“Learn some creative techniques for replacing the night sky with advanced masking, and Smart Objects. Also discover the best exposure settings for capturing the detail in the Milky Way galaxy.” Presented by the inimitable Russell Brown.
View more Photoshop videos here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
“Film producer Jeff Skoll (An Inconvenient Truth) talks about his film company, Participant Productions, and the people who’ve inspired him to do good.
Jeff Skoll was eBay’s employee number 2 and president number 1. He left with a comfortable fortune and a desire to spend his money helping others.
The Skoll Foundation, established in 1999, invests in, connects and celebrates social entrepreneurs – offering grants to people who build businesses, schools and services for communities in need. Every year, it presents the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurshipat Oxford, and runs Social Edge, a networking site for social entrepreneurs.
His production company, Participant Productions, is what Skoll calls a “pro-social media company,” making features and documentaries that address social and political issues and drive real change. His film North Country, for example, is credited with influencing the signing of the 2005 Violence Against Women Act. Participant’s blockbuster doc, An Inconvenient Truth, is required viewing in classrooms around the world, and has unquestionably changed the debate around climate change. Other Participant films include The Kite Runner, The Visitor, Food Inc., The Cove, and the recent Earth Day release, Oceans.”
Find out more about Participant Media here.
Path I, Death Valley, California, 1999
You may have heard the phrase, “You’re responsible for everything that’s included within the frame of your images.” Few stop to consider that this also means, “You’re responsible for everything that’s not included within the frame of your images.” We can eliminate objects in the frame in many ways – moving the frame, moving objects, and retouching are the three most common and progressively make pre-visualization more challenging. All three practices came into play while making this image.
One day, I drove to a remote corner of California’s Death Valley National Park called the Racetrack a location famous for the unusual paths that rocks made on the clay playa’s time-cracked mud. Theories about the cause of this mysterious phenomenon include ice, wind, magnetism, and extraterrestrials. The playa was wet when I arrived and couldn’t be walked on without leaving new tracks. (The park requests that people not make new tracks and only walk on the playa when it is dry.) So, I made exposures without tracks and later made new ones virtually, digitally removing cracks from the image selectively to form the appearance of a path. By removing something old, you can create something new. Elimination can be more than a matter of hiding, it can also be about revealing.
The art of composition and storytelling is indeed as much about what is not included as what is included. Making these decisions is more than choosing an angle of view, it’s the beginning of a point of view.
Questions
How many ways and to what end do you typically eliminate things from your images?
How many other practices of elimination can you imagine?
How would practicing other forms of elimination change the nature of your images?
The Story Behind The Story Behind The Image
(Years later, photographer Jay Maisel commented on this image, “That’s a good one. I’ve got one, just like it. Only mine’s more pure. I drove my car out on the mud.” (I assume he did this at another location.) “Mine’s more ‘environmentally friendly.’” I responded, only half in jest, as I consider a majority of my work a form of virtual environmental sculpture. I do this kind of work virtually and ephemerally because I’m working in a culture that doesn’t have a common land use ethic, and I don’t want to impose my interpretation of the land on others and future generations, particularly in pristine places, whether public or otherwise.)
Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes on beauty.
“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.” – Confucius
“If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?”- Ernst Haas
“Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.” -Socrates
“Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.” – Aldous Huxley
“The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.” – David Hockney
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.” – John Muir
“Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.” – Khalil Gibran
“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men’s souls.” – James Russell Lowell
“Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.” – David Attenborough
“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” – Aldo Leopold
“The perception of beauty is a moral test.” – Henry David Thoreau
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.” – Leo Tolstoy
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” – Anonymous
“Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.” – H G Wells
“Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived.” – David Hume
“It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.” – Voltaire
“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.” – Albert Camus
“Beauty awakens the soul to act.” – Dante Alighieri
“Beauty without expression is boring.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art.” – Victor Hugo
“It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.” – Maya Angelou
“People are like stained – glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.” – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
“As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” – Franz Kafka
“Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.” – Khalil Gibran
”‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’-that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” – John Keats
“Beauty will save the world.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Find more Creativity Quotes here.
Discover more quotes daily in my Twitter and Facebook streams.
