nowheremangraphics

Inspiration… er… Tuesday: Barbara Cook

December 27, 2011

NPR - Barbara Cook Interview

I was listening to this interview with cabaret singer Barbara Cook on the way in this morning and this woman is my new hero. She’s an 84 year old singer whose voice has dropped from a Soprano to an Alto. Instead of being defeatist about her new limitations she’s embraced the new possibilities of her voice and is simply continuing on. When she was originally interview at age 75 she said:

I think my approach to a song has gotten deeper and deeper and deeper. I think I sing a song better now then I did 5 years ago and I think I’ll sing a song better 5 years from now then I do now. Because I’m really a work in progress, there’s no question, this is not the finished product here.

I want to be an artist that never settles and always looks for the next ledge. I want to always say “I want to be better next time”. Thanks for the inspiration, Barbara. You’re an amazing woman and my artistic hero!

For more info on Barbara Cook, check out her website, Comments (0)

Filed under: Inspiration,Inspiration Sundays — admin @ 9:47 am

Cool Thing Tuesdays: Maenad Ram Horn by Idolatre Clothing

October 11, 2011


Photo Credit: Erik Christensen

My wife and I met Stefanie at the Urban Craft Uprising in Seattle several years ago. She had just come out with these particular horns, which are just simply amazing. I love them. They inspire me and I hope they inspire you!

Check out these and more over at her Etsy store, or friend her on Facebook!


Creative Mondays: Inspiration & Persperation

October 10, 2011

Yesterday was my first Sunday Inspiration post, so I think it’s fitting I chat about how Inspiration works for me. Generally speaking ideas don’t just hit me over the head and say “here I am, make me!” Not out of the blue anyways.

I’m a ravenous collector of the visual landscape. As a graphic designer I spend much of my day looking at a variety of visually stimulating things that fuel inspiration, but if it were just that I think a lot of people could say “that’s fine for Mike, he’s a graphic designer and gets to look at pretty things all day… of course he’s going to be inspired”, but I don’t believe that’s the case at all. I’m always looking through and buying up magazines, comic books, art books. I try and go to see the new exhibits at the Seattle Art Museum and the various Art Walks around town. We try and buy art from local artists when we can afford it, which isn’t very frequently, but often times we can afford a post-card sized print or something. The walls in our townhouse which aren’t covered in bookshelves have art from all over the map. We have an original Henry painting hanging over our TV, and a set of posters depicting the Celestial Bodies by Alphonse Mucha on another wall, a photo taken for us by Gabe Palmer in another wall, a series of tiny abstracts by a friend of Sarah’s on another wall. Upstairs we have posters of everything from Van Gogh’s A Wheat Field With Crows to a giant poster of Catwoman up on our walls and even a small tapestry of horses running. (Fortunately my wife likes having art on the walls as much as I do). The point is that I engage with a lot of different visual stimuli daily that inspires me.

Don’t have the wall-space for that? Take a look through Flickr or 500px daily. Look through Abduzeedo’s Daily Inspiration list. It’s a bit of a link-farm, but a lot of inspiration comes from that direction for me. One of the important things that I can’t stress enough. Don’t just look through photographs for inspiration. Look through ads. Look through illustrations. Look at tattoos or car designs. Paintings or typography or architecture. Go for a walk and look at the details in nature or the graffiti on the walls. Children and young adult literature is a fantastic place to look for inspiration. Technically it’s not visual stimulation, but for me when I read I have a little movie playing in my head, so it amounts to the same thing.

Get a nice stew of ideas going. Write notes to yourself when you find yourself inspired by an idea. I use a wonderful program called Evernote that lets you sync your notes across devices. I can take photos with my phone and drop them into Evernote. I can clip a web page at work and drop it into Evernote when I see a portfolio I want to review later. I can keep a checklist of ideas for shoots on my laptop, and it all syncs up together so I can review it, add to it, or edit it wherever I am.

Eventually that stew of ideas begins to coalesce into a some firm ideas for shoots for me and I’m ready to start really plugging away at refining the idea and figuring out the logistics of what I want to do. And the best part is that the stew of ideas never gets smaller. Some ideas get tossed out, but they’re not lost, they just go back into the pool to meld with another idea until you’re ready to use them!

The photo above, entitled The Witch came about because I first saw a vintage victorian baby stroller photo. The original idea for the shoot fell apart, but we improvised this shoot instead. That original idea fused with the image from the back of a Tom Waits album to create this image, which remains one of my favorites.

So go ahead and start keeping a journal of ideas. I like Evernote, but you may prefer using a spiral notepad or a moleskin book or a website like LiveJournal. I encourage you to write them down. Even if you never look at them again, transferring them from your brain into some other form is a proven way to get ideas and thoughts to stick more firmly in your brain.


