Street Photography Now

Collecting photography books is a great hobby, they are interesting to look through and inspirational. The book that I look through the most is Street Photography Now, The book consists of 240 pages with photos taken from 46 contemporary image makers. The photographers have taken images all around the world allowing a board and diverse set of photos and styles coming through. The photos from Paul Russel have a large amount of humour behind them, but the images from Richard Wentworth are a documentation of random objects on the street left behind by people. The diverse way of shooting allows the photographers to each have individuality within the book, none of the photographers work clash on a visual level or on a meaning/representation level. Overall this is a highly recommend piece of work for anyone who is slightly interested in street photography or documentary photography, the book is most defiantly "Everyday life at 1/125 of a second" - quote from http://www.thamesandhudson.com/streetphotography.html

Paul Russell's photos here as a taster of what is inside of the book....

For more imformation on street photography click this link - http://www.lfph.org/what-is-street-photography

Original image taken from - http://duckrabbit.info/blog/2010/06/spend-some-time-with-paul-russell/

Having fun with light!

Long exposures at night time are usually used to capture traffic driving past, and you will get a streak of light coming from the headlamps of the car. But you can do so much more with light at night time! These are a few examples of experimentation with light at night.

Firstly we have the same principal of a standard long exposure but doing it over a large amount of time, and in a strange location instead of a road in a city centre. The photo is actually capturing rally cars going down a hill.

Original image from - http://www.flickr.com/photos/buckshotracing/3590874926/in/faves-garryjonesphotography

Stencils have been used in graffiti for many years, and considering long exposures/light painting have the nickname light graffiti it would make great sense to use the same technique. The photo here has taken inspiration from Studio Ghibli film Princess Mononoke, a great Japanese animation movie. Watch Trailer here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkWWWKKA8jY

Original image from - http://www.flickr.com/photos/tigtab/4488746870/in/faves-garryjonesphotography

The last and most complicated of all is star trails, these take a huge amount of time and practise, but are the most spectacular when achieved. As it is such a long process I have found another blog that has a step by step guide on how to shoot star trails - http://www.liquidinplastic.com/2008/06/startrails/ lets go streaking will tell u everything u need to no.

Original image from - http://www.flickr.com/photos/gerry_kingsley/4258278569/in/faves-garryjonesphotography

David Cotterrell: Monsters Of The Id

Monster of the id at the John Hansard gallery part of the university of Southampton is on til march 2012. When i went to see the exhibition I was lucky enough to hear David Cotterrell talk about his work and walk around the gallery just with my fellow students and spend alot of time looking at the work which was a great opportunity.

   As far as exhibitions go I've never been to one where the works on show are effected so much by the factor of human presence. As you walk into the gallery on your left you are faced with a large projection and if you stand there for long enough human figures start to appear on the projection, this is done by sensors taken from the XBOX Kinect David later told us. This first piece effects the second one around the corner where you can see tiny figures walking across what look like mountains, and the more people by the first piece of work the more tiny people walk across these white mountains made of chalk. The final photo shows a room which you come into which is set up like a army room where they would be able to control these flying drones.
   This exhibition is based around David Cotterrells trip to Afghanistan where he went not as a journalist photographer but was put with the medical part of the army to allow him to take photos and then the second time he went he went alone to explore Afghanistan without a constant military presence. His experiences from these trips and the thoughts he had about the country either political or cultural are manifested in this show.

Ikea Digital Camera

Swedish furniture store IKEA takes on the photography with their first ever camera, but i doubt Canon and Nikon are going to be worrying about a drop in their sales due to it. Ikea seem to have gone for a green and hip feel with this camera and fits in with the instagram craze at the moment. It is made from cardboard and runs off two AA batteries and holds around 40 photos, but at the moment there is no price on this different little camera, lets just hope its waterproof. Its a great idea if the price is right as it may be the modern age disposable camera, allowing you to take it everywhere without worry perfect for festivals! Watch the video to see more capabilties of the camera and check it out for yourself.

