Weekly Artist Post

(http://www.dancersamongus.com/photos)
This weekend, I am heading out to photograph a rehearsal for a local musical, so for my artist post, I wanted to find a photographer who makes a lot of photos based on capturing motion in various forms. I found the photographer of Dancers Among Us, Jason Matter. Matter photographs dancers, shifting between the usual images of his subjects frozen in an interesting leap, and the less common images of blurred movement that capture the speed of his subjects as they dance.

My favorite image is the last photo, which combines the two techniques of freezing and capturing motion. Matter uses a slow shutter speed to capture the surrounding movement on the subway platform, while simultaneously capturing a sharp image of his primary subject (it makes me wonder how long the dancer had to freeze like that).

While part of me wishes the left building in the middle photo was not there, the rest of the photo's composition of color and light along with the movement of the water and the dancers if very interesting. It seems that Matter used a fast shutter speed to sharply capture the dancers in air, which results in an intriguing photo. It shows that there is something really mesmerizing about capturing a moment that can't be observed quite the same way with the naked eye.

The first image interested me because of its depiction of the relationship between the subject and nature. The frozen capture of the seagulls and the dancer reaching through the air gives an interesting repetition of the theme of flying and the relationship between man and nature.

These images have inspired me to be discerning when it comes to capturing motion. As I go out today to capture people in motion, I'll definitely try some of these different techniques to see what results I get.

Dani Brown -- Weekly Artist Post #7

Salvi Danes

Salvi Danes employs a very interesting use of light and dark in his photos. His subjects are always well lit, and their settings are generally in focus, but lit maybe according to their importance to the photographer and to the scene. I can't be sure, but I think he uses a flash of some sort, particularly in the photo of the man with the leaf on his back.

Danes seems to be telling a story or telling the chronology of an average hunting day. This series, entitled Hunting Season, strongly alludes to the presence of the photographer. I don't believe that any of the images portray a scene that the viewer could assume exists if no one is watching. I believe it was the artist's intention to imply one person's view of a situation.

I like the subjectivity of Danes' photos. Each of his photos makes me feel like a participant in a scene, not an objective spectator; it's more like I'm standing beside the subject, than viewing the scene on a computer screen. I feel like the dogs are trying to smell me, and like I can feel the cold air when the man next to me is smoking a cigarette. I think this is a unique quality. Most of the time when I look at portraits, I feel like they are more about the subject or the scene, but these feel like they're more about the experience that the photograph makes the viewer a part of.

Ratcliffe- Weekly Artist Post

Maud Chalard

One thing I notice about her photography is that she really uses light and color to highlight her subjects. Like we discussed in class, this makes for a more pleasant photo than just taking a picture of a couple with no light and color. It seems like she also uses different focal lengths to frame her photos in different ways to give the viewer a different prospective. Her colors and focus in her photos seem to be soft.

Her project captures young love. She is capturing couples in love and enveloped entirely with one another. Her subjects are often dude, almost to capture the raw passion that each couple shares. She also captures photos of the couples in casual relaxing situations.

I really love the idea of making photos of young love. It is a beautiful thing, and she does a really awesome job capturing that beauty. Love is a huge part of my life that I always try to give and be engulfed in so i really relate to her project. I also like how she kept her photos casual and soft, it warms your heart.

Mary Pforr- Week 6 Artist post

Artist: Austin Kamps
Photo Cred: http://austinkamps.tumblr.com/

 i. Kamps seems to focus on exposure in his photos to capture the amount of light he wants shown. Being they are outdoors and in areas of intense daylight, there needs to be an ability to dictate when to under or over expose. Depth of field also is important in Kamps work- the outdoor scenes include detail to as far out as the eye can see, so closing the aperture would be needed.
ii. While he repeatedly has human or scenery in his work, I think he mainly is focusing on the light. Usually the human subject has it's back turned and is not always in focus. Yet there is always detail in where the light is being shown.
iii. The use of daylight draws me to Kamps work. I always struggle to focus on the light rather than the object in my own work, and the way he is able to accept the human as not the main subject in the photograph is wonderful.