Inspiration Sunday

October 9, 2011

Each Sunday I want to post something that inspires me. This first one is a wonderful gal I met recently named Veda who makes incredible fun and funky fashion accessories over at Pretty Swank Girl. We met at a shoot for the incredible upcoming Love Couture Magazine shoot. I love her cuff bracelet designs, but then she told me about her chandeliers and sparks started going off in my brain. I’m really excited to work with her again. We’ve got something fun planned for the near future, so stay tuned and check out her work. I know you’ll be seeing a lot more of her!


The Princess of the Spring And The Queen of the Sea

August 28, 2011

My wife and I just got back from a week’s vacation in the Twin Cities where my wife found this little charmer of a book called The Princess of the Spring And The Queen of the Sea: A Fashionable Fairytale by Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein. Mr. Schatz and Mrs. Ornstein originally published this work as a fashion editorial in Stern Magazine, but reproduced it as it’s own fairytale book with photography by Mr. Schatz and story by Schatz and Ornstein with a team of stylists, makeup artists, models, and fashion designers helping out.

I think this is a marvelous fashion editorial which tells the classical fairytale of a young maiden and her lover and a jealous witch. The photography is lush and beautiful, the fashions look amazing underwater, and the underwater sets are vivid and textural and add to the vibrant, colorful atmosphere of the piece.

I really love this book and am thrilled that my wife found it. It’s really got me inspired to try my hand at underwater photography as I’m buzzing with ideas and inspiration.

If you can find it, buy it! If you’d like to see more photos from the series he has them posted on his site here.


[More] Photography Resources I Like

February 22, 2011

A while ago I did a post about which resources I find useful from around the interwebs. Here’s an updated addition to that list.

Podcasts
AdoramaTV
This is the podcast for the giant camera store, Adorama. There’s a fair amount of shilling gear, but there’s lots of good introduction-to-photography podcasts for the beginners, some great interviews with photographers, and some great hints, tips, and tricks.

Art of Photography
This is one I just discovered about 2 weeks ago, but I absolutely love it. They’re mostly pretty short videos on a specific topic, whether it’s introducing you to an amazing photographer, or a series of podcasts covering Ansel Adams’s Zone System.

Camera Dojo
This podcast is directed primarily towards wedding photographers, but covers a lot of the business of photography in general, and good practices of running a photography business and keeping inspired, gear reviews, etc. It’s a really good podcast, though I believe they tend to get stuck on the “bitching about uncle bobs with their cameras wanting to be professional photographers” topic a lot. Pretty much every guest they have that conversation with. But this rather minor point shouldn’t obscure the fact that this podcast is well worth listening to if you’ve got the time. Mostly they’re 1-hour long podcasts, so it’s definitely a “put on the headphones and listen to it while you’re doing something else” podcast.

Circuitous Conversations w/ Bill & Dan
I discovered this podcast from the Faded & Blurred podcast (see below). Circuitous Conversations isn’t strictly a photography podcast. Both Bill Wadman and Dan Gottesman do photography, though neither is a full-time photographer. They’ve both had major gallery shows, though they both have lots of other interests. Music is a big part of both of their lives, as is technology and science fiction, and as a result their conversations tend to be pretty random and tangential. But they’re extremely entertaining and insightful. It’s really nice hearing people who are nerdy about the same things I’m nerdy about chatting.

D-Town TV
This started out as a straight-up Nikon podcast, and even though I’m not a Nikon guy (Pentax, yo!), I still found it well worth listening and tuning in. Since that first season they’ve branched out to make it a general photography gear and tips podcast, hosted my Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski et al.

Faded & Blurred
Faded and Blurred has a whole lot of great articles and tutorials on their site and I was delighted to find their podcast, which is primarily interviews with various photographers. A good sources of inspiration!

LensWork
LensWork is a black and white art-photography magazine located up near me in Anacortes, WA, and the podcast is just brilliant. They are short vignettes about photography done by Editor Brooks Jensen. You won’t find gear reviews or tutorials here. What you’ll find is a lot of talk about how to stay inspired and what it means to be a goo photographer, editor, and artist.

Photofocus
The Photofocus podcast is a Q&A podcast by pro photographer Scott Bourne. It’s well worth listening to, though the same questions do tend to pop up repeatedly again and again on the show. It’s another long one though, so find something to do while listening to it!

