Array ( [0] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 34745 [post_author] => 4947 [post_date] => 2013-12-30 08:00:31 [post_date_gmt] => 2013-12-30 13:00:31 [post_content] =>By Joe Fassler - Artwork courtesy of
Brian DuffyThere was a time when
Duffy was everywhere. His photographs were a key part of the visual culture of the 1960s and 1970s. He was the go-to photographer in London, Paris, and New York, and he worked with everyone who was anyone. Then, Duffy disappeared. Shut down his studio. Quit the industry cold. There were rumors, even, that he had destroyed his work—burned it all. No one knew for sure.When Duffy agreed to give
Resource an interview, we finally got a chance to go behind the lens and contemplate the legacy of this brilliant, enigmatic pioneer. So, who is Duffy? The answer, it turns out, is as illuminating and paradoxical as photography itself.[caption id="attachment_34749" align="aligncenter" width="599"]
© Duffy[/caption]Ask Brian Duffy what he was thinking when he took one of his photographs. An early one maybe, when he was still a young man from tough East London, filling in for Irving Penn at Vogue with a borrowed camera. Or one of the many sixties images that took female sexuality out of the apron. You could even pick a portrait —there’s a long and incandescent list of icons to choose from—or ask about a fashion spread or glossy ad from the later period, when he was a go-to photographer in London, New York and Paris. Ask and he might lay the whole thing out for you. He might.More likely, he’ll tell you what he told me: a baseball outfielder comes from nowhere to field a skew line drive, dives for a spectacular, game-saving catch, and then heaves the ball back to second for a double play. Afterward, everyone will shove microphones at him, asking, “How did you do it? How? “ He will then go into a diatribe of explanation, Duffy says, “Which is actually rubbish. But he has to post-rationalize it because you sound like a mug saying, I don’t know!” And Duffy would know. “Art?” he scoffs, “None of that ever entered my head! Though when questioned, I had hundreds of answers.” There is wisdom in this oblique, analogical answer: Duffy refuses to narrate his process in hindsight because it is impossible to do so truthfully. He was on autopilot, guided by an artist’s instinct and chance. So how does a great photograph come into being? “Just do it,” he tells me. “Trust your luck.”[caption id="attachment_34755" align="aligncenter" width="576"]
© Duffy[/caption]Not that Duffy can’t speak eloquently about his work. He can go on all day about technique but despite his mastery, at bottom, he’s unimpressed and shrinks all the technical stuff down to size with one deflating hypothetical. “If you were to give me a trumpet,” he says, “maybe I could blow a note. Maybe I couldn’t. But give one of my grandchildren a camera and there is a possibility that they could take a seminal photograph.” The implication is that no one will ever play a Wynton Marsalis’ solo on the first blow. This is why a wizard like Duffy, someone who has devoted decades of thought and effort to his work, can say that deep- down photography is “not understandable.” The art of capturing moments is not something that can be explained or reproduced. Pictures are understood emotionally, but their construction remains fundamentally mysterious.
“One of the great problems with photography,” he adds, “is that, because you’re always trying to pretend you know what it is about, you, the photographer, rationalizes it with words and think you can do it again and again.” He laughs. “But every time I’ve taken a photograph I’ve not known what the hell I was doing!” The artist can set precise conditions or leave it all to chance, but he can never truly know in advance what the camera will see. And so a photographer straddles the horizons of a moment. A photo cannot be foreseen, and once it’s taken, a photographer cannot look back and tell again this truth. Can the process ever be free from this ghostly evanescence? “No way,” Duffy insists. “It has this metaphysical strangeness.”[caption id="attachment_34758" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Duffy[/caption]Duffy didn’t begin as a photographer. He went to art school in London and started working as a clothes designer and fashion illustrator. Later on, he felt this background gave him a huge advantage. “I knew how clothes were meant to look,” he explains. While working as a fashion illustrator for
Harper’s Bazaar, an art director showed him a contact sheet. He remembers thinking that the images were all the same until the art director pointed out the minute differences between them. There’s still a mischievousness in Duffy’s voice as he tells the story. “I said, ‘Oh yes, the model moved a little in each frame.’ And I thought to myself, ‘My God! This is much easier than being a fashion illustrator!’”Getting started was not easy. Duffy had no technical experience and no equipment of his own. “What I did,” he remembers, “was set myself up as a gopher. I went to different studios, and eventually someone gave me a job.” That person was the English film director
Ken Russell, who let Duffy sweep the studio floor. Duffy would work at a new studio every three or four weeks, trying to absorb all he could. “Because I realized I was on limited time, I was ferocious in my interest. I spent twenty-five hours a day trying to learn about photography.” After a year and a half, Duffy felt he had learned a good deal and decided to try to take the next step. “I went to the
Sunday Times in London,” he recalls, “and a wonderful fashion editor there gave me my very first job.” Duffy had only borrowed equipment, and the light blew up within the first twenty seconds of the shoot. The editor found the pictures dreadful and refused to print any of them. Somehow Duffy survived to shoot another day.Duffy’s early career had some minor triumphs—he was able to put enough of a portfolio together to snag a job at Vogue—but most of it is full of horror stories. “I was a total outsider,” he says. “I can remember being put down for the way I spoke. This was a time when the receptionist at
Vogue could almost have been a debutante. And oinks like me seemed awfully, you know, common.” It didn’t help that Duffy was still relatively inexperienced and that things were always going wrong. He was once asked to fill in for Irving Penn and take a portrait of
Otto Van Klemperer, one of the great conductors of the 20th-century. Van Klemperer insisted that a Leica be used, so Duffy had to borrow one, although he was inexperienced with rangefinder cameras. Duffy recalls, “At the end of the session, I said ‘Thank you maestro.’ He got up and walked to the door, turned round and said, ‘Mr. Photographer, is it normal that when you take zee photograph, you leave zee lens cap on?’” Duffy knew he’d blown it utterly. If the studio hadn’t blamed the lab he might have lost his job at
Vogue. Many of Duffy’s early stories have this feel—all con-artistry, cliff-hangers and hair-breadth escapes.
[caption id="attachment_34757" align="aligncenter" width="608"]
© Duffy[/caption]“The sixties started in the late fifties,” Duffy tells me, “and it was an incredible time, and I was there.” I was there—again, the humility, the relinquishment of self, as if all he did was stand there with a camera while great things went on around him. I ask Duffy what was responsible for the excitement and upheaval of this period, and he has an immediate, emphatic answer: “The pill! That was a total revolution. It changed everything, subconsciously, between men and women.” He adds, “Also, one-piece pantyhose allowed dresses to be shorter, skirts to go all the way up. That produced a look that hadn’t been possible before. It changed the dynamics of the female figure. And that, of course, changed sexuality.”Duffy came of age as an artist at a time when there were many revolutions going on, and he was on the forefront in combining two of them: the visual and the sexual. He can’t remember the exact moment he met
Terrence Donovan or
David Bailey who, with Duffy, became known as the
“Terrible Three”: the holy trinity of London sixties-era sexed-up photography. All three of them shared a similar background and a love for photography and jazz. Chris Duffy, his son and assistant, tells me, “David Bailey and Terry Donovan were his best mates and were always around. I remember them talking and discussing photography passionately.” Chris feels he’s never again seen anything like the passion displayed by those three during that time.The Terrible Three are often credited with infusing fashion photography with a new level of sexuality. Similar to how the New Journalists were injecting themselves into their work, Duffy and his contemporaries were bringing themselves into their photographs. This was often done in the form of sexual interplay between the male photographer and female model. A model is not a clotheshorse they felt—a model is a woman. And they photographed them that way. It’s hard to underestimate the impact Bailey, Donovan, and Duffy had on the fashion world. They were total outsiders—they grew up in East London, a world full of dockers and boxers, far away from
Vogue. When they brought their East End attitudes into the studio, it shook things up forever. Duffy perfectly expresses the culture shock they wreaked in the business with this often-quoted description: “Before 1960, fashion photographers were tall, thin, and camp, but we three were different: short, fat, and heterosexual!”The work speaks for itself. Look at the photographs he took for the
1965 edition of the Pirelli calendar. The images are saturated, up-close, and tactile; a love song to both the female form and photography. There is the sense that the camera has brought us spontaneity on a platter and captured the essence of a moment. And yet you wonder if this glorious “realness” is staged.
[caption id="attachment_34752" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Duffy[/caption]For Duffy, photography is “a great treacherous liar. You fundamentally think it’s telling the truth, and yet it also contains lies. Every photograph is packed with lies. It’s devoid of so many things—taste, smell, noise—and yet we tend to believe it! But the other thing about photographs is that they tell the truth. Even a fake photograph tells a truth.” The line between truth and fiction is much more blurred today, in the age of digital manipulation, than it ever was in the era of what Duffy calls “steam-driven photography.” Movies like Ben-Hur and Gladiator exemplify this phenomenon. In the older movie, the chariot accidents are “real,” even if they’re staged. When you watch a crash, it is a crash that physically occurred at a real point in time. In the more recent movie, everything is slippery. “The crowds don’t exist,” says Duffy, “and none of the accidents are real! It’s a non-real reality. And that touches photography. You believe less in images today than you ever did.” Of course, the world of fashion photography has never used images straightforwardly, and it was no different in Duffy’s day. He says, “I can remember models looking at covers and saying ‘Gosh, I never realized I looked that good!’ And they didn’t! They’d been touched, re-touched, rebuilt.” Still, everything was much more raw. “Even in New York, there was no such thing as make-up artists, and hairdressers didn’t turn up on shoots. The model did it. She did her make-up. She did her hair. Nowadays they just sit in their chair and read
Vogue.”Yet, the most important difference, according to Duffy, happened to the photographer’s role. The photographer has become deprived of his own ability to choose his fate, even his right to put himself at risk. Things that were once his responsibility have been delegated to others. Even though he’s at the wheel, his role is now greatly minimized, almost a token. “Someone takes a photograph,” Duffy says, “and everyone, including the hairdresser, the model, the editor, everyone, puts their mouth into gear. In the process, they rationalize what’s happening and make it common. So you get very, very high quality mediocrity.” Blandness through democracy and shared responsibility. I can tell Duffy misses the days when he could be at the helm, making hard choices under pressure— and taking responsibility for them. “I love the idea,” he tells me fiercely,” that when I got to the end of the session, I’d turn to my assistant and say, ‘I wonder if things will come out?’”[caption id="attachment_34756" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Duffy[/caption]Chris Duffy assisted his father during his last years in the business from 1974 to 1979 or 1980, before Duffy left photography for good. He began the way his father began—sweeping floors—but he gradually honed his skills and moved up to being an assistant. “In that period,” Chris Duffy tells me, “photographers like Duffy were what I would call GPs—general practitioners. We did everything, every genre of photography, in every format. You couldn’t ask for a better apprenticeship.” Duffy himself puts a different spin on it. “I worked in commercial photography,” he says, “and like a whore, I would work for anybody who’d pay for a photograph. From the very beginning I’d adopted that attitude. I didn’t give a sot whether it was for a magazine, or an advertisement, or a passport. If you want it, you’ve got it, you pay for it, good night. I just wanted to get paid. It was never about principles or art.”
