Edward Burtynsky

Born in 1955 Edward Burtysnky is an artist who has been featured in numerous museums. His is best know work which depicts industrial waste and the industrial process. An example of this would be his Quarries series. In this series he took pictures of open quarries around the world. It amazing to look at these quarries not only because of the amount of detail in each image but also because of how beautiful they are. Another one of his series deals with urban mines and how there are huge heaps of recycled parts that people dig through in order to make a living. Its interesting to hear the background story on these urban mines and how they came to exist. Often times they take over an entire community and force the community to rely on the money they get from recycling the heavy metals found in these trash heaps. What great about his work is how raw it is. There is no attempt to make a place beautiful through strange lighting or sunsets. Instead Burtynsky lets the places speak for themselves. He shows them as he comes upon them and captures them in a very plain style. However because of the interesting and colorful qualities of these places that are almost never seen to the average person the work stands out and is fascinating to look at. In conclusion its amazing how Edward Burtysnky is able to make interesting the waste and destruction caused by industrialization.

Formaly good artistically Meh

So last night while I was search for photographers I ran across another gentleman who had his stuff at photo.net. Because I was short on time and his images were attractive I decided to bookmark the page so that when I went to write this blog about his work I would know exactly were to find it. However looking over his work this morning I decided it really wasn't anything that great. So the question I ended up asking myself is why I bookmarked him in the first place. Granted I was in a rush the day I did it but there were also allot of other artists that I skipped over that day. I finally came to the conclusion that the reason I bookmarked him was because of the formal qualities of his images. Almost all of his images were perfect in terms of image quality. They were perfectly cropped and lighted as well as lacking in anything negative such as color casts or dust. However with them being perfect they just weren't interesting. I had seen these images before time and time again by other artists and because of this when I actually started looking at the images instead of just skimming over them they were not able to hold my interest. I'm not sure if this is because I'm an art student or because they are the same old type of images however this showed me the power of both a well printed image and the importance of a artistic subject. Without a quality print a viewer would never know there was art to be had and would just skim over the images. On the other hand without an artistic subject matter their is nothing to keep the viewers interest. Yes it might attract them however it wont keep them becasue there is nothing to stimulate the mind. The key is to create the best of both worlds. To make something that is both artistically interesting and formally appealing.

Koscs Gábor

The next photographer I looked at was Koscs Gábor. I really don't have much info on this photographer besides that I found him on the photo.net website. Most of his work seems to be either portrait or landscape and much of his portrait pictures are very difficult to describe. Often times only the model is shown and the feeling that you get from them is dark. It is almost as if you were looking through the eyes of a madman and saw distorted people. His landscape photos are just as strange. Rather then take the typical landscape that is picturesque his have a darker feel to them. This is becasue seem to have more of a centrally important object. Often times his pictures have a dark and creepy house or a lone person/ couple in the middle of the image. This combined with scenery that seems to surround and entrap the central object makes it seem as if the borders of the image are trying to invade the middle. What also adds to the darkness of his images is his use of lines. Many of his images contain trees or walls with cracks that either blend the focus point with the background or lead the eye towards the object of interest. These lines add the to formal qualities of his pictures and help bind them together so they don't seem so intentionally odd. I think what makes many of his images so successful is how easy it is to come up with a story for them. They don't seem to have any hidden meaning but rather invite the viewer to come up with a dialog that would fit the image.

Tom Robinson

So this post is the beginning of about ten post that all talk about photographers that I found online. All these photographers I found using the stumble search engine and choose to feature on my blog because they have some work that peeks my interest.

The first of these photographers is a man by the name of Tom Robinson. Although his online portfolio is fairly small he does have some interesting work. However I should clarify that in this case I mean interesting because of the formal elements of the photograph, not because of whats in the image. It would be fair to say that Tom Robinson is a landscape photographer. Yes he does have a few images that might be considered portrait style however in general the main theme of his work is landscapes and quite urban scenes. Much of his work also seems to consist of trip photography. Granted some of the best photos are taken while on vacation but his stuff definitely has a touristy feel to it. I think that out of all of his work that I have viewed some of his best stuff seems to be black and white. He seems to have a natural sense of light and shadow. He knows what needs to be lit and what doesn't to make a quality image. I think that if he was to take this further he might be able to achieve some very unique artwork.

Troy Paiva's color photos

While stumbling around the internet the other day I came across Troy Paiva's website. What interested me about his site was his fantastic colors in what seems to be night photography. At the time I was shooting night images for the first time and it was interesting to see how color changes at night. In Paiva's picture although there is a blue cast making the image cool there are also bright reds, yellows, greens, and other colors that pop. This is because instead of having our focus on the sky or the sunset our focus is on the raw colors of the objects. This is one of the great things I discovered while doing my own night photography. In taking the picture an objects background is no longer important becasue the background is often dark and uncontrollable. So instead the photographer must focus more on the actual object and the framing of it. Making sure that enough light is let in to give us color but not to much to blow out certain areas. I think that night photography is more technical then most other simply becasue you have to consider everything and make sure its perfect. Its not like day photography were you might come upon an image. You have to make the images with your camera.

Color of smoke

So a few days ago I signed onto the stumble website and have been using it to search for art. Whats great about stumble is it just randomly finds web sights that fit your criteria of what you want to look at. So instead of spending time going out and tracing down artists now i just press a button and a new one randomly pops up. Whats also great about it is the artists that pop up aren't always famous or well know. This means I get to look at art produced by people who might never have their stuff in a museum. So while stumbling today I found Colored smoke by Graham Jeffery. Colored smoke is exactly what it sounds like. It is images of smoke, both colored and uncolored. From what I read from his site he apparently makes the smoke from incense sticks then shots them at a fast shutter speed in a studio. A couple of the things he mentioned that are important for shooting smoke is good lighting and a large depth of field. This is because smoke is always moving and you cannot get a definite focus on it. Also without proper lighting the smoke is hard to discern against the backdrop and its detail is lost. Whats great about this form of art is how much and how little control the artist has. Because he is shooting in his studio he can control the lighting the depth of field and has a life of its own their is no way he can exactly predict which direction its moving or what shapes it might take. In a way it is very similar to nature photography. The photographer does have a certain degree of control but in the end the results are controlled by the billions of little things that, although small by themselves, can make or break an image.

Pictorialism & Holga 341

Pictorialism is an artistic style in which images are made so that they are similar to paintings. The original reason behind this was because at first photography was not considered an art. In order to show the artistic possibilities of photography photographers made images with a soft focus and that showed classical objects or scenes. By doing this they resembled paintings in both look and context. The images shown above contain some of the elements of the pictorialism movement such as a classical scene or a soft focus. These images as well as the images below were taken on Holga camera's. Because of the narrow depth of field as well as the square framing of the images the Holga camera takes pictures that look as if the belong to the pictorialism movement.