Distortion HDRI

Check out the figure...i really like the way in which they photoshop software has fucked with alignment of the person in the frame.

Lighting Experiments...and pain...

Montage from a series of flash tests shot on sunday night...i hurt myself in the process and Ange kindly captured it.




This needs to be printed. Reproducing it on the web is not that great as the scale is to small in any sort of condition to actually be able to upload it.

Hmm 44 inch printer anyone>?

Hmmmmm...now to find a train station...

Thanks Don!

Flash Sync Yo...

F7.1, 1/125th, ISO 200

Max_Dworkin

Dammit....

Woo now they can see everything...

This is pulled right of stuff, click to jump straight to the article.
They want to install cctv cameras around Queenstowns waterways in order to crack down on boaties braking the rules, and back up accusations with "...solid video proof..."
I just thought this was the best quote from Andy Brinsley the Director of Kawarau Jet boating operations:
"The [harbormaster] can't be everywhere simultaneously."


I just thought that was a great line. Is that what surveillance systems are trying to acheive? The idea that they can be everywhere simultaneously>? watching all from a point of power? Shit, does this sound Orwellian to anybody else? Not to mention the fact that lakes and rivers are right in that gray zone that may, with measures like this flick over into that realm of private and controlled space....

Who are we making images for>? For us now>? For the future, whoever may come after us>?

Sophie Calle - the woman who, through her mother, got a detective to follow he and take photographs of her. Wanted surveillance style images, "not good photographs".

Sophie Calle//Exquisite Pain

Also getting way more pumped on some narrative stuff...

Bell Soto:


The Father Figure The Hunger

Interesting to see that on her own website these images arnt presented as they are above...have other people put these together in order to dhow the narrative content more clearly? curious...

Photo_rant//

So...I have been thinking a lot about this project and what I have been working on at the moment. Some of this thinking coalesced last night when I had to rapidly write an artist statement for group show that may be happening with the jnr and snr photo group here. This is what I wrote:

These images represent an ongoing body of work that is exploring the idea of the human body in public and private space. It is examining the way in which we move through and interact with everyday spaces, so-called public spaces, private spaces and the exchanges we may or may not have within them.

This series of images aims to convey a feeling of dislocation, of confusion and bewilderment to the viewer about the idea of public space. These images aim to create confusion and bewilderment in the mind of the viewer and to make them aware of the growing confusion about what exactly is public space and does it really exist.

///So this wasn't really what I expected to write...but it kind of made sense in relation to what i am trying to do with these images. There are a lot of things going on (in my head) and dont know how much is being conveyed or not. In writing this last night it felt like the two sometimes disparate bodies of work that i have undertaken in the past months have finally found this point where they have merged together. But in saying that im not sure how i feel about this merge yet.

The floating people images have been a way of dealing with several things. The sudden change in the landscape that i am in, the way in which i have been feeling suspended in a new environment. But i would like them also to deal with the ideas of the human body in general and its relationship to space, and being here in the US seems to make it even more relevant to the nature of public/private space.

In saying this I recently re-read a post that Rachel left me. It was talking about Denis Darzacq and his flaoting people series. She mentioned the way in which the figure sin his work cast no shadows and are shot in flat landscapes and how this could reference that perhaps they do not fit in or belong in the landscape they have been shot in. Another intersting part of Rachel's comment was the way in which the lack of shadow could also reference the theft of soul, like the old photographic myth....

On top of all this im just not feeling hot about the floating images that i have been shooting in the last week or so...the first thing i need to do is go back and re-look at these first images:

I like this image more than the more recent ones where I am centred in the frame. I feel that the recent images have become focused soely on the figure rather then about the space that the figure is floating/suspended in. I want the figure to be a smaller part of the image, for the image to create more interest about the location that the figure is in...

RantyMcRanterson

Dominique_Wilson

Untitled
Image found on tinyvices.com - a collection of work of many many photographers.

A bloody D&G add...

Inspiration comes from the weirdest places and this just proves it. I would never have thought to have been inspired by a ridiculous fashion label and there fragrance advertising campaign but something in this shot clicked in my brain last night...