Weekly Artist Post

David Williams 

David Williams is great at framing his subjects with light and color. In all three portraits I believe he employs a smaller aperture or higher F-stop in order to achieve a deeper depth of field. This brings out the detail in the colorful items that help frame the subjects. In all three of the images he places the subjects near the middle of the frame so the viewer knows what the main focus is and this also leaves more room around the subjects to frame them with light and color. You can see this done beautifully in the first image. Here we can see how the blue and red objects in the kitchen have formed an almost perfect rectangular frame around the subjects.  This can be seen again in the second image where the tan objects have created a perfect triangular frame of the subjects. Lastly, you can tell from the first and third image uses the corners of objects to point to his subjects

            Conceptually, I think he did chose to do something that breaks stereotypes. He is going against the crazy cat lady stereotype by showing men in what seems to be their natural settings or as I like to call them, “man caves” with their cat or rather, their companion. I think it’s interesting because popular culture tends to associate cats primarily with feminine friendship. David Williams set out to challenge that idea, potentially even changing the perception of culture. This is something that I find very intriguing and even professor Rocheleau has said it is something we should all strive to do.  I can see how doing something like this can become very relevant as many people can relate to the fact that they’ve never heard about crazy cat men.

            As a male who owns and really cares for his cat, I appreciate what David Williams has done by making these pictures. Sure I don’t see myself as a crazy cat dude but I must admit I am crazy in love with my cat. I really admire how in the second image you can see how the man’s life is a mess of with his own hygiene products, clothes etc. mixed with the cat’s litter and litter box (feline hygiene products). The way each image is made helps me see the companionship and sense the connectivity between the man, his cat, and their shared environment.

Daniel Potes - Artist of the week

Uta Barth

Barth uses play on both depth of field and motion blur to create blurry yet bright images that contain no specific subject. Instead, her images contain a field of colors blanketed together in a soft yet strong light. Seemingly all shot in dim overcast days, she manages to maintain the strength of the colors while still keeping the entire frame out of focus.

For me "subject" has always been a questionable term. Utah Barth manages to capture the stark beauty of life, but not as we know or see it. By creating images that lack subject and instead focus not on the objects in the frame, but rather the light and the color that make them up, Barth manages to build landscapes for the imagination in which the viewer can fill in the blanks with any story they might like. For this reason, I believe Utah Barth, among others, have transcended the need for "subject".

Barth's work specifically speaks to me because it manages to make visual, ideas that I've been thinking about for years. I wrote my Univ 200 paper on the concept of lack of "subject" in photography and I've geared almost all of my work towards this early idea. Almost all of the books or photos that I've made have been lacking "subject" to instead play with color and light, by finding Uta Barth's work, I found an artist who thought similar thoughts and managed to create famous works of art with similar techniques to mine. It gives me hope and encouragement seeing images like these.

Ayana Chavis - Weekly Artist Post

Mark Raymond Mason

Mason seems to use a digital camera with decreased focal length. Because his photography is usually abstract he utilizes depth of field somewhat closely with his images being of better quality. The orientation is a mix between portrait and landscape, which seems to depend on what exactly he is framing in the photo.

Mason's work is almost entirely abstract. Use of color and texture are big themes in his photos. These aspects are what add interest. How different objects that have color and texture come together is what he uses to create a scene.

Personally, I love Mason's play on the blues in his photos especially because cobalt blue is one of my favorite colors. The color is of a darker shade but is still so vibrant. Considering our current project on light and color I feel as though he is the perfect example of such topics. His blend of color, texture and light really draws one in, hence why I put five photos instead of the normal three. I could not choose!

Erin Copeland- Weekly artist post 6

Alexei Vassiliev

Alexei Vassiliev is a Russian photographer that creates blurry, unsharp photographs reminiscent of paintings. He uses long shutter speed to capture figures movements which result in ghostly images of people. Alexei uses a 35mm lens with long shutter speed and mostly artificial light.

