Shai Kremer

Bio:

• Born in Israel in 1974
• 2003-2005 School of Visual Arts, New York. M.F.A - