Friday Inspiration – Andrew Nixon Photography

April 24, 2015

Friday Inspiration: Alec Soth

In my stumble through contemporary landscape photographers I recently found Alec Soth, and particularly his recent photo book ‘Songbook‘ in which he is exploring physical social interactions in a world of social media.

I’m still digging into the rich world of Alec Soth, there’s lots to go at! His self published book ‘Sleeping by the Mississippi‘ caught the attention of the curators of the Whitney Biennial in 2004 and his inclusion in the exhibition launched him on a larger stage. The image above from his ‘Sleeping by the Mississippi’ project was used for the poster for the exhibit. He became a nominee of the Magnum Photos agency in 2004 and a full member in 2008. Since his first book in 2004 he has produced over 20 others, including Songbook, and a number in collaboration with writer Brad Zellar. He founded the publishing company Little Brown Mushroom in 2008 to publish his own books and those of others interested in a similar narrative approach to telling visual stories. A very busy guy!

See Alec talk more about his work in the videos below.

Alec Soth et Roe Ethridge (April 28, 2013) from Paris Photo on Vimeo.

March 20, 2015

Friday Inspiration: Camille Seaman

It never ceases to amaze me how small our world now is. That we can easily get on a plane and travel to almost anywhere, even some of the most remote places in the world, is something that continues to fascinate me. Many of my photographer friends have been to the polar regions of the world, particularly Antarctica, and the discussion between them is when they are going to go back.

Being in the presence of ‘big ice’ has yet to capture my imagination in a way that pulls me to the ends of the earth. Until the time that it does I’m happy to enjoy the work of photographers such as Camille Seaman who have spent time in these places.

Camille is part Shinnecock Native American Tribe and is using photography to explore her connectedness with the world, which in many ways is an extension of the things that she was taught by her paternal grandfather. Her 10 years of visits to the Arctic and Antarctic have been collected into a book ‘Melting Away‘ that is well worth spending some time with.

See Camille talking about her polar project ‘The Last Iceberg’ in the TED talk below. Also see Camille share a few few thoughts on her process as well as a longer talk that gives more detail on her background as well as her projects.

February 20, 2015

Friday Inspiration: Julieanne Kost

As I look around for ‘how to’ resources for lightroom and photoshop one of the people that I continually come back to is Julieanne Kost. Julieanne is the Principal Digital Imaging Evangelist for Adobe Systems, which means that she spends much of her time on the road speaking at conferences and teaching how to get the most out of lightroom and photoshop. I recently worked through her ‘Advance Photoshop Layers‘ course on the CreativeLive site which was excellent. She’ll be teaching during the upcoming Photoshop week on CreativeLive which will be worth checking out.

Many of the examples that Julieanne uses during her demonstrations are from her personal projects. Her book Window Seat is quite interesting and now available as a digital book. Well worth a look. It’s the photoillustrations, such as the one above, that of course really capture my attention given my interest in assembling images from parts. Check out the videos below to see more of how these are constructed:

February 13, 2015

Friday Inspiration: Brooke Shaden

Often as a beginning photographer you will hear the admonishment, ‘get it right in camera’, this is good advice when your starting out. It provides a restriction, a box to work in, and edges to push up against. It forces you to think about what is the subject, how do you frame the subject so that everyone knows what the subject it, are there lines that you can use to lead the eye through the image and on an on. A multitude of decisions to make on the fly that with practice become second nature, an instinct and perhaps one of the reasons that it can be so hard for some to teach what they are clearly so capable of doing.

I find that I am increasingly less interested in getting it right in camera and more interested in making sure that I’ve captured enough of the scene in front of me to be able to recreate what I felt when I was there. I’ll shoot different shutter speeds to capture waves with just the right amount of blur, I’ll focus at different points in the image so that I can get good front to back depth of field and I’ll shoot a lot of frames. I’ve actually been doing this for a while and it’s taking some time for my post-processing skills to catch up with what I’d felt and imagined I would be able to create when I was stood in various places around the world blasting away.