Shepard Fairey (OBEY) X Fashion

Shepard Fairey is alot of things to people, a ggraffiti artist, street artist, graphic designer and illustrator. His work of Andre the Giant or Obey has become a worldwide street campaign which meanings simply are question everything according Fairey. As one of the big hitters in the street art world, similar to Banksy and others it is left to on lookers to question how far these artist can now go as their work is so well known and now might have lost any meaning or underlying message that it did have before everyone knew about it.
  Fairey's Obey brand has spread world wide and now he profits off many T-Shirts designs coming out each month selling from £25-£35, the fact that Fairey is all for revolution against governments and ran a campaign called "anti-war anti-bush" maybe making all these clothes dilutes this message that he wants to put across and now has simply become a brand for consumers to buy from major high street stores.

Does his brand of clothing allow him to spread his work further than walls on the street and now uses people as canvas's walking around with his propaganda message on their chest? I'd like to think its this and not that he has lost direct with his art and ended up another faceless organisation churning out clothes to sell to a market already swamped by brands who simply want your cash.

If you don't no of Fairey's work, take a look into it.... http://obeygiant.com/

Caine's Arcade

Caine's Arcade I think is a truly inspirational story of having a dream no matter what age, and using your creativity plus abit of hard work to make it happen. If every city had a Caine's arcade I'd surely go to it. Hope this video put a smile on your face as it did mine.

Cliche Resume

Cliche Resume is a skate photo book done by French skate brand CLICHE, composed of over 300 images it is a large hardback book that time lines the company from the early 90's through to 2008. The photos below are some of the pages that I got signed by the Pros from the team on their signature pages in the book.

Riot Girls

A great fashion shoot done for Vice magazine, shot by Muir Vidler.
During the student protests well over a year ago now, the photographer Muir Vidler took several girls to the protests and decided to shoot photos as the protest were going on, they ended up getting stuck with the protesters and not being able to leave for 8 hours.

http://www.vice.com/en_us

Mozart Effect

The Mozart Effect can be described as a set of research that took place that indicated that listening to Mozart's music may temporarily improve the performance of certain mental tasks. Some even say that in general listening to Mozart makes you smarter.



This research into the Mozart effect was taken place in the 90's , since then no real research has taken place to look into seeing if other kinds of music could improve brain function or improve smartness. The type of music I am passionate about is mainly for the dancefloor and in clubs, but there is a small area of dubstep that is so minimal and progressive that I think it could have the same effect as a Mozart piece. Listen below to Burial and Four Tet's tracks which always help me to concentrate.

A Skateboarder's Mentality

People who have been in skateboarding for many years draw on their experiences from the extreme sport to put into life around them. These are two videos that feature a pro skateboarder and legend Mark Gonzales and another person who is deeply involved in the film making side of the sport Greg Hunt. Hunt in my mind perfectly describes the balance between how skateboarding is a sport and a lifestyle which absorbs so many different types of people into it. This array of people makes the sport what it is for sure.

Coventry X Skateboarding

Since the new year at university I have worked on a project called Representation and I ended up photographing a skateboarding community and the people within it. I tried to brake the stereotype of skateboarders being young teenagers with nothing better to do, so I focused on the older members of the group and photographed them. Now my project is finished I still have thoughts wether I can carry this project on in some way so I decided to look through so videos which myself and some friends made, filmed and edited of the skate community in Coventry.

Larry Clark - Tulsa

When working on a project for uni, I was looking at the idea of how cannabis effects people and the fact they are braking the law by smoking this drug. I was trying to find photographers who had included drugs in their work, and I found Larry Clark who didn't just document a social group taking drugs he was part of it!
  The book Tulsa by Larry Clark is a dark gritty insight into what he was doing in the late 60s and early 70s, it shows people taking drugs and playing with guns when high. It is a shocking book to look through but the people in it seem to have a emptiness to them and lost a grip on thing due to all the drugs.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tulsa-Larry-Clark/dp/0802137482/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336575109&sr=8-1

The Hundreds

http://thehundreds.com/

To start off The Hundreds is a clothing label based in Los Angeles, it is classed as a streetwear brand and has been picked up my many different social groups such as skaters and hipsters. The Hundreds website though has a daily blog that is updated with videos on inspiration for designing clothes, photos from fashion shoots, general lifestyle of living in LA and even exhibition reviews.