And yet, listening to Duffy, I don’t think he solely sees his work as sheer commerce or that he’s unbothered by the often-crass consumerism of the magazine industry. At times, he suggests his line of work helps create a cultural lust for the impossible that spawns materialism. “Capitalism is driven by creating inadequacies in culture,” he tells me. “You don’t need Ray-Ban sunglasses but you’re made to feel inadequate if you don’t have them. Technology drives capitalism to create inadequacies. And photography is the tool.” If so, Duffy’s fostered a good deal of feelings of inadequacy. He’s created photographs of the world’s most beautiful people and shot ads for the most expensive products. Yet it’s clear that the commoditization of photography played a role in driving Duffy from the business. He’s dismayed with the way art directors and photographers can be at cross-purposes. “Of all of the art directors I’ve worked with over the years,” he laments, “I think I only met two who could read a photograph.” According to Duffy, art directors only “want to talk a photograph. Design, plan, and work it out.” He sees this as pointless. “A photograph only exists in time future, prior to taking it. How can you really know what a photograph will be before it is?” The very essence of this art is its spontaneity.When an image is stripped of its mystery, what does it become? Commerce? Propaganda? It’s unclear, but Duffy seems to know what the photographer can become when viewed as incidental. “Art directors really wonder, ‘Why am I paying this man so much money? If I could afford that camera and his assistants, I could do that. All he does is press the tit on the end of a shuttle!’”[caption id="attachment_34750" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Duffy[/caption]Duffy did burn his work, about fifty percent of his archives, he thinks. His frustration with the industry, with the process, had grown to be insurmountable and he decided he didn’t want to go on.When prodded to explain more, he says, “It’s quite a crazy story.” And then, slyly adds, “I’m not sure how true it is though.” This innocuous insertion screams out like a gunshot, as if he’s saying, Everything I’m about to tell you may or may not be true. I’m giving you a snapshot in time, and it will contain truth, and it will contain lies. The original moment, whatever it was, is lost now, and what remains is something evocative, vivid, based on reality, but fundamentally a myth, much like a photograph. “I came to work one morning and one of my assistants told me, ‘We haven’t got any toilet paper.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘We don’t have any toilet paper.’ Now as I said the second what, I was about to smack him. Trying to control my temper, I asked him, ‘What did you say to me?’ and he repeated, ‘We don’t have any toilet paper.’ And I thought, ‘My God Almighty, we’ve ended up where I’m in charge of toilet paper!’ It was enough to blow me out of the water. At that moment I thought ‘I’m not going to go on.’ It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” He pauses, and there is perfect silence for a moment, before he laughs, and says, “Surreal, no?” Yes, it is surreal, and whether this is a faithful retelling of one of the worst days in modern photography, or a myth that tells an anecdotal truth about Duffy’s frustration with the minutiae and pettiness that came to encroach upon his work, it is certainly a powerful story. No matter what happened, a lot of work did leave the earth in flames.
“I had a bonfire. A massive bonfire,” he tells me. “The work that’s left,” I ask him, “Is it just luck?” “Total luck,” he says. “It just wasn’t around that day?”“Sure.”[caption id="attachment_34751" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Duffy[/caption]Duffy, it seems, has never looked back. His past life as one of the Terrible Three had all but absconded. It may have stayed that way if it hadn’t been for his son. Chris tells me, “Duffy didn’t think about photography, or look at any of it, for many, many years. Bailey and Donovan were in the limelight, while Duffy really dropped out. But he’d been a legend. He was the man in London. I kept telling to him he needed to do a book. A couple of years ago, I went down to his cottage in the country and I started looking through old contact sheets. I said, “Dad, you’ve really got to show this.’” David Bailey pulled six boxes of Duffy’s negatives from the
Vogue archives, and he and Chris started going through them. Duffy had forgotten about them completely. “It’s just amazing stuff,” says Chris says, “and he finally came around to the idea that we should do something with it.” A retrospective of his work will begin at the London
Chris Beetles Art Gallery in mid-September 2009.The exhibition should be fantastic. There’s a wide range of material, and all of it is enticing. The images in the show have not been seen since they came out in print. Some alternate versions of famous Duffy’s works will probably be featured, however, Chris estimates that fifty percent of the images have never been published in any form. Much of the material was never intended to be published, as the exhibition will contain photographs taken by Duffy on his own time, not on an assignment, and not for money. Images that were never talked through, and never intended to be read. The inclusion of this material is what seems to interest Duffy most about the exhibition. He says animatedly, “I’ve never done anything with these images. Moreover, I’ve never been published outside the ads or editorials I shot so in that sense, I’m a virgin!”After London, the exhibition will go on the road. Negotiations are in the works with galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. What will the show be like? Will these never seen before images add up to a man, to an artist, or to an era? Together, will they construct a story?[caption id="attachment_34754" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Duffy[/caption]
I ask Duffy to describe his photographs, the ones he took for himself. What are they like? He says, “You’re a writer. You must have notebooks that you’ve just written down two lines in and then put away. Years later you look at them and think, ‘Good lord! How interesting!’ And you somehow have a revelation about you.” Going through these photographs has been quite an experience for Duffy. “Now that I see them again, I wonder why I took a particular photograph. Something was triggered in me to take it, but I don’t understand what.” Duffy continually emphasizes the unknown, and the workings of effaced selfhood, of a vanished time, with which he can no longer relate. Things that were lost, if you will, in the fire. Yet Chris tells a completely different story. “As we go through photographs, there are hours-long conversations about the people, the situation. He’s so good at putting things into context—politically, socially. It’s a fascinating process, and it’s very, very, exciting.” Which of these stories captures Duffy best? Both, of course, and at the same time, neither. The exhibition, I’m sure, will deliver both the man we all know, as well as a stranger.Photographs, as Duffy has said, are always forward-looking—they take place in future time. And so a retrospective of photographic work is in a sense, a bizarre thing. It’s a current collection of past images of what had once been future instants. The moments are lost; the reasoning behind them has been erased by time. We can no longer determine what truth they held, and what lies. And yet, if we can read them, they will tell us so much. I think this may be why Duffy speaks so often in analogies. He is keenly aware of the slippery nature of experience: the way that past experiences, even entire past selves, can half-vanish and become something we do not remember or no longer recognize. He never wants to say what “is”—he only wants to suggest what may be. There is truth in that. That’s what a photograph is.[caption id="attachment_34753" align="aligncenter" width="618"]
© Duffy[/caption]This article previously appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of
Resource, which is available
here.
