|
|
| and the good news is that i made honorable mention with the “Fall”
 the fall |
|
Archive for the ‘chiaroscuro’ Category
Robert Cornelius awards winner’s list woopee
October 14, 2010
The Robert Cornelius Portrait Award….. nomination…. woo pee……
September 28, 2010late last night i received this email, i was tired been working all day on the ‘rainy monday morning’ post and it was amongst all the other emails that fill my inbox. i always like to see if there are links to others work, i am very confused by what work is selected by whom, it’s all a crap shoot and so many contest i enter i never hear from. what would camera Obscura be looking for but i entered two images in their contest thinking my stuff can be pretty obscure.
but every once in awhile some pretty prestigious award or honorable mention comes my way. last year it was International Photography Award and Prix de la Photographie, Paris (PX3) which are pretty cool which another photographer reminded me ain’t chopped liver.
The Worldwide Photography Gala Awards announces the finalists of
THE ROBERT CORNELIUS PORTRAIT AWARD
In this first edition, 1622 images were submitted from the following 37 countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Moldova, Netherlands, New Zeeland, Norway, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Russian Federation, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, and Venezuela.
92 images submitted by 73 artists were selected as finalists in the 8 thematic categories.
These are the finalists that will compete for the Robert Cornelius Award, and the category prizes and honorable mentions. The announcement will be done on October 8th.
Category Figure and Nude
Mark Scharfman, Had Pollock worked for Playboy
Peter King, Mirror Images
Joy Goldkind, Adagio #47
James Thomas Josephs, Papa John 05
Anna Tomczak, From the Garden
Jene Youtt, Fall
Ken Merfeld, Nobuko’s ki
Ken Merfeld, Senora Plastica
Binh Trinh, Nude 1
Binh Trinh, Nude 4
The Fall
male nude depicting the fall of adam
but i do get discouraged and encouraged at the same time. thats life. enough about me today. woo pee
rainy monday mornings work, Aubrey in corsets
September 27, 2010this past sunday i worked with a young woman model named aubrey doing an Edwardian corseted shoot. i’d been toying with the idea of using a mirror i’d found on the street years ago which had some damage which i thought would be easily fixable, i was right and can’t notice the repair, even my critical eye.
the last female nude shoot with keira grant i did was to complete my adam and eve series but in thinking about it, while i got some good single nudes what i really need are images of them together which seems harder than i thought it would be to find the right couple. so i moved on to panama project which is still very much in the works and forgot about nudes for a while.
i found aubrey through and adv in manhattan figure study group, a group i’d left along time ago because i would light something and people would take pictures and post then on the internet as their work, yes they did push the shutter so it was their picture but i never got credit for lighting it. i don’t mind teaching people how to, which is what i use this blog for but these are my images and i mark and copyright them as such.
aubrey intrigued me with the offer of having edwardian corset props. i wondered how i’d look in one but we are different sizes. but letting my imagination run free anyways i remembered the mirror so i contacted her. she was excited about the idea as well so when she had some free time we booked it for sunday afternoon. mary was able help set up the studio beforehand but had to leave due to prior commitment.
the set up consisted mostly of blacking out the room as i had figured the lighting positions beforehand, three lights – one with a softbox strip over the mirror and one from each side. simple.
although in this image there are only two lights being used due to my fooling around with them, but it worked out because the back light also lights her face due to reflection in mirror.
female nude with white edwardian corset
i’ve decided to start taking head shots of all my models because a lot of people are looking for the perfect photographer to capture their images, make to make themselves a star and why not? we are all here together.
this is an un-retouched image straight from the camera, nice to have great skin.i am a master of finding ugly angles but having young models helps.
female nude with curtain & mirror
this was the big set up even for the head shots, i wanted to try and get the curtain pattern projected on her body but it didn’t work here. i’ve done this on movies and television but would have taken more hands than i had. so do the shot and move on.
female nude wearing white corset
i think we got some nice images out of this afternoon, btw it does take a lot of time getting into and out of these things as they lace up.
female nude adjusting white corset
but i do think the afternoon was well worth the effort although i didn’t have to get in and out of those corsets
corseted female wearing blk mask & boots
these are her street boots that i think add an (erotic) dimension to the session, that of course depends on ones pov.
masked corseted female putting on stockings
but stockings and garters are always fun unless you get caught up in them, ouch.
did someone come in ?
but then i said gee i’ve got this study i am finding it hard to find people to work on which is about peoples ability to be able to touch each other both physically and mentally which these
wearing pearls & black gloves
represents.
this one below is one of my favorites as everything lines up nicely. of course we changed the set up somewhat and got all the lighting working for this shot.
looking in a mirror as young girls do
but there are a lot more images, it’s just i am tired of working on computer. it must be lunch time, what i missed lunch again and it’s now dinner? now i know where my life goes, down some pixel hole working to blind the photographer. do you know there are a group of blind photographers working?