There is something so bizarre in the way (i don't even know which celebrity's they are) they are making out, not only is it in the confines of an elevator ( which I'm totally down with) but the bodyguard is right there next to them, reflected in the glass jsut over her shoulder! Then your brains processes the visual clues and you realise that the dark mass near the screen is the same guards rumpled suit, and hes standing there as they go at it, cool as a cucumber.
I don't know, the perversity of this situation and the interesting camera angle clicked a wee switch somewhere in my brain. We'll see what happens...

and if for some reason you want to see the whole add hit the image for the link...shudder...

Under the Radar Music Showcase

Matt Dill:






Death Top:









Polymer Slug:






Friday night _ this was at the Pistol and Foundation down in the very industrial Westbottoms. Amazing showcase of local music.
nb// images are super washed out on here but are way more epic in real life haha

Some more things...haha i almost wrote thugs

I am really keen to create a performative piece that is based on some of the ideals in the previous post but i am also interested in combining it with the work myslef and Mishca Rhys Hill are doing and bring into it a surveillance aspect. Or even just an aspect of control and security. I like this concept and i would like to do something in a place where i know i would be under some sort surveillance. So more work to come on this...

In the mean time here ia another series that is germinating as an idea at the moment. The spaces where stumbled across, no planning as with the poses, positions. All shot with Canon G9 on self timer.

Lily McElroy

This photographer has a really interesting suspended series of images but ti was drawen to this work entitled "Locations".

Her artist statment says that the work began as a documentation of "...public reaction to unexpected behaviour in privately owned public spaces..." These spaces are where we all spend a great deal of our time and they all have a strict regimentation on the expected behavior in theses spaces. There are no public spaces, as myself and Mishca Hill have recently been discussing. There are only points of transit from one private space to the next, or as McElroy puts it, privately owned public space.



She continues to explain that this regimentation has created fear of unconformist actions in these spaces so she wanted to do some thing that was clearly non-conformist but at the same time not confrontational. She also talks about how the work quickly became a study of the alienation in these sorts of spaces and society as a whole. She is putting herself in these spaces in a vulnerable position and wearing only a nightdress and in all her images she was only asked three times if she was ok. She received little empathy. The images explore the passive nature of people that move through these spaces, again something that myself and Mishca Rhys Hill have discovered for ourselves firsthand. People have an incredible ability to block out what they dont want to see...what they fear exists or they dont understand. This series highlights this capacity strikingly.

We live in a culture now that fears the non conformist, it fears those that act without total rationality. Yet the paradox is that a culture of fear and conformity is simply breading irrationality...

Satisfying my enjoyment of the Bizzare...

Fred Muram:


Thanks to Katy for throwing me this and other links!

I really enjoyed this guys work, in particular the series "Kissing the Ceiling" (2008) The way in which the figures defy our usual spatial orientation for them by being raised up on something and within the frame is really interesting.

To say the least these images prompt a range of questions !? Why kiss the ceiling? How did you get up there (for the one on the door handle) I feel that the bizarre nature of the images is heightened by the way in which they are shot from approximately head-height (our normal view) but they show people doing something that is very abnormal haha. They float above our normal perception of where people should be. this is nicely offset in some of them by the figures who are where we would expect them. There is a comical nature to them as well...I enjoy the bizarre.

Some notes//

Larry Clark
Bill Henson
Nan Goldin
Polaroids
Tension_
Tiny Vices.com
Masao Yamamoto
Mixed media works. I need to sort this out. I need to get on with this project with Mischa.
The Edge of Vision - The Rise of Abstraction in photography - Book

-The distortion of space and referential size in my images. Suspended above the available horizon lines.

Some Photoshop playing...

I really like how i have kind of vanished in this one...i like the ambiguous-ness and how i look like I'm going to break my face open...
Fuck this is going to sound so incredibly narcissistic but i like the way my arms stick out, the flesh colour compared to everything else and the way my veins are sticking out. It kind of links to the physical aspect that goes into creating these images.




So i started playing with this HDR stuff and i quickly realised i actually don't know how to do anything cool with photoshop! In terms of making images epic anyway, not just fixing them and what not..So here are some of the shots iv been playing with, there cheesy as hell but yea I am interested in getting much much better at this!