Shutter Mike Photography

I ran across this on Chase Jarvis’ blog and it is really quite a feat.   For 6,000 days between March 13, 1979 and October 25, 1997 New York based photographer Jamie Livingston took a Polaroid photo each day.  That is some amazing dedication.  I have tried the 365 photo of the day challenges and never quite got one every single day.  So to keep it going to close to 18 years takes stamina.  Livingston’s first Polaroid in 1979 was of his girlfriend at the time and his last one in 1997 was on his death bed.  Take a look at the entire set of 6,000 Polaroids by Jamie Livingston here.

For any of us who have ever used a “handicap,” perceived or real, as an excuse to not do something, this story can be very humbling and encouraging.  The last hobby you might expect a blind person to take up is photography.  It is all visual after all, right?  But a group of blind individuals in Mexico City are doing just that disproving that photography is strictly a visual art.  Although they cannot see the end result of their work, which may be a frustration to most of us, they are taking photography beyond the visual and are presenting the world as they “see” it through their photographs.  They use their other senses, hearing, smell, touch, to compose their images making them a visual interpretation of a world they cannot see.

Read the whole story of these inspirational photographers here.

Does every photograph have to have a commercial value?  Is there always a client in mind? What about photography for art’s sake?  Sometimes when your day to day life is wrapped up in the commercial side of photography and each photograph is taken based on specific requirement from a client you tend to forget that photography really is an art form.  Someone recently pointed me to the online portfolio of a photography with the comment “I’m not sure what the commercial value of these photographs will ever be.”  That was the work of photographer Mckay Jaffe on his site I Must Be Dead.

After checking out his site my response would be “this is some amazing work with a lot of talent behind it.”  It is a very creative mind that is creating this photography.  Maybe it will not accompany the next magazine article you read or be on a road side billboard, but I definitely see commercial potential in his work.  Fashion can be very avant garde as can the advertising for many products.  So, in my view, there is so much potential and incredible talent here the money is sure to come.  And above all else it is ART, and you should check it out for no other reason.

The University of Arizona has a strong connection with photography.  It is home to the Center for Creative Photography started by Ansel Adams and houses a collection of prints and photography related materials in its archives unmatched by almost anyone else.  Now, in an effort to preserve the works of photographers and make them available  online “…to increase access to unique and rare material…,” the U of A’s Special Collections is digitizing thousands of photographs.

The most recent collection to be digitized and made available to the public is the Jack Sheaffer Photograph Digital Collection.  Consisting of more than 10,000 photographs spanning the period from 1955 to 1975 the images document the growth of Tucson, AZ and Southern Arizona during this period.

Sheaffer photographed tragic accidents, civil rights and anti-war marches, politicians, athletic events, celebrity visits and local beauty pageants, and the collection is continually growing.

This collection is a valuable resource for its documentation of Southern Arizona history.  But it is also cool to just browse the vast collection of images.

Can you stand another book suggestion?  I love books almost as much as I love photography so any chance I get to pack my book shelves full I generally take.  Me and Amazon go way back.

I came across this book via the Daily Icon and felt it was worth sharing.  Photographers A-Z by Hans-Michael Koetzle is a comprehensive overview of some of the finest photographers of the last 100 years.  With over 400 entries from North America, Europe, Japan, Latin America and beyond this “encyclopedia of photographers” has cataloged the best of the last century.

Richly illustrated with facsimiles from books and magazines, this book includes all the major photographers of the last hundred years—especially those who have distinguished themselves with important publications or exhibitions, or who have made a significant contribution to the culture of the photographic image.

Name a photographer, any photographer, and chances are they are featured in Photographers A-Z.  Just a few of those that grace the pages of this book are: Bruce Weber, Cindy Sherman, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Julius Shulman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Capa, and the list goes on and on.

I will be adding this book to my library shortly!

I think if there was ever a building that was meant to grace the pages of one of those over-sized “coffee table” books of photographs it is Fallingwater.  Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece is very well known and has been photographed from every angle thousands of times.  It is on my residential architecture photography bucket list and I will hopefully have the opportunity to be one of the countless photographers that have captured this truly extraordinary residence.  The house floats above the falls of Bear Run Creek in Pennsylvania and is one of the best examples of Wright’s organic architecture.  It was meant to be photographed.

In the mid-1980s photographer Christopher Little worked with Edgar Kaufman Jr., the son of the Pennsylvania department giant that commission the home, to document the house for his book Fallingwater: Frank Lloyd Wright Country House.  Twenty-five years later Little returned to Fallingwater to document it again for an updated version of the book this time simple called Fallingwater.  Little spent about 50 days spread out over the four seasons to capture Fallingwater as it changes with the light of the seasons.  The result is a 300 plus page book that brings one of  Wright’s best known designs to life through incredible photography.  If you love photography, architecture and books like I do this is one you should add to your collection.

When I photograph a building I try very hard to make it look its very best.  I wrote a post a while back on 5 Quick Architectural Photography Tips where I discussed some very simple things you can do to really highlight the main feature of an architectural photograph, the building.  But sometimes the architectural photograph is about telling the story of the building and its environment more than about making it look pretty for a magazine or brochure.  So instead of cleaning up you might leave it as is and let every element of the scene speak for itself and tell the story.