The Photographer & Model Podcast
This is a podcast that is pretty much right up my alley. It’s a podcast that is run by a photographer and a model and that’s what they talk about. The business of being a photographer and/or a model, the inspiration, etc. Each week they alternate (generally) between interviewing a photographer and a model, and though there’s a couple of stock questions and answers that I find irritating after a while. On the whole the podcast is great and well worth the 15-20 minutes per episode.

Photoshop Killer Tips
Photoshop killer tips is the shortest podcast on earth. Each episode, including intro and outro is about 2 minutes long. It’s literally a quick 1 minute photoshop tip. Some of them are ridiculous that everyone learns the first day of Photoshop class (press B to go to the Brush tool!), but you’ve not wasted much time, and there’s always some phenomenal tips out there (select an area when using the Liquify Tool to make the tool work a LOT faster).

PhotoTips
This is a great podcast. Particularly if you’re a beginner to intermediate photographer. Jimmy Beltz does a great job of making photography easy to understand while not being condescending. Some people find his sense of humor off-putting (he’s a redneck… deal with it), and he occasionally will speak about his Christian faith which people also get offended by, though to his credit… he puts it at the end of the podcast and gives people LOTS of warning that he feels compelled to speak about his faith and if you’re not in to that, feel free to sign off, it won’t hurt his feeling. I always listen to them because I value his opinion and his viewpoint, even if I don’t share his faith. He’s started doing gear reviews, and he really breaks it down and shows you side-by-side comparisons. I also very much appreciate that he’s rigorously anti-brand war. For a long time he refused to tell people what brand of camera he used because he didn’t want to influence people. He also started his very successful photography business with a point and shoot camera.

Within The Frame
This was only a 20-episode podcast hosted by the incredible David DuChemin, and it’s finished, but it’s WELL worth watching the series. It’s mostly a review, critique, and discussion podcast where he helped photographers to achieve their vision for photographers. It’s a wonderful opportunity to hear some great critique from an incredible professional photographer.

What podcasts do you find useful?


Daily Inspiration: A New Kind Of Film

December 23, 2010

Photobucket

Several years ago I was working at a photo studio in Seattle (as a designer, not a photographer) and I got my hands on a magazine called Wraparound (who are located in LA, but apparently don’t have a website that I can link to) that came into the studio. It had an absolutely fascinating article on a pair of British artists, Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey who were doing something completely awesome. They were literally growing photographs out of grass!
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A Cycling Allegory

June 14, 2010

For those of you who don’t know me, I cycle to and from work every day (well… almost every day). Today as I was cycling home I was just exhausted. I had worked a half-day over the weekend, not gotten much sleep last night, and had to go in an hour early today, so I was just pretty drained. I had been cycling the past several miles with lagging energy and sore muscles, slowly shifting to lighter and lighter gears to try and keep momentum.

In short I was lagging badly.

Then suddenly this cyclist whips by me at a good clip. I had passed her on the side of the path as she was chilling a few miles back, and she was chugging along.

I’m a fairly competitive guy, and I make it a personal goal to at least keep pace with people in front of me. I push and push till I just can’t do it anymore, and I thought “I’ve got it in me to go a ways at her pace”, so I switched my grip to the lower bars (I’ve got the “ram’s horn” style of street bike handles where you’ve got several options of grip) and started chugging along. After a fairly short amount of time I had caught up to her and was keeping pace with her quite handily.

Two minutes ago I could barely keep the slow pace I was going and now I was hauling tail and not even feeling it. Why? Because I had someone to push me.

And it’s the same way with photography. Reading blogs and taking classes and reading books is all well and good, but sometimes I need someone to come along and just fly by me to get me jazzed up and motivated. That’s why I love going to photo meetups or doing organized photostrolls. I get to see first-hand the work people are doing and how fast they’re flying past me, and it pushes me to be more creative. Not to be better than them, but to keep up. You see, I’m not competing with them. I’m competing against myself. They’re just the thing that gets me off my butt and gives me a target to shoot for.

So get out there and find someone. A friend, a Meetup group, a student, whatever. Just go out and find someone to shoot with. Someone who will push you to be better than you are.


Inspiration Thursday

May 20, 2010

I’m always on the look-out for photographers that just completely rock my socks off. Today I found Andrzej Dragan whose dark illustrative conceptual portraits ooze mood and tone.

Check out his website to see more: www.AndrzejDragan.com


beautyLIGHT

**Note: I wrote this last night and tried to post it, but it just wasn’t happening for some reason. Maybe it was the 3 Jumbo Margaritas I had.**

I finished reading Matthew Rolston’s beautyLIGHT… well… saying I “finished reading” it is kind of like saying “I finished reading the emergency exit instruction sheet on the airplane” as there are literally 2 pages of text in the book in english, but you get the idea. This book is 99% photos. But what photos!!!
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