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Watch your baby sleep easy as well as listening...

Baby monitors are a necessity when it comes to having a child. My sister recently gave birth to my niece last summer and while discussing her recent purchase of the first family home, I learned about baby monitors with cameras attached. My sister's new home has 5 bedrooms, with the master on the floor below the other 4. This is a problem, especially having a 1 year old in a bedroom somewhat far from where her parents will sleep. Solution--baby monitor with a camera.

On Amazon, you can get one of these monitors for about $150-$200. It looks like your regular monitor that you can hear your baby on, but with an iPod type of screen included.

I think this is a great idea and I'm not sure why it wasn't made 10 years earlier. The fact that you can watch your baby sleeping safely is such a nice feeling when you're a worrying new mother, like my sister.

From Amazon

Logo inspirations to aid in assignment #2

Coming up with a logo is kind of a daunting task. It took me forever to come up with a basic logo for myself, a photographer. Logos need to be recognized and associated with whatever the person whose logo you see, does for a living. You can be conceptual, or stick to the basics as less is more. There's so many things you can do. Below are some examples of good logos that may inspire you, plus a website with lots more.

Logo inspiration

"Designer as Dramatist, and the Tales He Left Behind"

A show at the Met called "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty," is all about the career of a talented fashion designer and artist who ended his life far too early. "The show, or rather what's in it, is a button-pushing marvel: ethereal and gross, graceful and utterly manipulative, and poised on a line where fashion turns into something else." McQueen liked to shock people when it came to his fashions typically with shapes consisting of horns, teeth, hair, cast-metal, etc...

The fact is that McQueen wasn't just a fashion designer, he was truly an artist with an intense, dramatic vision that came out in pieces of clothing.

Alexander McQueen

assignment 3

Feathery Fun
photographs of a model, studio, Avedon lighting, and a pound of colored feathers.

pick a gallery, create an art show post card

NYC GALLERY – Hasted Kraeutler – 537 west 24^th street, new york, ny 10011

#212-627-0006


2x2 map to put on post card
use grays and one color

The influence of music on art..

The Parish Art Museum in Southampton, New York will be hosting a night where musicians improvise what they play based on what the artists are painting. Artists are influenced by musicians and vice versa, this is something that has been going on forever, but the idea of actually playing it out seems very interesting. 

"Everyone will improvise, the idea being that the painter will respond to the music, or paint what he hears, while the musicians simultaneously express what they see. From a musician's standpoint, it is very exciting because a line, a color, a shape immediately means something, and you trade it back and forth."

The band playing in this event is called the Sinopia Quartet, which consists of 2 pianists and 2 percussionists.

The influence of music on art..

The Book Surgeon

There are many different types of artists in the world, one way to be creative and try using an unconventional canvas, so to speak, is to use books as a carving material. Brian Dettmer is an artist who does this. He uses all different kinds of tools like tweezers and surgical tools in order to carve amazing details page by page. "The richness and depth of the book is universally respected yet often undiscovered as the monopoly of the form and relevance of the information fades over time. The book’s intended function has decreased and the form remains linear in a non-linear world. By altering physical forms of information and shifting preconceived functions, new and unexpected roles emerge." He's from Chicago and work in Atlanta. 

I really enjoy the intricacy and time that goes into creating a work like these books. I don't know if I could ever be patient enough to do complete one though.

The Book Surgeon

Creative Use of Film Negatives

On the theme of "green living" and do-it-yourself projects, one way to recycle old negatives is to make a lamp. Go to Ikea, buy a cheap rectangular or curved lamp for about $7 and use a clear type of adhesive, such as Mod Podge or rubber cement to attach your negatives. This is a super easy and creative project. The lamp you make will absolutely be one of a kind and it's a great way to use some old negatives that you have collecting dust. The light from the lamp will shine through and they look really great.

Turn Photo Negatives Into Artsy, Personalized Lamps

Beer Can Butterflies

While I was sitting in a doctor's office, I was skimming through a home decor magazine and came across these beautiful wall sculptures. They were sculpted butterflies in the pattern of a flock. I wrote down the name of the artist so that I could look him up when I got home.

Paul Villinski is an artist who works with found objects and after finding crushed beer cans, decided to create a butterfly installation using them.

“These pieces explore themes of transformation and recovery through the metamorphosis of crushed beer cans from the streets of New York into flocks of realistically crafted butterflies.” 

Beer Can Butterflies

I used to be an art history major and remember learning about 'found objects' in contemporary art. Artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg are known for incorporating random objects, 'readymades' into their artworks.

I think that using found objects in art is a really important subject especially today because recycling and re-using are the ways of the world now. Plus, I believe that anything can be used in art. The simple design of a beer can or the way it looks crushed can be considered art by someone out there. Paul Villanski just took the idea and ran with it, morphing his found objects into resembling beautiful things found in nature.

Artist's Website

This one time...I met a musician

Being a photography major, I typically generate lots of different ideas and projects that I want to focus on. Recently for a documentary class I decided that I wanted to go out and find a musician of some sort and use them as a subject. My journey began and after finally and randomly meeting a musician in a bar in New York City, we both decided to work together.

