Friday, April 25, 2008

RE: Online Artists

Please click on the blog titles for online links

Tony Howell

online artist 5


As the semester is coming to an end, I'm starting to think more of how I can further use my creativity in developing my images. Maybe I can use a little bit more of Photoshop for digital alteration of my images. I found this image above, and I started to think of maybe combining different flowers to give a different feeling and patterns. At the same time I am beginning to also like the macro focus of an object or in the case of what we have been doing in our class...macro focus of the flowers. Your use of depth of field definitely gives you a different outlook. I am much aware of how I approach my subject within my work.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Finally...it's done














I'm proud that I was able to create two books this semester. You can imagine my excitement when both of them were finally published on Blurb. For my California native plants book, I took some of my best pictures and applied some texts that came from my blog and some I wrote specifically for the book. I felt I have learned so much during the field trips that I can't help but share the information that I have gathered. I must say, I had a very good feedbacks from some people. My husband took the book to his work, and one even suggested that the book would be good for tourists. My intention in creating this book is to make awareness of the beautiful native plants, trees, and Rock Art we have here in California. Sadly, they are sometimes the last thing we think of, when we start making developments for new housings, schools, businesses, freeways...etc. Part of my goal is also for people to see the beauty and understand more of the use of the native plants. So here is some taster from my book.

Monday, April 14, 2008

wildflowers everywhere






The wildflowers seem to be everywhere. Here are some new pictures that I have taken just around the neighborhood.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Joel Sartore

Online artist 4

Joel Sartore is a photographer for The National Geographic. "The frontiers are mostly gone now, and so is our connection to the land. No generation has ever been as far removed from the natural world as we are today." In his gallery, man vs nature Santore explores our relationship to nature. From Caribou in front of an oil refinery in Canada to the Bonneville Dam in Washington/Oregon, he presented how we build system and factories with the cause of nature. The shelters of animals, fish, nature, and etc...are being taken away from them. No longer they have a safe place to live in as a new factory, dam, and even a new highway is built in place to the wilderness they were familiar with. Sartore believes that we seem to forget about that we are all in this together. What is good for nature is good for humanity.

I thought Sartore's pictures are compelling. I do feel like we are becoming more detached to nature. This reminds me of our class, and how we have talked about how California is big in development. We are further threatening the shelters of animals who can't rally for their rights to have a safe place, and also as we talked about in class, the destruction of historical sites such as some of the Native Rock Art.

The above image with the mother bird and baby bird especially got my attention maybe because I am also a mother. I can see she is protecting her baby, just like how we humans need to be protected.

Monday, March 24, 2008

studio style


So anyway after looking at those pictures by Tennesson, and some that I've seen our Professor done, I decided to try this studio style photography. Only I really don't have any equipment but my camera and tripod. So I cut out a cleveland sage that I found around our house, and placed it on top of the sink on a black cardboard paper. I used a black shirt to make its surrounding all black. I know this is not the ideal way, but it was fun to experiment nonetheless. The rest I retouched on photoshop. The black that I used turned out to be not so black so I had to delete the background and replaced it with a painted black layer on photoshop. I then realized the stem were also not so green as the stem on the sage, so I mask the layer and made the stem greener to make it look more real. Anyhow, the image above is what I came up with.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Joyce Tenneson

online artist 3
date viewed: March 23, 2008

I found out about this artist as I was searching through photography books at Barnes and Noble. Her book titled Intimacy grabbed my attention. I thought the title alone was an attention grabber, and the book happened to be about flowers. Perfect, since I have been photographing a lot of smaller flowers for our school project lately. What I like about her style is that she gives the flowers personalities. Sort of like Georgia O' Keefe, the flowers take their own lives as they are put on the spot light through photography. I like how ever details is visible, such as I can flower the curve of a rose petal as the picture above and appreciate its beauty. With my photographs this is becoming to be what I'm trying to strive for, for finer details. I wish I can experiment more with different camera lenses to get the look that I want, but as of right now I don't have the means to do that. I feel like the more I'm getting into photography the more items on my list I want to purchase someday. However, I don't take things for granted. I feel like with my camera I have learned more about what kind of shots I like. The DMC Panasonic that I have had helped me develop keener eyes as far as looking for contrast within my pictures, learned more about apeture setting, white balance, and ISO. I've also been checking out a canon 30D at school that comes with a macro lens, and have been able to play around with that a little bit. I wish for my canon camera someday.
The other thing about Tenneson is that she shoots her pictures in a studio. The background is black, and I think that enables her images to stand out even more. I have been checking out light sets at the stores...even those can get expensive. Though I imagine you don't need a lot of lights to light up the flowers at a studio setting. I want to try doing this technique. Outdoors vs. indoors.