Mobile Masters, an iPad eBook by Dan Marcolina features 50 of the worlds most notable iPhoneographers. (Caponigro, Eismann, Hollingsworth, Kost, Marcolina and many more.)
Priced at $2.99 this iPad eBook features…
– Over 50 varied Artists from around the world are represented
– Many step-by-step “app-stacking” secrets revealed with a swipe of the figure
– Personal video interviews from 30 artist discussing how iPhoneography has changed them and photography
– Many image tutorial video
– Over an hour of video included
– In-depth text descriptions with direct links to each app mentioned
– Hand selected portfolio of additional work from each artist
– Direct links to each artist websites, blogs, and even email address
Find it here.
There’s lots of inspiration in Issue 2 of PHOTOGRAPH magazine, which includes featured portfolios and interviews with Martin Bailey, Andy Biggs, and Chris Orwig, as well as articles from David duChemin, Nicole S. Young, John Paul Caponigro, Martin Bailey, Al Smith, Jay Goodrich, Piet Van den Eynde, Younes Bounhar, Kevin Clark, and Chris Orwig.
My Creative Composition article discusses using the frame creatively, perhaps the most essential skill in photography.
Purchase it here – $8 single issue or $24 quarterly subscription.
“Learn to combine multiple exposures together into one composite shot with Adobe Photoshop CS6. Russell Brown demonstrates stacking images and using advanced blend modes to combine multiple images together.”
View more Photoshop videos here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
As I set sail on my fifth voyage to Antarctica I’m wondering what the light and weather will be like this year.
In 2005 we had crystal clear skies that lit up with sunset color for 4 hours.
In 2007 we had weeks of low hanging clouds and low lying fog.
In 2009 we had high thin clouds that diffused the light with a golden glow.
In 2011 we had rain, sleet, hail, snow – if it was wet it was in the air.
Now, in 2013, I’d love to be surprised with something different. But what would that be? A combination of the intense color of 2005 and the sculptural form of 2007?
Each voyage, I’ve hoped for at least one calm passage across The Drake. They have a phrase to describe this body of water – “lake or shake”. I’ve only seen the “lake” in the colorlful photographs of Eliot Porter and I’d love to see it with my own eyes and make my own photographs. Though I’d be happy to continue “paying the price” to visit Antarctica, I’ve had enough “shake”, which is one reason we plan to fly to Antarctica in 2014.
Discover our 2014 fly to Antarctica sail south of the circle workshop here.
“J.J. Abrams traces his love for the unseen mystery back to its magical beginnings- a passion that’s evident in his films and TV shows, including Star Trek, Cloverfield, Lost, Alias (and soon Star Wars).”
View more creativity videos here.
Reflection I, Cushing, Maine, 1999
There have been a few moments in my life filled with unimaginable stillness and clarity. I find myself continually looking for this quality wherever I go. I’ve found that what it takes to return to this state comes as much (or more) from within as from without.
The Buddhist tradition uses many metaphors that link states of sky or water with states of mind and these are in turn, used to cultivate specific qualities. I made this image (and others like it in the series) spontaneously, not to illustrate or practice Buddhist concepts, yet it arose out of a parallel impulse. I made this image to bring more of this quality into my life, into myself. All photographs are acknowledgments and recollections, some are aspirations too.
Though it’s rare to find incredibly still surfaces without a trace of distortion (by wind, weather, or currents), I have seen them many times. Few of them are picture-perfect, but they are nonetheless inspiring – even surfaces that are not perfectly still can be inspiring. So, to make this image, I made separate exposures of the sky and water and joined heaven and earth virtually. These images connect two moments of stillness and extend them through the creation of a third, one that is reenacted with each viewing.
Titles can speak volumes. How do you title images like this? Cushing, Maine 1998 and Clark Island, Maine 1996? The standard convention of place and date breaks down and if applied, seems complicated and ultimately beside the point. This image is a portrait of a state of mind rather than of a location – an internal space rather than an external place.
Whether unconsciously or consciously, whether unintended or intended, whether collective or individuated, all images portray states of mind. The most important question then becomes, what quality is that state of being?
What states of being are portrayed in the images you appreciate most?
What states of being are portrayed in your images?
Does intensifying your own state of being produce a reciprocal effect in your images?
Can you cultivate states of being through your practice of image-making?