In looking around at people who were pushing the envelope with regards to creating images Brooke Shaden’s work caught my eye early on, initially through her book ‘Inspiration in Photography: Training your mind to make great art a habit’ and through her CreativeLive Class ‘Fine Art Portraits‘.

Brooke creates worlds that ‘she wishes we could live in, where secrets float out in the open, where the impossible becomes possible’, often using herself as the model for the photograph. She is able to create these new worlds using relatively simple techniques in photoshop.

Looking at some of the behind the scenes videos on her You Tube channel made me realize how much you could do if you just understood just a few of the tools in photoshop deeply. Watch Brooke in action and hear her talk about her work and process in the videos below.

January 30, 2015

Friday Inspiration: Nobuyuki Kobayashi

In continuing my exploration of Japanese photographers I recently came across Nobuyuki Kobayashi. Kobayashi may be most well known for his work in magazines as a portrait photographer or for his humanitarian work but what caught my attention were his black and white landscapes. Landscape might be the wrong word, since for many it evokes the grand view and Kobayashi’s work offers a much subtler take on the land. He feels that he is taking portraits of the Gods and this delicate approach certainly comes through in the work of his that I’ve seen so far.

I find his process intriguing – use of an 8×10 large format camera, film and printing on traditional Japanese paper, washi. I’ve tried printing on washi in the past and found that the heavy intrinsic texture works against many subjects but Kobayashi seems to be making it work. It rails against the increasingly small format, mirrorless digital cameras and yet his choice of materials that should last for hundreds of years supports his goal of using photography as a tool to preserve the beauty of the natural world.

I’m hoping to see more in the book that accompanies this body of work ‘Myriads of Gods’.

Listen to Kobayashi describe this project in the short interview below and watch the longer documentary for a behind the scenes look at his process of platinum palladium printing on washi.

（English sub）Portrait of Nature – Myriads of Gods on Platinum Palladium Prints – from augment5 Inc. on Vimeo.

January 23, 2015

Friday Inspiration: Hiroshi Sugimoto

Over the last week or so I’ve been making a list of my top 12 influences, visual artists and their work that influence and inspire me. Consistently over the years Hiroshi Sugimoto has made this list. Born in Japan, Sugimoto moved to the US to study in the mid-70’s eventually settling in New York. While he’s returned to a number of subjects repeatedly over the years, including ‘American Theatres’ in which he photographs old movie theaters and drive ins using long exposures in an attempt to show time in his photographs; ‘Dioramas’ which are beautifully executed photographs of exhibitions in natural history museums and more recently of wax-work figures; ‘Architecture’ in which he photographs structures slightly out of focus which gives a sense of the form that the architect had in mind without you getting lost in the details and my personal favorite ‘Seascapes’. His seascapes, such as the one above, give a real sense of the vastness of the ocean that particularly appeals to me.

Check out the documentary below for more about Sugimoto’s life and work.

January 5, 2015

Future Thinking – It's Black Magic!

I’ve been interested in film making for a very long time, almost as long as I’ve been interested in photography. I never really engaged in film making in a meaningful way but it’s something that always has stayed in the background as something that I pay attention to.

I have yet to figure out how to integrate film making and photography. While the skills of making a still image and framing a film shot may be complementary (see Greg Crewdson’s work as an example) if you’re taking video your not taking photographs and vice versa. Of course increasingly the DSLRs that we have a very capable video cameras making this back and forth much easier. I’ve seen some photographers talk recently about the ‘long still’, videos that were taken with the same set up that had been used to take a still. Easily done once you’ve got the image you were interested in, just a button push away. Something to think about and experiment with if you haven’t already.

I’m more interested in documentary film making, particularly telling the story of people making things – explorations of artists and their process is a particularly appealing topic to me. Of course I could use DSLRs to do this but my imagination was captured by the possibilities with the iPhone and in particular the app FilmicPro.

To see what people have been able to achieve using the FilmicPro app check here.