A really interesting post on their blog was of Tim Biskup's work which I personally find very interesting, its on the verge of street art and Graffiti but has a vibrance and base colour of pop art. I thinks its really creative and you should also have a look at his website http://timbiskup.com/

Music And Art Go Hand In Hand

Boddika - Acid Jackon designed by ASHES57

Vinyl record label SWAMP81 which makes amazing heavy, deep, techy, minimal tunes, only releases limited numbers on vinyl per release and each vinyl comes with a sleeve that has been designed by a London based artist. Boddika is a artist that makes minimal tech music and his latest release on SWAMP81 came with a great vinyl sleeve designed by ASHES57 who collaborated with the artist to creative something really special and now ASHES57 is selling limited screen prints and lithographs of his work. Follow the link to look more closely at his work. . . . http://ashes57.com/limited_prints.html

WRITER - Blank Canvas Records

Here's some photos taken by myself (Garry Jones) of DJ and producer "Writer". Hailing from Coventry in the UK he is established as  a dubstep artist under the name of DubKid but has taken the move to minimal tech which is making a huge impact on the underground music scene at the moment. These are some promotional shots I did of the artist WRITER.

Vimeo Video Festival Awards

Vimeo is much like Youtube but has videos at alot better resolution so you get alot of professional film makers, photographers, animators, and artists using it as their preferred video host. Vimeo is currently running there annual awards where anyone can vote for a video they like, and there are multiple categories ranging from sport, animation, documentary, fashion, and inspirational captures.

It is certainly worth looking through each category as I'm sure something will take your interest. This video below on light painting takes the photographic technique a step further as the creators take to the street and shoot a series of images with a huge light source other than a torch as most amateur photographers try the practise with.

Analogue v Digital (part 2)

Not just in photography but in music it has gone from analogue to digital, vinyl records to digital MP3's. But There is one exception, dance music such as "Drum and Bass" and "Dubstep" is produced digitally on computers but then put to a vinyl (analogue) format.

In Benga's latest video a reconstruction of the waveform of the track which would appear on a computer screen when being produced. The video uses 960 vinyl all cut to size to create the wave and photographed after each vinyl is placed into order. Using stopmotion instead of CGI or other visual effects gives a more real feel to the video and obviously alot of time went into it.

Glitch/Corrupt photos

Glitch art is made up photos that has been corrupted on purpose by a programme called Recylism which plays with the 1s and 0s that make up the image and corrupts them to leave these end results.

All photos taken from Flickr group Glitch Art
http://www.flickr.com/groups/glitches/

I think this idea of corrupting photos makes for really interesting images, it remains me of Bridget Riley's pop art style images using solid blocks of bright base colour.

Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize

The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery was the first exhibition of the day, it features works by sixty portrait photographers from around the world. The competition is open to anyone and has 6000 submissions from professionals to amateurs and students.
   http://www.npg.org.uk:8080/photoprize/site11/index.php - link to NPG's website page on the Taylor Wessing Prize.

Antonio Olmo's photo of friends mourning the loss of their friend to a stabbing is a particularly moving image I feel, they are stood around the shrine to their friend which has been decorated with bright flowers and they are dressed in probably their usual dark tracksuits and other clothing but contrasts with the flowers as if it were a funeral. But are their thoughts really with their deceased friend when they are texting away on their phones.

