers at a resolution of 9600x5400 pixels. The project took 25 hours to complete over the course of 6 days.

Conscientious Extended | On Process

A good photograph is a good photograph in such a way that the process itself might be an integral part of it, but it’s not the focal point. In other words, the moment you can almost separate out the image from the process - just like you’d think about Hipstamatic as picture plus filter - you’re in trouble: Suddenly, the process itself becomes part of what is being evaluated. But who cares whether it took you three days to make a picture or whether you got that great picture seeing something and then snapping it very quickly?

In photoland, the cult of process is tied to the cult of work. It’s almost as if the more physical and technical effort you put into a photograph, the better it is, or rather: the more we have to admire it. But why would we?

 

This is one of the issues I have all the time.  It's not about the process, it's about the image.  Many times I will get into discussions about the work I do and someone will snarkily ​say, "It's all done in post, the photographer does not matter!" Which is so far from the truth that now-a-days I either get a bit offended or just dismiss the person outright as uneducated. It sounds a bit harsh, but I am over that statement.  The difference between a well composed, beautifully lit, perfectly timed shot and a careless "one off" has huge repercussions for what I can do with it in post. 

Source: http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/extended/archi...

Lucas Samaras

For more than a decade, each new Polaroid product prompted Samaras to embark on a fresh suite of experiments. Panorama belongs to a series he began in 1982. For each image the artist made several eight-by-ten-inch Polaroids of a single figure. He then cut each print into strips of equal width and reassembled them to create an elongated hybrid image. This simple technique stretches the figure as a fun-house mirror would, yielding the quality of theatrical fantasy that permeates all of Samaras's work.

LS: I think even at a young age I became aware that two kinds of fame were available: One is the kind you get from building this great church; the other is the kind you get from burning it down.

Zeke Berman

Since the late 1970's Zeke Berman has been making singular, studio-based photographs. These works reflect his long standing interest in visual cognition, optics and the intersection between sculpture, photography and drawing. The formal range of his work, and his sculptural use of materials is varried, original and idiosyncratic. 

Some selected works from Zeke Berman, fine art photographer.​

Gregory Crewdson movie

Brief Encounters Trailer

Big fan of his work, would love to track this down to watch.  Can't belive I just found it today.  I feel like I must have been living under a rock.