© Bruce Soyez-Bernard[/caption]What type of lights did you use?I use Broncolor as flash strobes and had four lights. There were two strobes for the background, one on each side. I had one back light for the hair, and a little white line around the mouth and lips coming from the back. The main light was about twelve feet from the floor, with a medium grid, no gel, and with a little angle so I could light her cheeks, forehead and neck. I put a small silver reflector underneath, about thirty inches away from her chin. I like the silver reflector because it gives the image a little crispness —some punch.What camera did you use?Mamiya RZ67—that?s my favorite so far—with a f140macro lens.Do you shoot all film?I love shooting film. I?m very old school that way. I love working with film because it?s more natural. Digital is too cold for me.What film did you use?I really love 160VC [Vivid Color] from Kodak for beauty images like this, shot with strobes in a studio.Was there any retouching?Nowadays everything is retouched. Since I?m old school, I?m trying to get perfection on film. I want what I see on film and I do not want to retouch too much. I?m not the type ofguy who is going to spend three days on one picture and change everything. The light has to be right from the beginning. So retouching consisted of cleaning and color- correction—especially on the gold makeup: it turned out not gold enough, so I had to pushed it a little bit. That?s about it.Any words of wisdom to young photographers seeking a future in beauty or fashion? Be patient and keep trying. The world is full of talented people but very few succeed. Very few make anything out of it. If you really want to make it, be patient and perseverant.[caption id="attachment_34740" align="aligncenter" width="554"]
© Bruce Soyez-Bernard[/caption]This article previously appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Resource, which is available here. [post_title] => Bruce Soyez-Bernard on Beauty Lighting [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => bruce-soyez-bernard-beauty-lighting [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2013-12-19 15:59:38 [post_modified_gmt] => 2013-12-19 20:59:38 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://resourcemagonline.com/?p=34735 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )[2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 34692 [post_author] => 4947 [post_date] => 2013-12-25 08:00:56 [post_date_gmt] => 2013-12-25 13:00:56 [post_content] => By Maggie Flood - Photos by Adam SherwinIn 2002, photo producer Cindi Blair headed down to Parrot Cay, a small island off the shore of Turks and Caicos. What began as a diving trip quickly morphed into a business venture and love affair with the translucent waters and cultural wealth of Turks and Caicos, a small cluster of islands situated roughly 550 miles off the southeast coast of Florida. Within the course of a month Blair had established Turks and Caicos Productions, covering all photo production needs on and around the islands. Over the next year and a half, the company grew to represent a large number of private residencies and hotels as photo shoot locations. Today, Turks and Caicos Productions works for clients from Vanity Fair to Target who are attracted by the diversity of the islands. From miles of underground caverns and empty beaches to stunning hotels, historic buildings, and amazingly welcoming businesses and locals, Turks and Caicos provide the perfect location for that “wonder where that is” shot, not to mention the best diving waters in the world.[caption id="attachment_34725" align="aligncenter" width="562"]
© Adam Sherwin[/caption]GANSEVOORT HOTEL Every photo maven based in New York or Miami has at some point been acquainted with her majesty the Gansevoort Hotel. A third branch has recently cropped up in Turks and Caicos. Located on Providenciales, or “Provo,” the establishment lives up to its famous name, sporting some of the whitest stretch of beach on the main island. The hotel also maintains the highly sought-after modern style that its sister locations are known for. But beautiful décor andtrendy clientèle aside, the Gansevoort Hotel is an extremely accommodating business for photo shoots and film crews due to its long history as a favored location in other cities.[caption id="attachment_34727" align="aligncenter" width="562"]
Gansevoort Hotel
© Adam Sherwin[/caption]The Gansevoort Hotel Grace Bay Beach, Providenciales 649.941.7555 www.gansevoortturksandcaicos.comTHE PALMS REGENT Many noted photo shoots have taken place at the Palms Regent. Because every hotel on the main island is nestled onto a different strip of beach, each place has an individual and unique setting to offer. One specific characteristic of the Palms Regent of Turks and Caicos is its large (and largely versatile) infinity pool.[caption id="attachment_34720" align="aligncenter" width="562"]
The Palms Regent
© Adam Sherwin[/caption]The Palms Regent Providenciales 649) 946-8666 www.regenthotels.com/en/thepalmsTHE GRACE BAY CLUB & ANACOANA RESTAURANT The Grace Bay Club, overlooking a white sand beach and impossibly blue waters, sits on a large property and offers many opportune spots to answer varied photo aesthetic and needs. The hotel is also home to the phenomenal Anacoana Restaurant and Infiniti Bar, the longest bar in the Caribbean. Stretching an impressive ninety feet across Grace Bay beach all the way to the shore, the bar’s construction provides the illusion of extending indefinitely into the ocean.[caption id="attachment_34706" align="aligncenter" width="562"]
The Grace Bay Club & Anacoana Restaurant
© Adam Sherwin[/caption]The Grace Bay Club Providenciales 649.946.5050 www.gracebayclub.comCONCH BAR CAVES: The environmentally protected Conch Bar Caves wind for miles below North Caicos and are said to run directly into the sea at varying points. The underground expanse is not only enticing to the traveling spelunker or historian, but also provides amazing possibilities for photo ideas and locations. Here ambitious photographers can find all kinds of variations in color and light, including profoundly surreal rock formations that cannot be artificially created in a studio setting.[caption id="attachment_34713" align="aligncenter" width="562"]
Turks & Caicos National Parks
© Adam Sherwin[/caption]Turks and Caicos National Parks www.turksandcaicos.tcOUTER ISLANDS/AIR TURKS & CAICOS:Although the main islands offer a ton of great spots and natural phenomena, some of the best locations are found on the smaller islands surrounding Turks and Caicos. Because each island’s terrain is so dramatically distinct, there is no end to what can be found. The outer islands also maintain a plethora of different styles of homes and historic structures, from beach shacks or deserted nineteenth century colonial villages to the work of famous architects. However far away, nothing is inaccessible with the help of Air Turks and Caicos. Located in Provo, the charter company provides small jets ideal for the transportation of equipment and crew around the Caribbean.[caption id="attachment_34724" align="aligncenter" width="562"]
© Adam Sherwin[/caption]Air Turks and Caicos Provenciales 649.946.4999 www.airturksandcaicos.comBIG BLUE TOURS: Resource explored the island for a day with Big Blue Unlimited eco-friendly tours. The “Heart of the Island” tour first took us snorkeling and kayaking through turquoise waters (which, by the way, provide a great opportunity for some underwater photography). Following that was a quick walking tour of Middle and North Caicos, where we stopped for lunch at the home of Susan Butterfield, an island local who cooked us up some incredible food. Big Blue Unlimited offers various tours across the islands. It supports the Turks and Caicos National Trust, the local economies of the Caicos Islands, and promotes an understanding of the local way of life.[caption id="attachment_34718" align="aligncenter" width="562"]
Big Blue Tours
© Adam Sherwin[/caption]Big Blue Unlimited Leeward Marina, Providenciales 649.946.5034 www.bigblue.tcTHE PROP CLOSET: A benefit of being connected locally is having your own prop stylist and set builder. Turks and Caicos Productions maintains a prop closet that can provide anything from extra beach chairs, tents, phones, and electrical equipment to individually designed sets and props to meet the needs of even the most demanding client.[caption id="attachment_34726" align="aligncenter" width="562"]
© Adam Sherwin[/caption]Turks and Caicos Productions New York, NY 212.987.4233 www.turksandcaicosproductions.comSOMEWHERE CAFÉ AND LOUNGE: Louis Fabara, right, a transplant and owner of Somewhere Café and Lounge, serves up the best margaritas on Provo. The two-floor restaurant on Grace Bay Beach is always up for accommodating large groups in search of some good Tex-Mex food and a post-shoot happy hour. With a great sunset view and a laid-back, lively atmosphere, Somewhere is an appealing spot to bring both clients and crew.[caption id="attachment_34728" align="aligncenter" width="542"]
Somewhere Café and Lounge
© Adam Sherwin[/caption]Somewhere Café and Lounge Grace Bay Beach, Providenciales 649.941.8260 www.somewherecafeandlounge.comDA CONCH SHACK: Conch is a staple, not to mention a specialty, of the local cuisine in Turks and Caicos, and you couldn’t possibly visit without experiencing the many ways it’s prepared. One way to get your fill (literally) is to check out the famous beachside Conch Shack on Provo. This local spot is also home to the Rum Bar, known for its incredible rum punch.[caption id="attachment_34709" align="aligncenter" width="374"]
Da Conch Shack
© Adam Sherwin[/caption]Da Conch Shack Providenciales 649.946.8877 www.conchshack.tcLEMON CAFE: Turks and Caicos is home to a surprisingly wide variety of different types of food. For a Moroccan-Mediterranean feast, Lemon Café not only serves up amazing signature dishes but also offers a beautiful dining experience.[caption id="attachment_34722" align="aligncenter" width="374"]
Lemon Café
© Adam Sherwin[/caption]Lemon Café The Village at Grace Bay, Providenciales 649.941.4059 www.lemoncafe.tcO’SOLEIL RESTAURANT: Located in the gorgeous Somerset Hotel on Grace Bay, O’Soleil Restaurant plans weekly events on the beach long after the sun goes down. If you can, grab the chance to settle in for a lobster bake and some live music by the bonfire.[caption id="attachment_34712" align="aligncenter" width="562"]
O'Soleil Restaurant
© Adam Sherwin[/caption]O’Soleil Restaurant Grace Bay, Providenciales 649.946.5900 www.thesomerset.comIf you’re in search of that bright summer light in the dead of winter, Turks and Caicos not only provide beautiful white sand beaches, unique architecture, and fabulous hotel locations, but also promise a faster trip than a flight to Miami in just under two hours. “One thing you just have to bear in mind,” says Cindi Blair of working in the Caribbean, “is that you’re not in New York. It takes a sense of humor, but eventually things get done, even if you end up at some point working without electricity or Internet.” But the best advice for roughing it on an island is to go with the flow, and with any luck you won’t even notice that despite the 85 degree weather, the winter days are just as short.[caption id="attachment_34716" align="aligncenter" width="562"]
© Adam Sherwin[/caption] [caption id="attachment_34714" align="aligncenter" width="562"]
© Adam Sherwin[/caption] [caption id="attachment_34708" align="aligncenter" width="562"]
© Adam Sherwin[/caption]Blair Productions / Turks + Caicos Productions 315 E. 86th St. New York, NY 10028 212.987.4233 / 917.544.6977 cindi@turksandcaicosproductions.com www.turksandcaicosproductions.com www.cindiblairproductions.com
This article previously appeared in the Winter 2010 issue of Resource, which is available for purchase here. [post_title] => Productions of the World: Turks & Caicos [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => productions-world-turks-caicos [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2013-12-19 14:23:56 [post_modified_gmt] => 2013-12-19 19:23:56 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://resourcemagonline.com/?p=34692 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )[3] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 34676 [post_author] => 4947 [post_date] => 2013-12-24 08:00:22 [post_date_gmt] => 2013-12-24 13:00:22 [post_content] => Words By Charlie Fish - Photo by Carl Fischer, New York City, 1968Thirty-seven years after Carl Fischer photographed (and George Lois art directed) Muhammad Ali posing as Saint Sebastian for the cover of Esquire magazine, Radar spoofed the infamous image by having a Photoshopped Tom Cruise bearing digitally inserted arrows. It was supposed to be a throwback to the days when magazine covers—and their thought-provoking features—caused uproars, public discourse and even cultural shifts.Long gone are those days. Magazine covers now vie for your attention with oversized fonts describing the 616 summer tips for younger-looking skin, or how Transformers’ star Megan Fox is really pretty to look at, or the importance of knowing the recently-idle Idol alum’s sexuality, or even how the Disney Channel heartthrobs of today will someday rule the world.But in 1968 things were very, very different. Magazine covers (the best of them, anyway) bore little-to-no verbiage at all and relied solely on the power of their visuals to stop newsstand passers-by dead in their tracks and solicit a very audible, “Oh my God!”[caption id="attachment_34684" align="aligncenter" width="586"]
Muhammed Ali as Saint Sebastian, Carl Fischer for Esquire Magazine[/caption]Take the Ali as Saint Sebastian image, for example. At the time, Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.) had been stripped of his title for refusing to be inducted into the U.S. Armed Forces. Ali, a recent convert to the Nation of Islam, was drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. Citing his religion’s belief that “War is against the teachings of the Holy Qur’an,” Ali attended his induction but refused to step forward when his name was called four times. He was arrested, tried, and convicted within two months. The resulting battle to reclaim his freedom and title led all the way to the Supreme Court.Around the same time, Esquire had been featuring controversial covers dreamt up by George Lois, a former ad man. Lois has been widely credited for shaping a generational shift that reflected a turbulent era’s need for change, but he didn’t act alone. For fourteen years, starting in 1963, Carl Fischer consistently photographed the Esquire covers capturing the decade’s revolutionary changes during a time of an unwanted war, a sexual revolution, and a demand for civil rights.Resource met with the legendary photographer to find out what it was like to direct “The Greatest,” why the FBI investigated him, and his experienced take on the future of the magazine industry.On working with George Lois:We worked over the telephone. Lois never made layouts, never made drawings for the covers. He just had the idea of what the cover should be and he would call up and say, “We have a story about Ali and the fact that he lost his title. Why don’t we do something with him as Saint Sebastian?” And that’s the way it worked on all the covers. I would work out the problems of how to do it and Lois would sometimes show up at the shoots if they were in New York, which was the case here.On the setup:It was in my downstairs studio. For this shoot I used an 8x10 camera—don’t ask me why. I mostly used Hasselblad for everything, or 35mm, but that day, I was experimenting with a new ring light. It was a very big light, and for some reason it seemed to work better on a big, clumsy 8x10 camera. But there was no reason for the format. I move from one format to another. We set up and shot the day before on a stand-in model to have the exposure and the lighting right—so when we got to the actual shooting we could concentrate just on the shoot, not on the mechanics of it.