i’ve got to do something about my web presence these half measures aren’t cutting it. well it’s suppose to rain again tomorrow.
more Keira Grant nudes
August 17, 2010sometimes i make myself sick doing things and not really paying attention to what i am doing. well so far that’s exactly what i’ve been doing today.
first mistake is having missed the PDN digital contest which closed monday. I had a very nice image i wanted to submit but needed to clean it up a bit. oh well, lets move on to today where i wanted to go through the Keira Grant shoot
keira grant
and send some images she has requested but these images she’s never seen so this is also for her as much as it is for you
keira thinking
i retouched 7 images. had to move a open eye to one of them which i liked better than the closed eye she had in that take. so time to resize them and save for the web. i have an photoshop action for that, to save me time. well i ran the action thinking it would save the jpegs to my desktop and i’d drag and drop where i wanted them later.
keira streching
what i really did was resize the tiffs and save them as tiffs and not jpegs. so now i have some small tiffs which are useless and small jpegs which i can use for the web. ugh
making myself more work instead of less. what do they say ‘ if i didn’t have bad luck i’d have no luck at all’
keira praying
maybe this is what i should be doing to the Adobe gods, i wonder if it would really help? this old agnostic probably would get hit by lightning.
waiting for the gift
angel wings flapping
i can’t hear myself thinking because the sun is streaming in here through the window telling me to go outside.
keira sitting
so what i need to do is just finish this posting up and move on to finding car parts as the xr7 money pit has gone to the paint shop and begin shooting the wedding rings so invitations can get designed and go out in the mail.
so many other things on the list, new photoshoot look see
August 5, 2010but i am dancing as fast as i can, trying to keep up with this lightspeed life of mine as the sun has sent an unusually fast corona mass ejection of a large cloud of charged plasma toward earth creating beautiful auroras over parts of the planet. see nasa link
but i am looking through a photoshoot that mary wehrhahn did on fri with a traveling nude figure study model keira grant who’s pictures are posted below. any photoshoot is an opportunity to learn something about the craft which mary and i did. mary is looking for emotion emitting people for her series inner sanctum and all that glitters.
i am trying to add to or just finish my cave dwelling adam and eve series which really hasn’t been posted on my web site which is under construction. well i thought keira would make a lovely addition. but as you’ll see here, lovely pictures but something doesn’t work which i’ll try and point out. not that keria did anything wrong, she didn’t but it her training and my total lack of seeing that’s the problem.
part of doing these shoots is to learn how to direct the models or participants in order to get what i am looking for, sometimes the magic works sometimes it doesn’t. so you can be the final arbitrator and i’ll just add my commentary and see what develops.
here are the first ones letting mary work with her gold cloth, i lit the space with tungsten softboxes for her and flash for me. i was trying out my tota umbrella on my white lightning 1200’s. key light here 1200 with 216 on reflector and tota umbrella softbox back.
keria with gold cloth
notice the placement of her hands and how she uses her feet, more on that later but it seems this is a fine art model style, me not being a fine art model i wasn’t aware of this nuance.
keria nude
now after this image i should have just sat down and rested.
after the shoot i asked mary if she got anything and she said not too much but some over and under exposed ones she liked. some days are like that. during this section was mostly me backing away from my take charge personality and letting mary direct the model. but i did fool around while waiting my turn.
keria semi nude
here i took off reflector and added some blackwrap to a front 1200 because i don’t have any barndoors nor did i want to fool around with setting flags. working in movies i’ve learned to work fast never wanting to be the person or department to hold up production. very big no no. below is a more traditional light cropping.
female semi nude
but again notice her hands and feet. the thumbs extended away from the hand forming a V and her feet curled away from her body pointing down or away in this case. this isn’t a problem really more about style or form.
but in this next series it’s not something that i am looking for. maybe i am just picky and seeing something that others don’t notice. here i switched over to tungsten with strip box overhead gelled and 750 zip light fill.
keria's nude back
here again are the hands, notice the V. while the feet are again pointing away from the body. she does have a lovely back and cute tush which adds to the overall form and line of the figure.
another image this time sitting.
keria sitting
i remember a discussion keria and i had about the style i wanted from her as she showed me her pointed feet saying how this was fine art modeling to which i replied ‘i wanted a more natural look’. we did discuss what this series was about and who i thought she was as a character. during some of the poses i told her exactly what i was looking for, emotion, which was hard for her to do. models aren’t actors as their training is so different, so asking someone to do something they are not use to nor trained for is difficult.
it’s not about a pretty body but the emotional impact the image has, either through the tension in the body’s hands or face. i like to tell a story with my images beginning in the viewers mind, i want them to think. if the work does that then i’ve got them.
keria kneeling
this is one of the first shots in this series and really works. so any complaints i have about her really come right back to me. she was an all around trooper and really tried to give me a successful session. did i get something i can use and did she give me what i asked for? who knows
life is just stuff and then more stuff. the problem is to be able to live with just the stuff that’s here now and forget about the stuff from yesterday.