Jason Soffer is an acoustic singer-songwriter from England. He grew up outside of London and moved to Brooklyn about a year and a half ago. He's in his late twenties and although going to university for business, decided that he truly wanted to try his hand at the music business.  He had always loved music and is greatly influenced by The Beatles and James Taylor. He told me that he picked up a guitar one day and just decided that he wanted to learn to play, never thinking that it could end up being a priority in his life. He wrote a lot as a child as well. He writes all of his own music and we spoke about how he goes about writing songs. He said he always heard the music first and the words came second. After performing at a couple of open mic nights in Brooklyn and Manhattan, he met a producer. During the day, he works near Times Square with his brother selling commercial spaces, but by night he works with a music producer in Brooklyn.

Jason and I decided to meet at the Brooklyn Lyceum theater in Park Slope. In exchange for some free prints, he played his music for me and we spent a few hours in the abandoned part of the historic building (which actually used to be a bath house over a hundred years ago). In my opinion he sounds like a mix of James Blunt and maybe a little bit of Thom Yorke of Radiohead.

I'm really glad that I got to meet Jason. As a photographer who wants to focus on being apart of the music business, he gave me some really great material to work with (himself) and some experience at it as well. The best advice he gave me is that you have to do what you really love otherwise you'll constantly be changing your mind in life. I admire his courage and the fact that he's putting himself out there and that inspires me to do the same. I hope he makes it.

The Art of Pour Painting

Holton Rower's Website

I'm fascinated by the painting style of Holton Rower, a New York artist. He calls his completed works "Pour" paintings. The way in which he creates is by constructing a 3-dimensional shape, usually square or multiple squares and attaching it directly on top of a canvas or plywood. Then he continuously pours many different colors onto the box in the exact same spot. This creates waves of different colored patterns. They usually come out looking psychedelic and textured and are hung upright on the wall. Fun fact, Rower's grandfather was Alexander Calder, a famous artist known for mobiles and abstract sculptures.

When I watched a video of the process, I was so mesmerized that I decided to try it myself. I assembled a small rounded coffee can to a canvas and began the pour process. I love the freedom of it. You let the paint flow where it wants to go and there's no thought involved. I've been painting for over 10 years and my biggest challenge was always that I put too much thought into what I wanted my result to be. It became frustrating and therefore I began to paint less often. This process really inspires me to start again.

My own pour painting:

Video of the Pour Process

Birds in Flight -- a light installation

"Fly Light," a light installation by Design Drift of Amsterdam is something I've never seen before. It was designed with the lives and movement of birds in mind.


"Fly Light is a collection of 160 light infused glass tubes hung at various heights in a swirled configuration. The arrangement is scenic enough when dark, but when someone approaches, the individual bulbs flicker and dash in a pattern that resembles the waxing and waning of birds in flight."


When I find something considered art, what draws me in is the visual alone. What keeps me is the idea behind it. I think that "Fly Light" is extremely intriguing visually. It reminds me of a trip to a museum called Mass Moca in Massachusetts, where I saw an installation using clear discs of different sizes hung in patterns throughout an entire room. As a photographer all I wanted to do was photograph it, and I did. I would love to photograph "Fly Light."


my photograph at Mass Moca:

"The 160 lights are programmed with a bird’s “digital DNA” and equipped with ultrasonic sensors, which means they illuminate in random sequences depending on the “intruder’s” proximity. The result is a spontaneous display of phosphorescent evasion and approach as, like birds, the individual lights must stray from the threat without falling off the back. The most alluring aspect of the installation is its unpredictability. The lights alight in a non-repetitive way, taking their cues from the density of the approaching mass (meaning a more dramatic response for more visitors, or an especially frantic reaction when flanked on multiple sides)."


Fly Light

"What Happens When - A Temporary Restaurant Installation"

In Soho, New York City a restaurant called What Happens When will be open for 9 months. This temporary restaurant serves as an artistic installation, in which every month, the entire restaurant's decor and theme will be dramatically changed in order to create a new dining experience. You would think that this type of venture would be extremely expensive, but it's actually the opposite. Kickstarter, "a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers, etc..."helped out the creative group behind the restaurant.


Because the space in SoHo is a flexible one, it is easy to re-create with the exception of time. "Transition time between the themes is tight, the team has from midnight when the restaurant closes to 3pm the next day to finish each movement—sounds like being back in design school!"I think this idea is a very interesting one. Other than to the food, people pay a lot of attention to the decor and atmosphere of a restaurant. To re-create a restaurants atmosphere and keep the quality of the menu, that's a huge advantage to making a dining experience that much more memorable for customers.


What Happens When...

"Anxiety on the Fault Line"

A lot of the time, when people think of modern art in Japan, "Hello Kitty" comes to mind, especially because of its enormous commercial quality that has impacted the world starting in the 1970's. They also think of Gwen Stefani's Harajuku Girls. There is so much more to Japan than just the feel good commercialized and colorful brands. Japan is a nation of uncertainty. It lies on fault lines and has gone through its share of historical turmoil.