The arrows. Then vs. now:I had the arrows made by a model-maker in New York. I assumed we’d paste them on and that would be the end of it. Unfortunately, when you pasted the arrows on, they hung down. They didn’t stay horizontally as they should. So we made an elaborate device; we put a pole above Ali and hung monofilament lines, little fishing lines, from each arrow up to the pole. You could see the lines, slightly, on the final print, and they were retouched out. But they were hard to see because they were thin and transparent.Nowadays, we wouldn’t have had that problem; we would’ve put the arrows in [digitally]. But at the time, they had to be pasted on him physically. It was a long, boring process. Ali had to hold the position for an hour.On today’s ‘retouch-and-go’ nature vs. yesteryear:There [was] an article in the Times [recently] about makeup. Because of computers, models are being made up to look like figures out of wax. Magazines have always wanted things to be fanciful and unreal. Fashion magazine covers are not going to talk about the depression, inflation, and unemployment.I’m in love with digital photography and computers. I’m not a Luddite. I think all of these technical advances are marvelous. Do we screw it up? Sure, we screw it up. But we screwed it up in the old days as well. Retouching, improving pictures with computers, is great. But there’s a big tendency to overdo it.
On retouching the Ali shot:I’ve been going through my files and updating a lot of old pictures that I did. For example, as I had used an early form of a ring light—the first ring lights that ever came out—there was red eye. And it was originally printed that way. Lois didn’t know about red eye; he didn’t know how to correct that. But now when I reprint it, I take out the red eye. I’ve made a few little minor corrections—dust spots and other little things—which make [the image] better.There are other covers and pictures that had run years ago with little errors in them. [Art Directors] are mostly interested in the design or the layout of the cover or the spread. They’re not so much interested in the photograph. And photographers see things that they don’t see.On “The Greatest”:Ali is true to his reputation: he’s funny, he’s relaxed. There are a lot of people who get so impressed with their position in life that you can hardly talk to them. But Ali was always a big kid. He enjoyed life, and he always enjoyed himself. He was no problem to work with. This shoot was a pain in the ass. Not everybody would stay for an hour in that same position.
Taking a stand vs. ego:Ali took a proper cultural stand on this and I have to give him credit for that. But he was also very self-centered. I spent a night with him when Frazier and Foreman—I think—fought for his title after he lost it. I went to Philadelphia to watch the fight with a writer and Ali. When the fight was over, he stood up on his chair and yelled, “I’m the champ! I’m the champ!” He started a virtual riot in the place! And once, I stayed overnight in his Cherry Hill home in New Jersey. As we were driving to New York in the morning, he was speeding and was stopped by a state trooper. He told him, “I’m the champ!”On Parkinson’s having reduced “The Champ”:“Reduced.” That’s the proper word, because he was always so free and easygoing. Now, he’s still free and easygoing, except that he moves and talks slowly. Physically he just can’t do what he did before. And because he was an athlete—and a very clever and graceful athlete—it’s kind of a shame. I don’t know how he feels about it, but I think everybody else feels kind of sad to see him that way.On being investigated by the FBI:I was against the Vietnam War myself. I was part of a lot of people in this country —maybe half of them—who hated the war and thought it was unnecessary, just like the current war is unnecessary. I marched in anti-war parades. I photographed people burning draft cards, and had to suffer through FBI investigations myself.The editors of Ramparts magazine, a liberal magazine published in Los Angeles, wanted to burn their draft cards as a protest. Burning your draft card was illegal. They sent me their draft cards, and I photographed four hands holding [the burning] draft cards. Well, immediately the FBI came around. I called my lawyer and he asked, “You actually burned the draft cards?” And I said, “Well, how else are you going to do it and make it look real?” Besides, I didn’t burn them all. I saved what was left; I saved the pieces. So we went to the FBI office—which, coincidentally, was in the telephone company building, surprise. We sat in a little Kafka-esque room with just a little desk and a couple of wooden chairs, and you couldn’t even see the microphones.My lawyer told me, “They may never indict you.” (The President was having a lot of trouble with the war.) “Why would he want a big, First Amendment court case? He may just let it go.” Well, they didn’t let it go. But they kept postponing it and postponing it, and eventually the war ended so there never was an indictment, there never was a trial.
On recent “arresting” magazine covers:There are not so many anymore, but there are some. A few years ago Esquire ran a picture of President Clinton sitting down with his legs apart. That was a very powerful image. It wasn’t an idea cover, the way they were in the early days, but it was an arresting cover.It’s part of our conservative culture. It’s amazing how much culture has to do with the art that we do every single day. Especially we who are involved in publication art. Fine artists and painters may lag a couple of years. But I think that the new administration is going to make a difference in the way we do our artwork.On the future of magazines:We’re still doing ads, we’re still writing magazine articles, we’re still taking pictures, we’re still drawing illustrations. Artists and writers are still alive. So, without knowing what the change is gonna be—but knowing that there are going to be big changes—I can’t conceive that writers and artists will disappear. Because artists and writers do the content, and it’s the content that publishers, however they publish, need.This article originally appeared in the Summer 2009 edition of Resource, which is available for purchase here. [post_title] => History: Muhammad Ali as Saint Sebastian [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => history-muhammad-ali-saint-sebastian [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2013-12-19 13:35:01 [post_modified_gmt] => 2013-12-19 18:35:01 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://resourcemagonline.com/?p=34676 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 1 [filter] => raw )[4] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 34635 [post_author] => 4947 [post_date] => 2013-12-19 18:00:03 [post_date_gmt] => 2013-12-19 23:00:03 [post_content] => Franck Bohbot brings magic to the everyday. Theaters, swimming pools, museums—the French photographer captures empty spaces and turns them into characters in their own right, rich in detail and mystery. His photographs are vivid yet haunting, spaces that seem to hum with life and yet remain chillingly empty, as if the human crowds had been sucked suddenly out of the space, leaving the ghosts of nostalgia behind.[caption id="attachment_34638" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
Soaring Eagle
© Franck Bohbot[/caption]His latest series visits his delicate touch to Coney Island. In "Last Stop Coney Island," Bohbot brings the same warm light and attention to detail to the candy stores and abandoned roller coasters of the Brooklyn landmark as he does to the opera houses of Versailles or the galleries of the Louvre. Far from the stench of hot dog wrappers and sweaty crowds, this Coney Island is a delicate wonderland, hazy as a daydream and post-apocalyptic in its hushed emptiness. It’s enough to make us hop on the F train and right it on out to the sea, hoping against hope that instead of a slushy dirty mess we would be greeted by spun sugar towers of glistening crimson and matchstick hills breathing quietly under a cloudy sky.[caption id="attachment_34640" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
It Sugar
© Franck Bohbot[/caption]For more, go to Bohbot’s website, and prepare to be enchanted. [post_title] => Coney Island Never Looked So Good [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => coney-island-never-looked-good [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2013-12-18 15:59:08 [post_modified_gmt] => 2013-12-18 20:59:08 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://resourcemagonline.com/?p=34635 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )[5] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 34647 [post_author] => 4947 [post_date] => 2013-12-19 14:24:49 [post_date_gmt] => 2013-12-19 19:24:49 [post_content] => Clearly, we’ve been very, very good this year, because Santa dropped off an early present in our digital stockings this week. The Morpholio Project announced the launch of Trace 2.0, a revamped version of their app, first released in September 2012, which brings trace paper into the 21st century.[caption id="attachment_34656" align="aligncenter" width="720"]
Via Morpholio[/caption]The interactive app makes sketching faster, easier and more intuitive, enabling you to instantly draw on your photos or other imported images, as well as creating original sketches that you can filter—as ink, marker, perforation, or any of the nine other options. Like an Instagram for your drawings, Trace melds the drawing and rendering processes, allowing you to take your sketches to a whole new level. The app also includes a color palette feature, allowing you to draw with pre-assembled, coordinated color sets tailored to your subject matter, and a layers feature that enables you to view your creation at each step of the process and add, edit or remove information as necessary.[caption id="attachment_34655" align="aligncenter" width="693"]
Via Morpholio[/caption] [caption id="attachment_34650" align="aligncenter" width="640"]
Via Morpholio[/caption]As a photographer, this app can take you back to the days of classic grease pens, whether you’re working with contact sheets, lighting diagrams or post-production comments, or if you just want to add another level to your photographic process. The layers feature in particular allows you to get creative with abandon, letting your imagination run wild without fear of screwing up your product. Co-creator Anna Kenoff says, “The goal of the app was to embrace and enhance the fast paced and messy process of idea building, bringing back hand drawing to a culture no longer beholden to the desktop computer.” Her partner in crime and creation, Mark Collins, elaborates, “Drawing isn’t just drawing anymore—it is discovery. The hybrid of drawing and rendering opens up a vital pathway to inspiration unleashing enormous potential on the image driven world.”[caption id="attachment_34661" align="aligncenter" width="720"]
Via Morpholio[/caption] [caption id="attachment_34662" align="aligncenter" width="720"]
Via Morpholio[/caption] [caption id="attachment_34658" align="aligncenter" width="720"]
Via Morpholio[/caption] [caption id="attachment_34660" align="aligncenter" width="720"]