There also some third party add-ons that help when using the iPhone as a video camera. Susan Roderick from CreativeLive reviews some of the better ones here.

As I was packing my gear into the car after photographing at a beach in California a few weeks ago a couple arrived and unpacked their camera gear. They had what looked like an iPhone on a video tripod I of course asked what the camera was – it turned out to be a black magic pocket. I’d seen ads for the Black Magic cameras but wasn’t familiar with the pocket model.

The pocket camera body is essentially the size of an iPhone but capable of hi-res video and very flexible in terms of third party add ons. The pocket camera has four thirds lens mount but using available adapters you could use your existing lenses on the camera. This then starts to sound very interesting indeed – high quality digitial cinema cameras without any need to buy new lenses. The pocket black magic camera isn’t much bigger than an iPhone and could easily fit into my camera bag.

You have to jump up to the ‘regular size’ Black Magic cameras are capable of recording 4K video, the resolution where it starts to be possible pull a single frame and use that as a large print. Check out this link for more about that. Hopefully this will soon make it’s way into the pocket model too.

I’m surprised that I haven’t heard more about this idea of pulling stills from video, perhaps I’ve just had my head in the sand and ignored this as an option but I anticipate hearing more about this as the technology improves and the price continues to drop. It certainly seems worth exploring and solves the problem of how you could integrate film making with photography.

January 2, 2015

Friday Inspiration: Gregory Crewdson

I had a chance to look at some of Edward Hopper’s paintings of scenes from small town America over the Christmas break and couldn’t help but be reminded of the work of Gregory Crewdson. Like Hopper’s paintings, Crewdson’s photography shows scenes from small town America. They are vignettes that raise questions, that invite you in to wonder what happened before and what will happen next.

Many people will talk about their photographs being ‘cinematic’ but Crewdson’s images could really be stills from a movie. The work that goes into setting up each of the shots is not far from what you might expect for a cinematic production. You get a glimpse behind the scenes in the videos below. The second video is a trailer for the documentary ‘Brief Encounters‘ filmed over a 10 year period it gives not only an in depth look at what goes into the making of the work but also a sense of the events and experiences that shaped Crewdson the man.

December 19, 2014

Friday Inspiration: Wendy Macnaughton

I first came across Wendy Macnaughton’s work through her venn diagrams, such as the one above. I was sucked in by both the humor and her minimalist, colorful style. Once I started paying attention I recognized her work in lots of places – funny how that works isn’t it?

Macnaughton describes herself as a graphic journalist, a term that I’d never heard of before but it does make sense if you explore her work beyond the venn diagrams and other lettering work that she’s done. She tells the story of the people that she interacts with through her drawings, marrying these with snippets of conversations that she’s had with them and calling the result ‘Meanwhiles’. I was pleased to see that her earlier collection of ‘Meanwhiles’ from the San Francisco Public Library, one that I had unsuccessfully tried to get a hold of, was collected into her recent book ‘Meanwhile in San Francisco’. Well worth a look.

Watch Wendy talk about her work and see her drawing in the videos below.

Wendy MacNaughton: Listen to Strangers from 99U on Vimeo.

December 5, 2014

Friday Inspiration: Bryant Austin

I stopped in at The Focus Gallery recently and while I was there saw the image above created by Bryant Austin. The image was awe inspiring – ~ 5ft x 20ft. Truly immersive and a fitting presentation for images of the largest mammals on the planet.

Austin, a California based photographer, has spent over 10 years working out how to take compelling photographs of whales – images that could really move someone, that reflect the experience of being in the water with the massive mammals. To achieve this goal he evolved his approach, from shooting off the coast in the US to more tropical settings, the gear he used, from film to digital, from fish-eye lenses to traditional portrait lenses and built computers able to handle the resulting files. His talk at Google that I’ve included below is a fascinating insight into what it takes to pursue a dream and what you can achieve if you’re prepared to go all in.

Check out the gallery of Austin’s work here and click here for a book of his work.