What I love about these photos is the long exposure and the richness of color in all of them. I like how the portraits are not traditional portraits, but they are capturing the movement of the person. The blur and ghost like images on top of the pops of color make a really beautiful image.

Tyler Zheng - Week 6 Artist Post

Yosigo (Joseé Javier Sarrano)

The artist chose to photograph when it's bright out, so that snow would become really reflective and directly increased the contrast in each photograph. Bright environment also provided him a faster shutter speed + deeper depth of field. As we can see the moving people & objects look pretty sharp in both foreground and background. The photographs are shaped into square, which look very symmetrical to me for some reason. And they maybe they're overexposed? I'm not sure. The photographs seemed sharpened & saturated.

The theme is "Ski+holiday" for sure (I read the introduction). Due to the high contrast, we can easily sense the atmosphere, and each individual's body language. These photographs reminded me of the pictures they used in spanish textbooks back in junior high.

I looked through some other photographs in his portfolio, and this seems to be his typical style. Most of photographs seem "neat" and "pure" because he'd pick a theme color for each project. Such as white snow, yellow sand, and blue water. I would like to try out something like this... 

Artist Post 6

These photos were made by photographer Alex Buisse (http://www.alexbuisse.com/), and taken on various trips to Greenland and Patagonia. The definition of these images is breathtaking and Buisse's composition and capturing of light results in eye catching images. 

The first thing I notices about each photo was the excellent capturing of colors. Reds and oranges break through the images' primarily blue coloring. It's these bright flashes of color and contrasts between shadows and highlights that grab the viewer's eye. 

The first and third images brilliantly display the relationship between mankind and nature in two contrasting ways. The first image, with the zoomed out view of the climber and the lights of the town in the canyon, portrays man as small in comparison to the enormity of nature, making the surrounding landscape more powerful and primary to the image. Conversely, the second image centers on man, making him the primary focus of size and light. Buisse's compositions show the power that selective focus and focal length can make on the meaning of an image. 

Helen Westergren - Weekly Artist Post

Lisandre St-Cyr Lamothe

Lisandre St-Cyr Lamothe is a French photographer working primarily in digital mediums. She takes full advantage of the beautiful lighting and natural color found in rural Switzerland, where she has recently chosen to live. Much of her practice is concerned with following life-patterns that revolve around the cycles of the sun and thus it is a large component when she composes images.
Lamothe is interested in the idea of "Transplanting" herself into lifestyles where can can observes "lifestyles as they are, not as they should be". For here series Transplanter she followed a group of families for four years as they kept up their family farm and went about their daily life. She is interested in documentation of things that are sustaining, and removing herself from the urban environments so many deem necessary. Lamothe also finds great influence in Dutch paintings, a style which informs many of her compositional decisions. She wants to convey this type of modern fragility and beauty in the same way that old masters have.
I find Lamothe's use of lighting to be exceptional. She can turn seemingly boring things into works of art through her unique framing and attention to lighting. I also admire her commitment to getting images. The entire time she was working in Switzerland she was also training as a shepherdess, not only to learn the trade, but so she could have access to the experiences one in that field would have. I appreciate her commitment to creating beautiful imagery but also how she seeks out natural occurrences instead of false realities.

Lindsey Mott - Weekly Artist Post

Rob Hann

Rob Hann's photographs usually contain a very distinct foreground and background. By looking at his photographs you can tell that he shoots using a closed aperture, in order to have both foreground and background in focus. He also is very conscious of color and patterns, usually setting a minimalistic subject in front of a more complex background, and vice versa.

Thematically, Rob Hann is inspired by the idea of the American road trip. Many of his photographs were actually taken during his own road trips. He often captures Americana Route 66-like attractions, from signage to bizarre roadside constructions meant to catch the eye of passing tourists. He also captures the decadence of this roadside culture.

Rob Hann's work serves as a great example of how to manipulate f-stop in order to make creative decisions. His photographs would not only look completely different but also mean different things if the background wasn't also in focus. I've always been fascinated by our country's road trip culture, and the decaying state of once popular attractions. 