Via Morpholio[/caption]Like the tech-savvy love child of Instagram, Photoshop, and Microsoft Paint, Trace takes drawing to a whole new level, combining the expertise of architects, developers and designers to create a beautiful, simple, intuitive app that both streamlines and enriches the creative process. But don’t just take our word for it: check out the trailer below, showing off just a few of the handy, dandy things Trace 2.0 can do for you.Trace 2.0 Launch from The Morpholio Project on Vimeo.Trace 2.0 is currently available for download from the iTunes App Store. A Windows update is coming shortly.[caption id="attachment_34659" align="aligncenter" width="720"]
Via Morpholio [post_title] => Morpholio Brings Tidings of Great Joy, with Trace 2.0 [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => morpholio-brings-tidings-great-joy-trace-2-0 [to_ping] => [pinged] => http://vimeo.com/81946888 [post_modified] => 2013-12-19 14:25:04 [post_modified_gmt] => 2013-12-19 19:25:04 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://resourcemagonline.com/?p=34647 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )[6] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 34618 [post_author] => 4947 [post_date] => 2013-12-18 18:00:53 [post_date_gmt] => 2013-12-18 23:00:53 [post_content] => At first glance, the photographs in Lukas Birk’s new book, Polaroids from the Middle Kingdom: Old and New World Visions of China, look old, relics of a bygone era dredged up from a dusty box in a forgotten storeroom or some uncle’s attic. Cool blues tinged in yellow lend the images an underwater feel, as if we are submerged in the past, only permitted to look around for as long as our lungs hold out, until we must return gasping to the surface of the present. In fact, these images are brand-new, all vibrantly modern and captured within the past few years. There is something of an old attic treasure to the collection, however, as the nostalgic feel comes from the expired Polaroid film Birk used to capture each shot, working from a trove he discovered at his father’s house. For the Austrian-born artist, this blending of old and new serves as a metaphor for modern China, a country in constant flux, so caught up in a headlong rush of development that each day brings the country a new face, with the scenes of the day before gone as quickly as they came. Birk, a self-proclaimed “multimedia artist, explorer and organizer” who settled in Beijing in 2007, sat down with Resource to talk about the quicksilver neighborhoods of his new home, telling stories in visual prose, and the questionable authenticity of the Instagram effect.This is your second major publication (after Kafkanistan). What was the experience of working on this book like?It was a very organic process. I had the urge to tell a story, a story that related to my feeling of living in China at a certain time. Through luck I found a way to express exactly that and step-by-step the collection of images grew. When Marta Hallett from Glitterati saw the images she said, "Let’s do a book!"What makes the Polaroid film you used for this project so unique? Why was it a good fit for documenting China?The film actually expired in 1991. Usually films that are old are totally unusable, as the chemicals are dysfunctional or evaporated. Due to the right storage temperature and humidity, however, this film left the image in a layer of green, yellow or sometimes blue tone. Reds were very rare and that gives the images a touch of old, as if they were taken a long time ago and faded with the years. I always had a sense of nostalgia, even melancholy, in China. Not necessarily for old things but just for the things I liked and saw right now. The fast pace and rapid change lent an uncertainty to every corner I walked. My favorite noodle place might be gone tomorrow, or a street with trees might be all concrete, or I wouldn’t recognize a street anymore because a hundred trees had been planted over the weekend. This rapid change made me nostalgic for the possibility of change. And the film material captured exactly that. I could look at a photograph I had just taken and imagine that it must have been a long time ago, and most certainly was very different now.[caption id="attachment_34626" align="aligncenter" width="594"]
Mao tattoo, Beijing, 2008
© Lukas Birk[/caption]Do you think there’s something about a Polaroid, which immediately captures and crystallizes a moment, that prompts an immediate, inherent nostalgia, often for a moment that is barely past?Well, we could say the same thing about a digital photo that you can view on your phone right after taking it. The Polaroid, at least in the West, represents a time. You see a Polaroid camera or photo and you know it is from another time. Even if the photo is crisp and clean and taken five minutes ago, you still know that this technology is from the past, and that already attaches a certain nostalgia to it. Plus, with a Polaroid, you actually have a tactile object, in comparison to the screen on a digital camera. I think tactile objects trigger different memories in us.Much of your work focuses on peeking behind the curtain of East Asian cultures. What do you think Western audiences can learn or gain from seeing your work?I think all my work, though very different in artistic language or topic, is about telling stories. The narratives to these stories derive directly from my experiences in the different countries I work and travel in. If there is something to be learned from it, it depends very much on what the viewer wants to know about a place and how he or she interacts with the visual prose I produce, just like reading a book about a country or experience.[caption id="attachment_34628" align="aligncenter" width="594"]
Trash Collector Family, Pingyao, 2008
© Lukas Birk[/caption]What first brought you to China? What kept you there?An invitation to do a workshop in Beijing. And it was definitely the energy and possibilities that kept me there!What makes you nostalgic?A lot of things. Circumstances trigger memories trigger nostalgia. Though this pre-nostalgia I felt in China has left me.[caption id="attachment_34624" align="aligncenter" width="594"]
Sanlitun Matrix, Beijing, 2010
© Lukas Birk[/caption]In the foreword to your book, Katherine Don calls your work an act of authentic “agedness and nostalgia,” as opposed to the “contrived nostalgia” of things like Instagram. Do you think there’s such a thing as fake nostalgia?I cannot decide what's real or fake for others, but we have a lot of aesthetic trends these days that inspire "effects" of old and nostalgic things. Can effects trigger nostalgia? Maybe. Polaroids from the Middle Kingdom has effects in it—analogue organic effects—and if they trigger the nostalgia that I felt while taking them, then, yes. The difference I think is that I am not trying to imitate something through a digital filter. The same series taken with a digital camera and later altered digitally would not trigger the same feeling in me.[caption id="attachment_34627" align="aligncenter" width="594"]
View on the Bund, Shanghai, 2008
© Lukas Birk[/caption]Why do you think people today feel such a compulsion to make things seem older than they are or to revive their pasts, whether through Instagram filters mimicking obsolete film techniques or with endless “throwback Thursday” photos?Well I think we have to ask if people in, let’s say, the 60s aspired to keep elements from the 20s or 30s alive. If this is the case, then I think it might just be human nature to hold on to the comfort of the past, even if it is just the way an old image looks and feels. I do think though that we are losing certain tactile encounters through the extreme use of digital media. Somehow we have to compensate for this tactile gap. To make something look old might be such a compensation.Are you on Instagram? No[caption id="attachment_34625" align="aligncenter" width="594"]
Performance Artist, Pingyao, 2008
© Lukas Birk[/caption]Don also compares your work to other artists who have used the Polaroid medium, including Andy Warhol and Christopher Makos, who is a personal friend. Who would you consider your greatest influences, artistic or otherwise?Very often it is not the artists’ work that inspires me but the way the particular artist is living his life. I guess I am most inspired if somebody can distil his life authentically into art without needing to fill in the gaps by invention of aesthetics, concept or pop. Probably my inspirations come more from literature than visual art.Your work is difficult to categorize, ranging from landscapes to portraits to experimental work. What do you think binds your various projects together?I am a traveling artist. So I would say: the journey.[caption id="attachment_34622" align="aligncenter" width="588"]
From Polaroids from the Middle Kingdom: Old and New World Visions of China by Lukas Birk, ©2013, published by Glitterati Incorporated[/caption]Polaroids from the Middle Kingdom: Old and New World Visions of China (Lukas Birk, © 2013, published by Glitterati Incorporated) will officially release nationwide on February 1, 2014. For information on the book, visit www.GlitteratiIncorporated.com or contact Mi Mi Chloe Park (mcpark@glitteratiincorporated.com).Polaroids from the Middle Kingdom: Old and New World Visions of China Lukas Birk Foreword by Katherine Don 128 pages || 15 x 12” landscape hardcover || 5,000 words with 70 4/c photographs ISBN: 978-0-9881745-6-6For more from Lukas Birk, visit his website. [post_title] => Land Apart from Time: Lukas Birk's Polaroids from the Middle Kingdom [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => land-apart-time-lukas-birks-polaroids-middle-kingdom [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2013-12-18 15:29:59 [post_modified_gmt] => 2013-12-18 20:29:59 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://resourcemagonline.com/?p=34618 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )[7] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 34599 [post_author] => 4947 [post_date] => 2013-12-17 14:00:09 [post_date_gmt] => 2013-12-17 19:00:09 [post_content] => A few years ago, Australian photographer Chris Fawkes started a group, Facebook Wedding Photographers. He was hoping to create a forum for support and critique, sharing resources among photographers both in his native Australia and perhaps the United States. What he never anticipated was the sheer scale of the thing: as of today, the group has reached 13,230 members and counting, from every conceivable corner of the globe.Over the past eight months, Fawkes and photography guru (and good friend of Resource) Skip Cohen have worked hard to grow the group and create a safe space for professionals to give feedback on each other’s work and ask questions when they find themselves stumped about a particular technique or shoot. A few months ago, they took it one step further, launching their first ever photo contest through ViewBug, and with the help of Venice Album, SmugMug and Photodex. Judges Justin and Mary Marantz chose from a huge array of entries, narrowing it down to Lake Tahoe-based shooter Matt Theilen, whose winning shot, announced last week, will be published in an upcoming issue of Resource. They also awarded a Runner-Up prize to Austrian shooter Alexander Gliederer, and voters in a public forum got to choose a People's Choice winner, Australian John Tsatalios.[caption id="attachment_34605" align="aligncenter" width="680"]