Darren Hall's photo of a woman moving through a crowd brings out ideas of individuality in a busy and crowded space. In the photo she stands out more than anyone else in the scene due to the lighting, It reminds me off the work by Philip-Lorca Dicorcia which also follows this idea of street photography portraiture with the model not knowing they are being photographed.

Dylan Collard's entry was taken from his series of images called 'Up My Street' in which he photographed local shops which were own by independent business people. I like how when I saw the image I thought of a road in my home city in Coventry which has similar small shops in which are being closed due to lack of business due to larger stores taking customers away.

http://www.dylancollard.com/#/portfolio - click for more of his series from 'Up My Street'

David Stewart's photo I liked because it looks at a social scene that I can relate to. While being at university the most mundane things become something interesting, boredom is a huge factor. So this social setting of the girl cutting this lads hair I find rather interesting.

Don McCullin at Tate Britain

I know Don McCullin as a war photographer and have seen his photographs of homeless people in many photographic books. He also has alot of books published showcasing purely his own work.
   When looking round the exhebition at the Tate even though its in one room I feel like it was split into three genres, War, Homeless portraits and Landscape.

Don McCullin is most known for his photographs documenting war and international conflicts. In the exhibition the photos on show were taken from the series in which McCullin was in Berlin, Germany 1961, he photographs a city which hasn't fully recovered from the second world war and is still occupied by a military force. The photos portray a city at unease and put across a tension which must have been felt all over the city at the time.

This image is the first image that springs to mind when Don McCullin is mentioned, I first saw it when I was at school studying GCSE photography and looked through his book " Don McCullin - In England ". This photo was taken as part of his commentary on poverty in England. The Portraits of homeless people in the exhibition are my favourite I think they stand out as this is something you can see in any city and in any country, you choose to ignore homeless people or turn away from them. Looking at these photos you are confronted with these people that struggle through life and almost forced into starring straight into their eyes and feel sympathy for them.

Don McCullin is a favourite photographer of mine, but personally I don't really like his landscapes, I feel like they are too high contrast and made to look more dramatic than the scene really is. Maybe its to put across a message, but I feel like his other work is a lot more interesting and speaks more to me.

'Photography isn’t looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.' - Don McCullin

Analogue V Digital

http://digbmx.mpora.com/photo-ops/ricky-adam-destroying-everything/

read the full interview and see what your opinions are on the matter.

I must agree with some of the comments in the interview, like how shooting analogue giving you less shots so you take your time to think about lighting and composition, with digital you shoot then look at the screen and decide what needs changing with the photo. Maybe it’s down to a modern day society that expects everything now; being able to shoot photos on your phone or DSLR and edit them on the go allows this quick process that everyone can handle. Analogue may not fit into how people or consumers lead their lives anymore, but to a photographer who wants to explore his practice and idea’s film will hopefully always be an option.

I think having training in analogue photography certainly throws your view over to how much thought provoking and cared for analogue photography is, especially when you have the facilities available to you like darkrooms and processing machines. But from my own personal experience leaving college where I had a colour and black and white darkroom to use and going on my gap year having little money I went back to using mainly digital again. So a lot of my portfolio is digital based, and I don’t think the photos would look that much different if I had shot them on film, I believe you should use what is readily available to you at the time weather it be a 35mm camera you got from a car boot or a DSLR worth over a grand as long as you can make work and show what you are capable of.

Skateboard Documentary

Even though skateboarding is a sport I think the photography goes beyond sport photography, the people that do it come from all backgrounds and have such different characteristics but are pulled together through this piece of wood with wheels. Skateboard photography is being able to capture a trick with perfect timing and make sure you get the right angle, but theres the huge social aspect of it. Photographers have been able to capture this life style over the past 40 years. Documenting the way skaters live, act, and socialise with each other. Ive been looking more deeply into what makes skateboarders brake through this stereo type of a teenage sport that they grow out of, so I've been looking through all the skate books I own and one stands out which is "Mike Blabac: the art of skateboard photography."