Nowadays one can find art that goes against the popular images. There is more feminism and politically charged art as well. In the Japan Society show, "Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art", all of these types of works are being shown. Especially with what just happened with the earthquake in Japan, "no one, of course, could have known that the show’s images of material fragility and decay would end up being seen in the light of real-life disaster."

Anxiety on the Fault Line article

Photographs of artwork

What are my aspirations?

To become a professional photographer
To photograph live music, bands, artists, alternative lifestyles, etc...
To drive cross country, write, take pictures, meet people
To live in New York City
To open my own business whether it be a studio, coffee shop, bar, etc...
To play more guitar and learn more instruments
To write a song

All of these aspirations are supposed to go into creating a logo, but I want to focus on the fact that in my professional life, photography is what I want to do. I like minimalist design, therefore I want to make a 'lens' shaped logo with a simplified shutter design in the center or something resembling a frame.

Possible logos:

Inspirational pictures:

BRAND SCAPE:

Re-created You Tube Video Still

When I hear the phrase 'film still,' I'm flooded with memories of movies that I've seen where the cinematography is breathtaking and it reminds me why I love being a photographer. By definition, a film still is "a photograph taken on the set of a movie or television program during production by a movie stills photographer...shots can be taken as part of the filming or separately posed."Source1

I think that the best definition of 'film still' comes from an article I came across called "The History and Aesthetics of the Classical Film Still," written by Steven Jacobs. "In several languages, the English term ‘film still’ refers to images taken on the set with a still camera and to an extraction of one of the sixteen or twenty-four single frames that together make up a one-second piece of film. In film publications using a more accurate terminology, the reproduction of a film frame, which Roland Barthes called a photo- gramme, is usually labelled as a frame enlargement. These frame enlargements often show a somewhat coarse-grained quality because they are magnifications of a single frame from an often battered celluloid 35-mm film strip. In addition, frame enlargements are often blurred because the movie camera operates at a shutter speed that is not always fast enough to freeze movement. On the cinema screen, the picture does not appear blurred because twenty-four separate frames of it – each one pushing along the action, each one with its own individual grain pattern – pass through the projector every second. Hence film frames that work perfectly on screen are often unsatisfactory as still pictures." This article is great because it explains in so much depth, the job of being a still photographer, how these photographs came to be and the importance they had on serving a film. A lot of the time, a film still is what actually sold the movie. "The aesthetics of the film still, which implies a specific kind of dealing with light, focus, narrative, time, temporality and the instantaneous. Finally, it investigates how these elements were taken up by some prominent contemporary art photographers and video artists." From the early 1900's through the 1950's, the way movies were shot had completely changed. The lighting sets had improved, the locations were chosen carefully, etc...Yet still, the major aesthetic stayed, the way an actor was posed, the 'statuesque beauty' that never left a photograph are qualities that have carried over to today's films. 

The History and Aesthetics of the Classical Film Still link

Some stills that I think are wonderful:

From "Bright Star" (2009)

From "Into The Wild" (2007)

From "Gone With The Wind" (1939)

From "Atonement" (2007)

From "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961)

For our film still/self portrait project, I chose a still from "Breakfast At Tiffany's." I love the style of the 1960's celebrities and Hollywood in general from that time period, plus everything that went into the film is great--the clothing, the hair/makeup, the use of Manhattan as the scene, the story itself, the cast, etc...

When thinking about film stills, it's hard not to think about the focus of them, which are the actors/actresses--celebrities. What is a celebrity and where did the term come from?

The idea of a celebrity has definitely changed over the years. The word was first used in ancient times, to describe someone with immense power and notability, with effect on the lives of the people, such as the Gods, Olympic champions, religious figures (saints, popes), up through the Renaissance with the great artists, etc...-- A History of Celebrity. link. Through the years the idea of celebrity became less about personal feelings of "the common people" and more about regular people getting their '15 minutes of fame.' Actors, actresses, singers and bands, and more recently reality television stars began to take over Hollywood and other cities notable for entertainment. I can't turn on the television at 7:30 pm without hearing about Brangelina's new adopted child or that a real housewife from New Jersey punched someone and got arrested. While I think there are many 'celebrities' who use their fame and money to make things better in our world, the amount that selfishly just want the fame outweighs the prior. As entertained I am by watching "Jersey Shore," I think that it's us who helps them achieve celebrity status. I guess it has always lied in the hands of 'the regular people,' right?

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Many artists have been inspired by film stills, a lot in the Pop Art Movement such as Andy Warhol, etc...Cindy Sherman of course, a photographer who re-created film stills of her own self-portraits. In a 2007 Vanity Fair photo shoot, Annie Leibovitz and Michael Roberts took a film noir approach to "Killers Kill, Dead Men Die," in which they shot celebrities taking the rolls of a 1940's crime film. This is a clear example of being inspired by film stills and the history of films in general. 

Killers Kill, Dead Men Die link