so if you’ve gotten this far maybe you’ve gained an insight to my work, if you have, fine. at least no animals were hurt in the creation of this post.
some new old work done today
July 28, 2010sometimes i do shoots with the sole purpose of working on them later in photoshop to achieve what my vision is. this series is a work in progress with many fits and starts and today was no exception.
i had lots to do other than going to the farmers market and buying fresh vegetables but it was the time to sit here trying to make a few, well actually two images happen. but the jury is still out on one of them while i love what happened with the other one.
so i’lll try and let you into my mind a bit and ‘show not tell’ one of the few things i learned in screen writing at ucla.
this is what i began with in the studio, mary made the costume as she has a sewing machine from my idea
dancer suit
here is the final image i originally envisioned. it’s a composition of three different images reworked via layers in photoshop
born of the tree of life
this process i learned from a very talented director i worked with on As The World Turns, Paul Lammers, adapted for sure to what i am doing now but always kept in the back of my mind. tricks sort of act that way, it has come in very useful over the years but like anything good only has limited uses.
untitled
now this image is straight from the session, notice the different quality of smoke and how it affects the photograph, while the images works on it’s own i don’t think it as powerful as the previous image.
here is the another image from the same session that i’ve done a number of times and i might get one that i really like but this will do for now
born of
i guess you can see that i have a thing about birth. it all comes from seeing a movie when i was young showing natural childbirth i was fascinated and i still am by the whole process, but it goes by so quickly i hardly remember seeing my own sons head pop out then body sliding into the nurses hand.
who knows really what generates our creativity. i am happy to be away from the hungry ghosts of the past and to be able to have days like today with a farm fresh vegetable salad for dinner.
don’t you just love summer?
jene
not sure what i like anymore
July 1, 2010here are some images that i am not sure which ones i like or that really work so i am asking you for help in pointing me in a direction
1.
female semi nude profile
2.
3/4 female nude
3.
covered up
all though i do like the one looking at us i do have another preference but i’ll keep that to myself and hopefully see which one you like.
couldn’t get to sleep tonight so lucky you
July 1, 2010another single strobe test, trying to make my life simple
dark shadows
while still looking for detail
hands
and then do they tell a story?
hands again
i told you it was late, think it’s time to go to bed now
jene
new york photo festival outtakes or maybe intakes
April 27, 2010i am trying to select a series of photos to enter in the NYPF that closes 5/1/10 and i am finding it really hard maybe because of the amount of images 5 to 15 and what might at least win. win what ever? my work is somewhere between photography and……….. well i really don’t know. yet today i got a check from a gallery for one of my images selling. some people buy my work and i am always surprised.
the real fun about entering these contest is going through my hard drives looking for images and finding some like the ones below.
but i always knew about this since i have prints of this hanging on my wall, these were done 2008 so that was some time ago but the other images i had forgotten about. this image below is from a completely different session using the same red cloth but in a totally different way.
red cloth wrap
one is a dancer the other is not, but the cloth is still red silk. the reason i think these images work besides them being lovely young women in shadows is for the red silk. the one below i remember working on the cloth bring out the redness but i had forgotten about it.
letting go
it reminds me of a crane or stork.
a lovely image the way the light reveals the female body yet keeps the mystery. this is one of the reason i left the manhattan figure study & lighting workshop. i need to work on my own discovering these moments. i also don’t like to share my work even though i do.
it’s like my personal relationship with mary, a journey, discovering new things along the way. that’s life
just my opinion
writing LMCC proposal or wasting time looking for something found
March 23, 2010today i am trying to finish up a Lower Manhattan Culture Council application for a workspace. this is my first time application for anything of this kind. seems collage people take classes in this or are born with these qualities. for me it’s a big push, not in doing my artistic work, just writing about it. glad i took those creative writing courses at the new school. i am sort of stymied at doing a resume, i don’t want a job, i’ve had too many of those. all i want out of this is a clean space to work.
so i needed to put together a cd of images and all the ones i selected are a few years old, lets dig through a HD and see what i can find, it’s always interesting.
Parul Shah Dancer
these images are part of a commission work for the Parul Shah Dance company advertisement but are my outtakes. originally they had me shooting in a dance rehearsal studio way too small and ugly background, but ‘all we need are the images and we’ll photoshop the background out.’ OK
Parul Shah Dancers
but i think listening to me and doing these images in a more controled enviroment is better for the images, but hey what do i know
Parul Shah Dancers
these images are from reshoot in my studio because my camera canon 20d at the time stopped working. it does that every once in a while oh well. so we did these the next day. but i can’t remember if they were happy with the other images or what but i got a couple for me.
Parul Shah Dancer
odd that some people come through my life briefly and i never hear from them again while others keep in touch, life is that way.
jene
Fuzzypictures's Weblog 