First Place Winner: Matt Theilen[/caption] [caption id="attachment_34603" align="aligncenter" width="680"]
Runner Up: Alexander Gliederer[/caption] [caption id="attachment_34604" align="aligncenter" width="681"]
People's Choice: John Tsatalios[/caption]We chatted with Skip and Christ this week about what Facebook means for photographers, and how to capture the magic of that very special day in someone’s life.Skip, you've done a lot of work in marketing and photography education. What do you think photographers have to gain from social networking, and in particular from a group like this?SC: Having a solid network helps you raise the bar on everything you do. This group has been doing a pretty remarkable job of sharing ideas and techniques and helping each other when they're in a bind or have a technical question that's over their head. A strong forum like this becomes a resource center giving each member the ability to read and contribute what he or she wants. In the long run they're created their own customized forum.You recently boosted membership to 13,230 wedding photographers around the world. With the new members, and with the contest submissions, what common threads did you see in wedding photography across cultures and nationalities?SC: Great photography and technique is universally respected and sought after. It's still about capturing great expressions and telling the story even though the customs from country to country might change the way the story is being told.CF: I agree with Skip. Weddings are still a human story and as such great image making that captures the emotion and connection is a universal language.Chris, when you first launched Facebook Wedding Photographers, did you ever envision it reaching this scale? What has been the most surprising thing about this project for you?CF: I signed onto Facebook in 2008 and my first thought was that Facebook itself had huge potential for reaching a lot of people. I quickly started several wedding photography groups including one for each of the major cities in Australia and the U.S.A as well. None of the others took off but Facebook Wedding Photographers grew to 300 within a few weeks. I thought it might peak at around 500 over the next couple of years.We had reached close to 3,000 by 2009, and there was certainly group interaction but not like now. I originally thought we could have a place to network and for brides to find photographers. It was early in 2013 when I asked Skip if he would be interested in coming on board as admin on the basis of all the help and assistance he had been providing to members. He suggested we aim specifically to be a networking group.Perhaps that should have been obvious to me earlier on, but as soon as we did that we made it a closed group and participation escalated as members felt safer sharing, critiquing and being critiqued without fear of looking like a novice in front of their friends and clients. Of course membership has shot through the roof since. This has been one of the big surprises.The other big surprise is how much I have learned from other members. I shot my first wedding in 1983 and first paid wedding in 1988, and yet as a result of the direct critique of images I have posted I am a stronger shooter now than I was even a year ago. If you had asked me in 2008 I would have considered myself teachable, but figured I had been around the block enough to know how it all works.What do you think makes a great wedding photograph really work?SC: Expression trumps perfection every time, but photographers still have to pay attention to the technique…and great expressions come out of the trust built between the photographer and the client. Plus, today photographers have more creative tools at their fingertips than at any time in the history of photography, and it's wonderful to see what they're doing with it.CF: Emotional power comes first from content then from light, composition and technique. As long as those latter things are not screaming for individual attention, they can raise a very good image to a great one. Via Skip Cohen University. All images used with permission. [post_title] => We Have a Winner! From Facebook Wedding Photographers [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => winner-facebook-wedding-photographers [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2013-12-17 16:18:32 [post_modified_gmt] => 2013-12-17 21:18:32 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://resourcemagonline.com/?p=34599 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 3 [filter] => raw )[8] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 34540 [post_author] => 4947 [post_date] => 2013-12-16 18:00:33 [post_date_gmt] => 2013-12-16 23:00:33 [post_content] => Color us obsessed with Oleg Oprisco. The Russian photographer’s dreamy portraits and whimsical fine art work have got us swooning all over the place. His photos are soft and dreamy, yet with a dark, unsettling edge—something not quite right in this fairy tale kingdom of orange-lipped waifs and fluttering butterflies.[caption id="attachment_34544" align="aligncenter" width="480"]
© Oleg Oprisco[/caption]Oprisco is a deft colorist, striking a lovely balance between hazy landscape and bright patches of indigo or scarlet, and his sense of composition and proportion gives his models a doll-like quality, porcelain figurines dwarfed by towering stacks of books or suitcases or perched delicately on the roof of a house so ramshackled we click carefully lest we unsettle it and send the structure tumbling into the sea.[caption id="attachment_34542" align="aligncenter" width="420"]
© Oleg Oprisco[/caption]Oprisco’s is an enchanted, and enchanting world, and we’d love to wander around his photographs for a spell. Check out his website and Facebook page for more loveliness to fill your Monday.[caption id="attachment_34545" align="aligncenter" width="480"]
© Oleg Oprisco
[post_title] => Dream a Little Dream of Oleg Oprisco [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => dream-little-dream-oleg-oprisco [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2013-12-18 22:24:34 [post_modified_gmt] => 2013-12-19 03:24:34 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://resourcemagonline.com/?p=34540 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )[9] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 34456 [post_author] => 4947 [post_date] => 2013-12-15 12:00:48 [post_date_gmt] => 2013-12-15 17:00:48 [post_content] => You spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on it. It represents both your work and your life’s passion. And yet, when you’re not using it, where does all that pretty pretty gear go?If, like most people, you answered with some sort of hidden storage option (bag, cabinet, under the bed), then British inventor James Madelin has an alternative for you. His latest creation, Phlite, turns your tripods, cameras, and other photo gear into beautiful house wares, namely table or floor lamps.[caption id="attachment_34465" align="aligncenter" width="623"]
Via Kickstarter[/caption]The product is simple enough: a stream-lined, elegant light that attaches to the tripod or the flash mount of your camera, sliding easily on and off so you can enjoy your lamp while still being ready to shoot at a moment’s notice (the patent for the attachment mount is currently pending). Phlite comes in two sizes, small and large, and can even be used without a base, sitting flush on the floor or a table to provide a sleek modern light source even when you’re out on a shoot.[caption id="attachment_34464" align="aligncenter" width="720"]
Via Kickstarter[/caption]Madelin and his company, Enlight Photo Ltd., have been selling their inventions to amateur and professional photographers for a few years now, and Phlite itself has been in development for a year, but this month they’re taking to Kickstarter, launching a campaign earlier this month in hopes of scoring enough funding to really ramp up production to a much broader scale.[caption id="attachment_34460" align="aligncenter" width="640"]
Via Kickstarter[/caption]As Madelin says, “Launching on Kickstarter is the perfect match for Phlite. Anyone who loves photography gear will love it, but then there are a ton of people who just love great design too, who don't spend any time checking out photo blogs, magazines, or shopping for photo gear. Phlite is a mash-up of photo gear and well-designed lighting.”[caption id="attachment_34461" align="aligncenter" width="576"]
Via Kickstarter[/caption]Throughout the campaign, Madelin and his team will be posting video updates about their Kickstarter experience. You can be a part of their in-Phlite journey by following along, or by contributing to the campaign. Check out their Kickstarter page here![caption id="attachment_34468" align="aligncenter" width="576"]
Via Kickstarter[/caption] [post_title] => Let Your Gear Take Phlite [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => let-gear-take-phlite [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2013-12-12 16:05:52 [post_modified_gmt] => 2013-12-12 21:05:52 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://resourcemagonline.com/?p=34456 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )[10] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 34444 [post_author] => 4947 [post_date] => 2013-12-14 12:00:44 [post_date_gmt] => 2013-12-14 17:00:44 [post_content] => When most people hear the term “lightpainting,” they conjure up images of sparklers tracing hearts and signatures through the night air. But what often gets written off as amateur can actually come in very handy when shooting product photography, allowing you to illuminate an object or background in new and interesting ways.DIY Photography has a handy tutorial courtesy of Philippines-based portrait photographer Laya Gerlock, who shows you how to create cool effects and unique product images using only your iPhone and iPad as light sources. All you need is a tripod (or another steady surface or mount for your camera), your tablet or mobile device (a flashlight will also do in a pinch), and a room where you can turn off all ambient light.Gerlock walks you through the very simple process, which really boils down to set-up and experimentation. With the lights on, set your camera up on a tripod and aim at your subject, pre-focusing and then switching to manual focus or on camera so you can click the shutter once the lights are off. Gerlock suggests starting with 20sec ISO 200 @ f8, but every lightpainting session is a lot of trial and error, so it’s really up to you. As long as your shutter speed is ten seconds or longer, you’ll be good to go.[caption id="attachment_34454" align="aligncenter" width="700"]
© Laya Gurlock
Via DIY Photography[/caption]Once you’re set up, hit the lights, making sure there is zero ambient light creeping in, and when you’re ready, hit the button and start waving your light source around the subject (purposefully, of course). Gerlock used the iPhone to light his cameras and bottles and an iPad app with different graphic patterns to create cool backgrounds, sliding it in a slow arc behind the subject to finish the shot.[caption id="attachment_34452" align="aligncenter" width="512"]