Weekly Artist Post

Morgan Ashcom

Morgan Ashcom's series What the Living Carry is mostly photographed outside in natural landscapes, focusing on colors like greens and browns. She mostly uses a greater depth of field so most of the images are in focus. She most likely uses a low ISO because she is outside during daytime. This can be seen in her photos because they don't have much noise. 

Ashcom's series portrays people doing animalistic things, like crouching to drink water from a lake or hiding out in a hole in the ground. She makes the people almost part of the landscape, they don't appear out of place, but rather like they belong. This could be because Ashcom believes people should live more natural lives, or should spend more time outside and connected to nature. 

I like Ashcom's pictures and her use of light and color. She can take some really breathtaking landscape/ nature photos. I like how her pictures are clear and high quality. 

Selasi Fynn- Weekly Artist Post (#6)

Maud Chalard

Maud Chalard is a French photographer. Many of her photos consist of couples or of a relationship between multiples people, with a few of her pictures being self portraits of herself and her boyfriend, Theo Gosselin, who is also a photographer. Chalard seems to only use natural light when making her pictures, with the exception being the additional use of candle light. 

I think that the choice to use natural lighting coincides with the fact that Chalard is making pictures of couples. She may want the lighting in the pictures to look as natural as some of the emotions conveyed by the subjects. It also creates a soft tone without having the colors look washed out. 

I really enjoyed looking through all the pictures on Chalard's Tumblr. These three are definitely my favorites. I like the way she finds a way to use natural lighting in all her pictures. I also enjoyed the way she was able to create as natural a setting as possible with there photo subjects, sometimes you can easily tell that a picture is stated, but I feel like it's not as obvious with Chalards' pictures. 

Dani Brown -- Weekly Artist Post #6

Aaron Ruell

My favorite thing about Aaron Ruell's photography is the way that he sets up his scenes. Color is clearly a priority, as is symmetry. Most of his photos are highly symmetrical, but have some slight variance from being directly symmetrical. For example, the teacup on the table in the top photo, or the fact that the woman in the bottom photo is looking to her left instead of straight toward the camera. His color contrast is sometimes subtle, sometimes bold, but always present. He particularly seems to favor reds and yellows.

When I look at his work, I have to wonder when these photos take place. Every single shot is like a time machine. These settings don't seem like places that exist anymore; some don't seem like places that have ever existed. His work seems to encourage slight discomfort, especially for someone with a touch of OCD like me. It's like he has put together a series of almost perfect images, with just a tiny feature that sets the whole thing off. Its a "Where's Waldo?" of asymmetry.

I felt like I had to look at every photograph on Ruell's website twice. Particularly these portraits. They caught me off guard because of their "imperfections." Like in the Fish Girl photography, all of the fish (and the girl) face the right side of the shot EXCEPT the bottom left fish. And in the Napoleon Dynamite photo, the fact that the lamp shades are identical, and not mirror images, throws off the symmetry and catches me off guard -- which I guess is the point. I also really enjoy his use of color and pattern. My favorite photo is the top one because I am so intrigued by the way the mirror reflects the pattern of the wallpaper so that it shows the same patterns adjacent to one another, only different in size.

Lindsey Mott - Weekly Artist Post

JonPaul Douglass

JonPaul Douglass' photographs deal with balancing colors and overall composition. Although some of his photographs are clearly set up, and others are more candid, you can tell that he pays attention to how colors compliment one another, and how the photograph is composed. The picture of the man with the fanny pack is a perfect example of this. If the background was entirely grass or entirely pavement, it would not have the same visual effect.

In terms of subject matter, Douglass definitely has a quirky, joyful, nostalgic feel to them. His photographs tend to be minimalistic, as well as a little strange. I think his work is about celebrating life in a way that isn't completely cliche and is just a little bit absurd. Like taking pictures of pizza in random places, like on a miniature horse's back.

I have a lot to learn about balancing and composing colors, and photographers like JonPaul Douglass serve as great examples about how to be mindful and intentional with what is in your viewfinder. Thematically, I also like the slight absurdness of his photographs, and how they manage to be quirky without being entirely over the top.