Tag: Video

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Friday Inspiration: Daido Moriyama

The gear sirens have been calling me again. I’m now deep in thought regarding what a compact camera system such as the olympus pen e-pl5 coupled with a Panasonic 20mm F1.7 would do for me. I’m sure it’s a game we all play from time to time. Somehow while I was surfing around trying to get to grips with how much better my life would be with this combination I stumbled across Daido Moriyama.

It seems to me that Daido Moriyama is ‘street’ photographer, who seems to produce much of his work in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo. The photographs are predominantly high contrast, gritty black and white images that depict the seamier parts of life. I could take or leave much of what he’s produced but I do like the aesthetic of the images and also of interest for me is his prodigious production of photography books.

Check out the video below

Daido Moriyama on compact cameras:

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Getting Your Work Seen and Exhibited

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a little of the Flash Forward conference that was held in Boston in early June this year. I was particularly interested in the panel discussion ‘Getting Your Work Seen and Exhibited’ and was pleased to see that a video of this session recently appeared on the Flash Forward website. Check it out below:

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Friday Inspiration: Thomas Joshua Cooper

I’m intrigued by Thomas Joshua Cooper’s work, made with a 100 year old field camera, particularly that which documents the atlantic basin. In this project Cooper is charting the extremities of the land and islands that surround the Atlantic Ocean. As I understand it each photograph begins as a location that he finds on a map, this is then further researched before the trip which because of the typically remote location often involves difficult journeys by air, sea and land. Once on site Cooper makes only one photograph, the product of a lot of gazing and waiting.

Some of this work is captured in his book ‘True‘ that I’m now waiting for to arrive.

Check out the video of Thomas Joshua Cooper below:

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Friday Inspiration: Julius Shulman

The relationship between creator and publicist is something that struck me as a little weird when it was first spelled out that there may be a real need for this dynamic – how will anyone know what you’re done if you don’t tell them or can’t communicate with them effectively?

I was thinking about this again recently in the context of architects and the photographers that photograph the resulting buildings. A good architectural photographer is able to understand the buildings design and show it in a way that reinforces the design. Perhaps the most famous of architecture photographers is Julius Shulman. While I didn’t know who Shulman was until recently I did recognize some of his photographs and particularly the one shown above, “Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, 1960. Pierre Koenig, Architect.” One of the distinct features of Shulman’s work was that he often included people in his photographs, something that was unusual at the time and still isn’t terribly commonplace. Check out the videos of Shulman discussing his work below. A full version of the documentary ‘Visual Acoustics‘ is available on NetFlix or you can buy a copy here.

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Friday Inspiration: Sarah Moon

Sarah Moon’s name came up in conversation this week as a photographer to take a deeper look at. At the time the name was unfamiliar and it wasn’t until I saw the video below that I realized that I had been down this road before. All too often it takes couple of times to internalize and connect the name and the work. Sarah Moon lives and works in Paris, and is one of the great icons of fashion photography. While her work falls under the umbrella of fashion it’s not the slick, glossy, over produced fashion work that immediately comes to m mind. Instead, much of her work is black and white (I haven’t been able to find much of her work in color at all) that has an ethereal quality to it. Captivating. I don’t know the original source of the video below but I do hope that this is narrated by Sarah Moon herself. It gives a real insight into the mind of the photographer as they go through the process of finding the image.

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Friday Inspiration: Sally Mann

Sally Mann has used a large format camera to photograph the deep south since the 1970’s producing bodies of work that cover portraiture, architecture, landscape and still life. Perhaps her most well known work was ‘Immediate Family’ which focused on her three children who were all under 12 at the time. It’s release was met with controversy, including accusations of child pornography – many of the photos were of her children playing and swimming naked at the families summer cottage.

Sally Mann has received many awards including being named ‘America’s Best Photographer’ by Time Magazine in 2001, she’s a Guggenheim fellow and three times a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship awardee.

Check out the 2006 documentary of Sally Mann, her work and her process ‘What Remains’ below.

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Friday Inspiration: Cig Harvey

My first experience of Cig Harvey‘s photography was the image above which ran as a cover for Maine Magazine. It made me pick up the magazine, which I absolutely love, but also gave me an reason to dig deeper into Cig Harvey’s work.

Cig Harvey was born and raised in Devon in the South of England and now divides her time between Boston and the coast of Maine. Her personal work seems to me to tell the stories of what’s going on in her life and includes a number of self-portraits, many of which show case her collection of vintage dresses.

To hear Cig speaking about her work, process and inspiration check out this video .

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Book Module in Lightroom 4 Beta

There has been a good bit of fanfare surrounding the release of the beta version of Lightroom 4. One of the new features that caught my eye was the integration of a variant of Blurb’s booksmart software, making it possible to layout and then send to Blurb for production a book of your photographs. As someone interested in delivering my photographs to the world not just as prints but in the form of books this is a very cool development. While I frankly would have preferred the book module to be a generic layout tool not tied to any single book producer, perhaps pulling key features from Adobe’s In Design product, Blurb has a tremendous range of products that surely suits the needs of most, if not all, people interested in having a book of their photographs.

Check out the tutorials from the excellent Julieanne Kost below.

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Friday Inspiration: Andrew Zuckerman

I’ve been aware of Andrew Zuckerman’s photography for a while – I read the reviews of his Wisdom project when it came out and recently bought the Creature ABC book for my kids. His photographs are interesting in the simple way that they are shot, all against a plain white background. It wasn’t until this week when I came across his presentation at a Ted conference that I had a reason to dig into his work more deeply. I didn’t realize for instance that rather than have his subjects come to him in his studio in new York he took the studio to them. Not sure that I could handle traveling with that amount of gear. He talks in his 99% presentation about inspiration. Andrew’s take on it that inspiration is the convergence of curiosity and rigor. I like that. Check out the 99% presentation below.

Andrew Zuckerman: On Curiosity, Rigor, and Learning As You Go from 99% on Vimeo.