© Laya Gurlock
Via DIY Photography[/caption]If you’re hungry for a little more instruction, Gerlock also uploaded this video to YouTube demonstrating exactly how waving your phone around can light your subject and create interesting backgrounds. Check out the tutorial, and his results, here![caption id="attachment_34451" align="aligncenter" width="512"]
© Laya Gurlock
Via DIY Photography[/caption] [caption id="attachment_34448" align="aligncenter" width="512"]
© Laya Gurlock
Via DIY Photography[/caption] [caption id="attachment_34447" align="aligncenter" width="512"]
© Laya Gurlock
Via DIY Photography[/caption]Via DIY PhotographyFor more from Laya Gerlock, check out his website or follow him on Flickr. [post_title] => There's an App for That: Lightpainting with iPhone and iPad [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => theres-app-lightpainting-iphone-ipad [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2013-12-12 15:18:53 [post_modified_gmt] => 2013-12-12 20:18:53 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://resourcemagonline.com/?p=34444 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 1 [filter] => raw )[11] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 34366 [post_author] => 4947 [post_date] => 2013-12-13 16:00:36 [post_date_gmt] => 2013-12-13 21:00:36 [post_content] => Jeff Friesen is leading a double life. For three quarters of the year, he is an award-winning fine art photographer, capturing stunning shots, often in the great outdoors of his native Canada, that have garnered worldwide acclaim and numerous awards. On summer afternoons, however, Jeff becomes “Ernie,” whimsical creator of humorous dioramas and Legoist extraordinaire.The now viral 50 States of Lego started as a pet project for Friesen and his daughter, who would spend long afternoons building scenes with her Legos and other toys and then shooting them in a mini studio. The photographer dove head first into the project, first with a series satirizing the provinces of Canada and then with these United States, caricatured in little plastic blocks. The resulting vignettes are whimsical and smart, wittily captioned and rich in vibrant color and detail. Friesen talks to Resource this week about how it all started, and what a world-renowned photographer has to learn from a toddler.[caption id="attachment_34378" align="aligncenter" width="560"]
ALASKA
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Fish for a man and he is food for a week. -From Abominable Quotes by Shaggy Bonespitter[/caption]How did this project start? Which came first, the Legos or the mini photo studio?Every summer I look after my daughter in the afternoon. To keep us amused I set up a little tabletop studio (of the white tent variety) that we use to take pictures of her toys. This past summer she was into Lego so we made Lego dioramas. I started making Lego scenes of all the Canadian provinces as a joke for my friends. Because there are only ten provinces the fun ran out too soon, so I pondered whether it would be possible to make Lego scenes for all fifty States. It seemed almost impossible given the limits of my daughter's Lego collection.[caption id="attachment_34380" align="aligncenter" width="560"]
ILLINOIS
Bugsy’s mom is thrilled that he’s running his own lemonade stand this summer. He's so busy he hasn’t rubbed out any of his associates since June.[/caption]How does your daughter inspire you?Unlike many adult Lego builders, my daughter works with Lego free from dogma. She has even used a rubber band to hold pieces together. It inspires me not to get too rigid in my ways.[caption id="attachment_34374" align="aligncenter" width="560"]
NEW YORK
Give me your tired, your poor, your creamy masses of tartar sauce.[/caption]As a Canadian, how much of this project came from knowledge you already had, and how much had to be researched?I lived in the US for two years, and over the last twenty years I've visited most of the states. For states I've never been to I did research using Google.[caption id="attachment_34379" align="aligncenter" width="560"]
TEXAS
Rounding up little doggies who have lost their way.[/caption]How many of the states represented here have you been to? What do you think the residents would think of their Lego likenesses?I've been to thirty-six states. Residents of states are overwhelmingly happy about their Lego likeness. It gives people a laugh, and that is the work's goal. There are some people who think I didn't capture every important aspect of their state, but that is of course impossible to do in one picture, Lego or not.[caption id="attachment_34373" align="aligncenter" width="560"]
NEW MEXICO
People tend to shy away from probing questions in the land of enchantment.[/caption]Do you have a favorite diorama? What do you think makes for a good Lego vignette, as it were?I don't have a favorite; in fact, they are designed to look nice as a complete set. Consistency is important to all of my work. Humor is an important element to Lego vignettes, and the ability to get a story across in one scene.[caption id="attachment_34377" align="aligncenter" width="560"]
KANSAS
There’s no place like home, but if your home is frequently blown aloft it helps to wear a parachute indoors.[/caption]With these dioramas, how much is done in camera and how much is Photoshop?The only major Photoshop work is removing the strings that hold up flying objects, such as those in the Kansas scene. Other than that Photoshop is just used for standard image adjustments such as contrast and color balance.[caption id="attachment_34376" align="aligncenter" width="560"]
CALIFORNIA
Moonbeam’s mellow is never harshed by her Fruitfly brand compost-powered tri-scooter.[/caption]This project is a pretty big departure from your usual work. What does the Lego work allow you to do that your fine art photography does not?The Lego work lets me have a laugh, which is a big part of my life even though most of my photography is serious in nature. In some ways it is the antidote for my other work.[caption id="attachment_34375" align="aligncenter" width="560"]
TENNESSEE
One can’t help falling in love with a quadruple layer club sandwich.[/caption]Is there anything (techniques, approach to a shoot, etc.) from your fine art work that translates to the Lego shoots, or are they completely separate?The work ethic is the same for the Lego as it is for anything else I'm working on.[caption id="attachment_34383" align="aligncenter" width="560"]
LOUISIANA
A Mardi Gras float is only as good as its clean-up crew.[/caption]So far, you’ve done the Lego Provinces of Canada and the Lego States of America. What’s next?The next project is Lego World, and, though I've been trying not to go there, some fresh ideas involving Lego Star Wars have recently come to mind.All images © Jeff Friesen [post_title] => Fifty Nifty Lego States [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => fifty-nifty-lego-states [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2013-12-12 10:58:30 [post_modified_gmt] => 2013-12-12 15:58:30 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://resourcemagonline.com/?p=34366 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )[12] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 34411 [post_author] => 4947 [post_date] => 2013-12-12 12:11:10 [post_date_gmt] => 2013-12-12 17:11:10 [post_content] => Android users, rejoice! Christmas came early this week as Shutterstock officially launched their first ever Android-compatible app, so Google devotees can quit being jealous of their 650,000 friends who are already taking advantage of the iOS version.[caption id="attachment_34418" align="aligncenter" width="500"]
Via Shutterstock[/caption]The Shutterstock app is a one stop shop for inspiration, enabling users to easily search through the company’s collection of over 30 million photos and illustrations, adding them to lightboxes for later downloading and easy access (these are a few of our favorite things). iPhone users have already run tens of thousands of searches using their handy-dandy app, so that number is expected to skyrocket with the addition of Android.[caption id="attachment_34417" align="aligncenter" width="500"]
Via Shutterstock[/caption]Android users are no stranger to Shutterstock love—the company says they made up almost half of all mobile traffic to the shutterstock.com site last month—so really it was just a matter of time before they got a brand-new shiny app made just for them. And with the low, low price of, well, nothing, this could be the cheapest gift on your wishlist. Available on Google Play. [post_title] => New Shutterstock App Launches for Android [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => new-shutterstock-app-launches-android [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2013-12-12 12:11:31 [post_modified_gmt] => 2013-12-12 17:11:31 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://resourcemagonline.com/?p=34411 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )[13] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 33757 [post_author] => 4947 [post_date] => 2013-12-12 08:00:47 [post_date_gmt] => 2013-12-12 13:00:47 [post_content] =>Iconic, simplicity, innovation—these are all words that can be used to describe both Leica and Apple, two companies that have set themselves apart for their marriage of top-of-the-line technology with instantly identifiable design. So when Apple designer Sir Jonathan Ive approached Dr. Andreas Kaufmann, Chairman of the Supervisory Board for Leica, about collaborating on a special edition camera, Kaufmann says the company jumped at the opportunity.
“I had been in discussion with Jonathan before—I’ve known him since 2009 or so—and then he came up with this idea, that we should do something together for the (RED) auction. Then I got a letter from Bono, and it was clear that we should do it.”
The result is a custom-made digital rangefinder camera, blending the technology and iconic look of the Leica M with Ive’s Apple design aesthetic to create a unique piece of history that Gizmag describes as, “the love-child of a Leica M, a MacBook, and the Instagram logo.” Kaufmann and the Leica team like the description, although Head of Product Management Stefan Daniel is quick to point out that you could just as easily say the Instagram logo looks a bit like a Leica…
[caption id="attachment_34385" align="aligncenter" width="600"]
The Leica team at Sotheby's with the Custom (RED) Digital Rangefinder Camera
(l to r) Dr. Andreas Kaufmann (Chairman of the Supervisory Board), Alfred Schopf (CEO), Stefan Daniel (Head of Product Management), and Steffen Keil (Head of International Sales)[/caption]The camera, which the company has been working on since last December, is the product of over fifty engineers and over nine hundred prototype parts, according to Daniel. The body of the camera, which is built out of a single, solid block of aluminum, is finished with more than 21,000 little holes, engraved into the body by laser at the Apple factories in Cupertino. That process alone takes ninety-six hours, he says, a fraction of the time spent designing and manufacturing this unique piece of machinery.