This book shows the progression of skateboarding through Mike Blabac's Career from shooting with 35mm and medium format to using Nikon DSLR's and in this time technology might have evolved but the aspect of skateboarding and being a skateboarder hasn't changed and it is shown in this book with a huge documentation of the sport and the people over his whole career.

http://theberrics.com/shoot-all-skaters/mike-blabac.html - link to a video talking about his work.

Colour Priniting

Having a gap year after college and becoming unfamiliar with the colour darkroom has left me wanting to get back into printing again. My other university project called Representation is based around portraiture and colour printing so this has given me the opportunity to print. I'm uploading a few prints from a recent workshop I did in the studios, the idea is simplicity itself, allowing the models in the photos to put across themselves without overly posing or showing to much emotion.

Nathan

Holly

Semiotics

Incase you don't no what semiotics are I'm going to briefly summarise what semiotics are. Semiotics is the study of signs, these signs consist of signifier and signified. signifier is the material aspect, it is what we see in front of you, what is actually there. the signified is the mental aspect, it is learnt trough our society and culture.

To be able to look at semiotics I advise you watch Johnny Cash - Hurt http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clq01TXQR0s, first watch it in silence, then watch it with sound. come to some conclusions about what you see and see if your ideas change when you what it with sound, I'm sure the lyrics will effect your opinions about the window and the semiotics involved. Below I'm gonna write my ideas about the video and read that after yours and please post your ideas as a comment.

 - The bowl of fruit at the beginning immediately jumps out as looking like a renaissance painting.
 - The closed museum about Johnny Cash "House of Cash" saying its not open to public maybe meaning that his life is closing and he now wants privacy as it comes to a end.
 - When Johnny Cash is sat at the table with alot of food in front of him i think references to the last supper.
 - The line "everyone I know goes away" and "what have I Become" seems to be that he is reflecting on his life and what has gone wrong and who he has lost, maybe due to age or events in the past.
 - "I wear this crown of thorns" referencing to the Bible and Jesus.
 - What have I become my sweetest friend" again reflecting on himself but this time showing his wife and older footage of them together allowing us to see a different side of Cash when he was younger and in love.
 - The final few seconds Johnny Cash closes the piano lid which I think represents that his life has come to a close and he knows its time.

Polaroids

I bought a polaroid back for my Bronica ETRSi and it came with 3 pieces of film in it. I shot three photos randomly without and specific subject matter in mind, and came realised as i did it the film must have been out of date and was producing these odd colours that made my subject more interesting that it actually was.

                                    

Blog Research

Creating my own blog led me to look at other blogs of different scale and popularity. One of the first blogs I checked out was http://cupofpea.blogspot.com a small blog about a photographer called Rasmus Vasli, and his portraits he takes when he is walking the streets.

I think what interests me about this blog is in the approach he takes to taking the photograph, these are complete strangers but in the time it takes to shoot the photo he gets to know the person in front of the lense and then writes about this meeting on his blog in quite a intimite way.

 http://www.lenscratch.com/ is a well established blog offering daily posts, showing peoples work, exhibition reviews and interviews. down the right hand side of the page is a list of photographers that has been showcased on the blog and another list with other blogs and website which would give you more than enough viewing.

I spent a lot of time going through old posts on lenscratch looking for things that really caught my eye and thought was truely inspiring and worked with mainly the use of colour and light in the photo, I found myself being more and more drawn to work that was abstract rather than something like a portrait. One of the interesting things I found was a series of photos call "Revolutions" by Yvette Meltzer where she photographed laundry spinning in the washing machines. This work in my mind plays on colours to draw you in, the washing machine is almost like a frame to these different colours swirling around.

Other photos I found really unusual were of fire flys taken in japan, these long exposures are really unusual and a world away from the long exposures you normally see of cars and traffic. The scenery of the woods gives these photos a sense of a fairy tale and as if a journey is taking place. Photos originally from http://www.escapeintolife.com/showcase/dazzling-fireflies-display/ photographer unknown.