It has been way too long

some people have asked me about this blog and if it will ever seen an update, and for those few people here it is.

There are many notable things that have happened since the last update, but the best one by far is film.

the typical California picture, I can almost hear katy perry in my head

When I say film I don't mean movies, I mean pictures. I mean the old fashion way of taking pictures, where you would have to actually know what you're doing for a photo to come out properly.

I wish my carseat was this comfortable

The best thing about film cameras is that they are cheap. I bought my 5dm3 for 3500 when it first came out (you can get it for less than 3k now). And the camera I used to take the 2 pictures above I bought for 20 bucks!

It's hard for me to put my finger on it. Film is in focus, yet it's soft. The colors are vibrant and well blended. The pictures I take with my professional digital cameras need work done to them, but with film (as long as you know what you're doing) it comes out of the camera looking amazing.

If you're interested in shooting film, a great book I would recommend is "Film is not Dead" by Jon Canlas. I wish I had read this book 3 years ago. Or if you have any questions just ask.

Film is not expensive and I encourage anyone who's interested to try it, it definitely keeps things interesting.

All these Photos were taken with Canon Eos Elan cameras. Colored photos with Fuji400h and black and white photos with Ilford 400 hp5

Therapeutic Curiosity

I always enjoy watching other people take pictures because I like seeing what they take picture of. Thanks Annie!

Solitude Project

some more new photographers

Some new photographers that I think are interesting

First is Jeff Wall. He does an interesting narrative where he sets up a picture with clues as to what happened.

Each picture then becomes a puzzle or a riddle that is solved based on the interpretation of the viewer.

He's almost like the Riddler of photography.

Another interesting photographer is Wendy Mcmurdo. She uses digital manipulation to create a playful scene of a theatre girl who sees her double for the first time.

"[this] is an example of tableau photographer in which the constructed nature of the image is foregrounded"

Deadpan aesthetic: cool , detached, keenly sharp type of photography.

One deadpan photographer that I particularly like is Richard Misrach.

There's something alluring about giant natural formations that are just static in an image. 

They're so oddly peaceful....

One more photographer, who's actually not in my book and I'm not completely sure is considered deadpan, is Michael Levin. 

I discovered Michael Levin last year and this images were so captivating that I spent weeks just looking at his photography.

If any of you has ever bought an ikea frame his picture might have been in it.

who knew deadpan could be so exciting

Another update on project impossible

Here are some pictures updated pictures from a project I'm currently working on called Simple.Life.

My back is starting to hurt from carrying all my camera stuff around all day...

So I woke up extra early this morning (or didn't sleep) and got to school at 6:20 so I could get the sunrise. To my surprise there was a surprising amount of traffic and I felt like I was literally racing the sun to get to school. I ended up hating the pictures I got and deleting all of them and then going to panera bread to sadly eat my bagels. But after I wiped my tired tears and got back to school I got a unique view of teams practicing their sports.

Some epic volleyball (I'm not sure if this is a team or a class)

Our award winning track team.

I did end up catching something like a sunrise that I liked.

I'm going to go out right now to get more pictures. I think I need about 200,000 more and then I'll be done.

Contemporary Photographers

Contemporary photographer has always been a weakness of mine, it's a subject I never studied or looked into (except this one time I looked up David Lachapelle on my phone). I actually don't know that many famous photographers. Whenever someone asks me who my favorite photographers are my answer is Eddie Adams, Vincent Laforet and my boss Ezra, because those are the only photographers I know...

I'm reading a book called "the photograph as contemporary art" and I'm finally being exposed to a world of photography that is more than just flickr and instagram posts.

For most people, photography as contemporary art is mostly just anything offensive or homeless. This book has a lot of both... BUT there are some really interesting photographers out there.

For instance. Georges Rousse. George Rousse sticks out to me because I love perspective shifts. Long before the days of photoshop, artists used to (and still) build things in order to tickle our brains by deceiving and entertaining our eyes.

His use of line and color, getting the light logic accurate and correct, everything he does looks so tedious and time consuming.

And then he takes the reality and distorts it. I really like this picture. It's like having an extreme fisheye inside a rectilinear lens.

This one is a great play on plane shifts.



And then there's Philip-Lorca diCorcia.

His "Head Series" is really interesting. What he did was he put some lights on a construction scaffolding near a busy New York street and stood really far away with a telephoto lens. When people walked under he would capture a portrait of them, without them knowing.

People act weird in front of a camera. They never either stand awkwardly or they have a specific pose that makes them look good. Although I do feel like this is an invasion of privacy, I feel like this approach captures what a person really looks like.

I wonder if he ever got in trouble for these...

project crazy

I'm working on a project for a class and basically I have to take 100-1000 pictures a day for 10 days and then at the end I can either use 1 picture or all the pictures and basically do whatever I want. Some people made a childrens book, some people make a video, someone  I think put all their pictures on a roll of tape and hogtied the entire class with it.

I had a really good idea for this project, and then I ended up scrapping that idea and doing something else, and then scrapping that idea and now doing something completely different. Because this project is so open ended It's hard for me to solidify an idea when I feel like I could be doing something better. Fortunately what I have no, I think, is pretty good.

This is just a quick sample of what I'm doing. In the end it's going to be an actual video with music and fonts! I made this into a GIF because I wanted to see what a sample of what I'm doing would look like in motion without having to open up premiere, inportm resize, rendor, export, etc...

Special thanks to Ivan for letting me borrow his tilt shift. The low res gif doesn't look that good so I'll upload an actual still.

this is my toy house and those are my toy dogs. Hopefully the rest of this will turn out much better. I want to try to get a sunrise using this technique but I'm not sure if I'm for waking up that early...