While the interior of the camera—electronics, shutter, software, sensor—is standard to the classic Leica M, over one hundred parts had to be redesigned or modified to fit with Ive and partner Marc Newson’s design. “Jony simplified everything, and I mean that in the sense of reduced,” explains Daniel. Newson echoes his sentiments, “The Leica object embodies the most iconic qualities of a camera. It ended up being a process of distillation and concentration.” But while some elements have changed, the Leica team says the camera remains true to the principles that have come to define the iconic brand.
[caption id="attachment_34388" align="aligncenter" width="600"]
Leica M, Special Edition (RED) Camera[/caption]“It is simplicity, authenticity and design,” says Daniel, with CEO Alfred Schopf adding, “Also heritage, craftsmanship and longevity, I would say. In 1954, we made the very first M, and you can still use all of the lenses we were making back then with the very latest model.” Kaufmann echoes their sentiments: “I think what defines a Leica is optical excellence and experience since 1925. Also the craftsmanship and the German engineering [of the product]. I think that’s a good combination.”
So can we expect to see more Leica/Apple cameras coming to stores near you? Only time will tell. The Leica team all gave very positive reviews of the collaborative process working with Ive and Apple this go round. Daniel recalls, “From the beginning, it was a great relationship. And from what we saw, the engineers from Apple, and Marc and Jony, they shared the same passion for this project that we did.” However, Leica remain cautious about the possibility of future joint ventures. “My personal opinion is Apple is not that good at partnerships, up until now,” says Kauffman. “So we’ll see.”
[caption id="attachment_34386" align="aligncenter" width="600"]
Leica M, Special Edition (RED) Camera[/caption]The Leica camera was one of forty-four items up for auction at Sotheby’s on November 23rd as part of “Jony and Marc’s (RED) Auction,” with all proceeds going to benefit the HIV/AIDS charity founded by Bono and Bobby Shriver in 2006. Ive and Newson curated the entire catalogue, and the Leica was one of a handful of items designed by the British duo themselves, alongside an aluminum desk and a custom Dom Perignon cooler. With a final sale of a cool $1.8 million, the camera is also the most expensive item on the books, although it didn’t quite shatter the record set just last year for the most expensive camera ever sold (also a Leica, one of only twenty-five 0-series models produced in 1923, which went for a whopping $2.77 million).
Leica cameras are numbered sequentially, starting with the very first commercial model in 1924, which makes this the 4,888,888th camera the company has ever produced. That serial number of 4888888 may have driven up the price in the end, with Head of International Sales Steffen Keil explaining, “The number eight is lucky in China and Japan, where many of these camera and design collectors come from. At the auction in Vienna last year, there were about five of them competing that really drove the price up.”
Whether it was the competition or the holiday spirit of giving, wallets seemed to be wide-open at the Sotheby’s event, which raised an incredible $26.2 million, all of which will go to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria in Africa. ($13 million of that total was from the auction sales themselves, while the other half came via a matching donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Somebody is definitely going on Santa’s nice list this year.) Other Apple offerings on the auction block included a special (RED) Edition of the highly anticipated Mac Pro as well as a pair of solid rose gold Earpods, both custom Ive and Newson designs that fetched $977,000 and $461,000 respectively (the Mac Pro broke the record for most expensive desktop PC ever built or sold, shattering the previous world record set by Zeus Computer's novelty platinum, gold and diamond-encrusted models).
[caption id="attachment_34387" align="aligncenter" width="600"]
Leica M, Special Edition (RED) Camera[/caption]Whoever won the Leica RED camera now owns a once-in-a-lifetime piece of photographic history, at once a part of the heritage that Leica holds so dear while also representing the cutting edge of modern design and technology. “Many iconic images were shot with a Leica,” says Keil, “Which all contribute to the heritage of the camera,” adds Schopf. “We have a saying: With other cameras, you take pictures. With a Leica, you make pictures.” But with such a hefty price tag, do they actually expect this camera to add to that historic catalogue of photographs?
“The picture-making capabilities are all there,” Daniel assured me the day before the auction. “But it really depends on the buyer. I think it’s going to be a lover of design and a lover of cameras, somebody who is aware that he is getting a unique piece. For sure you can shoot with it. But I think somebody will try it once, and then put it back on its little shelf.”
“I don’t know, I think it could be kind of cool to go to a party with this camera,” Keil speculates. Just stay away from the champagne: this may be an Ive design, but AppleCare for the camera is currently unavailable.
[post_title] => Leica RED Camera - A Match Made in Design Heaven [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => leica-red-camera [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2013-12-11 17:41:43 [post_modified_gmt] => 2013-12-11 22:41:43 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://resourcemagonline.com/?p=33757 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )[14] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 33976 [post_author] => 4947 [post_date] => 2013-12-11 12:00:39 [post_date_gmt] => 2013-12-11 17:00:39 [post_content] => Picture yourself on a road trip with one of your closest friends. The windows are down, music blaring, landscape rolling past. Scenery flashes by in bursts of dreamy color: dusty desert town, marbled pebbly beach, wide wintry road, Iceland. Laura Austin’s photographs have a way of putting you in the passenger seat of her journey through this world. The snowboarder slash designer slash writer slash photographer has a knack for storytelling, and her shots are all rich in unspoken narratives and genuine Americana. While many of them capture tiny human figures dwarfed by a majestic natural scene, they manage to convey a warm intimacy and a delicious spontaneity, whispering of campfire stories and cloudy days at the beach. As she puts it, “The goal is to tell a visual story that will inspire others to go out and experience the world for themselves. There is a lot to see out there and a camera isn’t always going to do it justice.” Not always, no, but Austin comes pretty damn close. She chatted with Resource this week about her work, the Great American Road Trip, and what storm troopers do at home.[caption id="attachment_34354" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption]You recently updated your portfolio with a lot of new work. How is this work similar to or a departure from your previous work?Earlier this year I decided to quit my desk job and pursue a career as a freelance photographer. Allowing myself to focus strictly on photography has caused my work to progress in so many ways. The site update showcases a lot of the new projects I have done since I jumped headfirst into the world of self-employment.[caption id="attachment_34357" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption][caption id="attachment_34356" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption]Do you prefer shooting film or digital? What does film allow you to do that digital does not?These days I mostly shoot digital because of the quick turn-around time that is generally needed. However, when I do decide to take a step back and go analog, I love the anticipation and imperfections involved. I believe those imperfections give film more character. Also, when shooting film, my photos tend to be more considered due to the limited amount of photos on a roll.[caption id="attachment_34338" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption][caption id="attachment_34343" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption]How did you first stumble into photography?Initially it was a high school photography class. We shot strictly film and developed everything ourselves. There was something about the process that I fell in love with… how much work went into one image and how good it felt when it turned out even better than you expected. I still get a sense of that process now shooting digital; the steps have simply changed.[caption id="attachment_34355" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption][caption id="attachment_34347" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption]A lot of your photos have a soft, dreamy quality, with saturated color and big natural spaces dwarfing the human figures. How would you describe your photography style?Hmmm, I don’t know if I could attribute any one style to my work. I simply shoot what I am attracted to. And as you said, a large amount of my photos feature a single human image in a vast, wide-open landscape. I think subconsciously I am attracted to this composition because that is the scenario I personally feel most at ease in: alone in nature. That’s my favorite thing about photography, what it reveals that is going on inside the photographers own head.[caption id="attachment_34339" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption][caption id="attachment_34349" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption]The other writers and I actually laughed out loud at this picture of the girl in the storm trooper helmet. What is the story behind that shot?Haha. That was from a shoot I did for the website MeInMyPlace.com. That girl happened to have a storm trooper helmet sitting around her house. I thought it would be funny to throw it on her and do something you wouldn’t normally expect to see a storm trooper doing.[caption id="attachment_34340" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption][caption id="attachment_34341" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption]You come from a background in snowboarding as well as design and journalism. How do these other areas overlap with your photography?All of those things play a significant part in the way I use a camera. Design taught me composition, journalism taught me how to tell a story, and snowboarding gave me a sense of adventure. And for me, all of those areas were forms of self-expression.[caption id="attachment_34345" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption][caption id="attachment_34344" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption]What do you think makes for good storytelling?Hmmm… That’s a good question. As far as photography goes, for me it is about catching those in between moments, those things that every person might not think to take a photo of, when you are acting as more of a fly on the wall. You aren’t going to have much of a story with just a beginning, climax, and end. It’s those moments in between that make it complete.[caption id="attachment_34346" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption][caption id="attachment_34350" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption]You say you have “an insatiable appetite for travel.” What is your favorite place you’ve ever visited or trip you’ve taken? Where do you want to go next?Iceland has been the most amazing place I have been so far, hands down. As far as what’s next, there are some areas in Turkey with some incredibly unique landscapes that I would love to see and photograph. Patagonia, Chile would be amazing for the same reasons.[caption id="attachment_34353" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption][caption id="attachment_34348" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption]If you could send somebody on a Great American Road Trip, where would you have them go?Oh wow. There is so much to see on the road in America. For me it isn’t all about where the road leads you to, but more about who you’re with and the adventure getting there. But I highly recommend driving through a national park at some point. There are reasons that land is protected; you’ll have to go for yourself to truly understand.[caption id="attachment_34352" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption][caption id="attachment_34351" align="aligncenter" width="630"]
© Laura Austin[/caption]For more from Laura Austin, check out her website, or you can follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Instagram. [post_title] => Hitting the Road (Vicariously) With Laura Austin [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => hitting-road-vicariously-laura-austin [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2013-12-11 11:49:31 [post_modified_gmt] => 2013-12-11 16:49:31 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://resourcemagonline.com/?p=33976 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )) 