This is the case with abandoned buildings.  Why is this house or former school or whatever sitting empty now?  What is its history?  Who once walked its halls, lived under its roof and called it home?  Every building has a history and a story of its owners an occupants that brought it to where it is today.  To capture that story in a photograph can be a challenge but when you do it the end result can be awesome.

So along those lines, I discovered the work of a Detroit photographer, Kevin Bauman.  For better or worse, Detroit has more than its share of abandoned architecture.  The recent recession, and even before, has taken its toll on the city leaving home after home as well as businesses, schools, churches and industry vacant and crumbling.  Kevin has captured 100 of the abandoned homes of Detroit in a series he simply calls 100 Abandoned Houses.  The images were taken in various seasons of the  year and of abandoned houses in various stages of decay.  Some are burned out while others range from completely covered in overgrowth of vegetation to the point where the house is no longer visible to those where someone is still mowing the lawn of an otherwise obviously abandoned and almost forgotten home.  The images can be haunting yet thought provoking.  They make you wonder what these homes once held and what led to their demise.

This is a great series if images to peruse and contemplate.

Nick Risinger, an amateur astronomer and photographer from Seattle, quit his day job and set out to document the entire Milky Way through photographs.  Such an undertaking required a lot of planning and calculating.  It required traveling 60,000 miles by air and land back and forth from the Western United States to South Africa in order to find locales with as little light pollution as possible.  He used 6 Finger Lakes ML-8300 monochrome cameras with Zeiss Sonnar 85mm f2.8 lenses specially mounted on a Takahashi custom mount that rotated in sync with the Earth’s spin.  All of that was combined with some very detailed calculations and computer work to be certain there were no gaps in the final image.  The result is a 360 degree, 5,000 mega pixel view of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,440 separate exposures.  Dubbed the Photopic Sky Survey, the amazing image allows you to see 20-30 million stars with incredible clarity.  The final image allows you to zoom and pan and explore the amazing night sky in a way that only a 5,000 mega pixel image can do.

I do not know the man, but this is my second post about photographer Thomas Hawk.  It is not a stalker thing, but pure admiration for his body of work which is a source of inspiration for my own photography.  I am constantly amazed by the photography he posts on his website, Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection as well on his Flickr photostream (of which he is a heavy user).  So here is another unsolicited plug – this is a photographer you should be following.

Cover image provided by National Geographic

Something strange and wonderful happens when light enters a dark space through a tiny opening. Aristotle described the phenomenon back in the fourth century B.C. Leonardo in Renaissance Italy sketched the process. In Coney Island and other 19th-century seaside resorts, tourists lined up to see the magical results. Shift to a Boston classroom, the year 1988. Cuban-born Abelardo Morell, teaching an introductory photography course at an art college, was curious to step back in time. On a sunny day, he covered the classroom windows with black plastic, making the space as dark as a cave, cut a dime-size hole in the material, and told his students to watch. Almost instantly the back wall came alive like a movie screen, its surface covered with a fuzzy image of people and cars moving along Huntington Avenue outside. Then the double take: The image was upside down, sky on floor, ground on ceiling, the laws of gravity seemingly gone haywire.

Morell had turned his classroom into a camera obscura, a dark chamber, the Latin name for perhaps the earliest known imaging device and the ancestor of the photographic camera.

- Tom O’Neill -  Bravura Camera Obscura – National Geographic, May 2011

The magical process Tom O’Neill writes about in May’s National Geographic hitting news stands tomorrow, April 26th, is the camera obscura.  This forefather to the modern camera can be traced back all the way to Aristotle’s time and comprised of an entire room in its earliest stages.  A rather simple device, the camera obscura takes advantage of simple laws of the physical world.  When light passes through a small hole in the wall of a completely darkened room or box, an inverted image of the scene outside the hole will be produced on the opposite wall of the room.  Over time the camera obscura was used by artists, mathematicians, architects, astronomers and entertainers becoming smaller and even portable over the years.  In the 19th century it took two tracks, one leading to the camera as we know it today (or more appropriately as we knew it pre-digital with light sensitive film) and one as an amusement park and carnival attraction awing 19th century entertainment seekers with its wonderment.

Jump forward to the late 20th century and Cuban born photographer Abelardo Morell’s resurrection of the camera obscura. Morell’s work combines the predecessor to the modern camera with the modern camera itself.  His photographs of the images projected by the camera obscura were a first in the early 1990s and have seen been displayed in galleries and museums and published in his book Camera Obscura.  The May 2011 issue of National Geographic traces the history and principle behind the camera obscura as well as Morell’s work since his early experimentation with the device in the 1990s in Tom O’Neill’s article Bravura Camera Obscura.  This is a great bit of photographic history that has been brought to the 21st century by Abelardo Morell.  Be sure to pick up a copy of National Geographic this week to get all the details and view more of Morell’s photography.  And if you’re inspired by how Morell’s work draws from the past, consider some online history of photography classes that will increase your knowledge of the field.

Image courtesy of Abelardo Morell/National Geographic

Image courtesy of Abelardo Morell/National Geographic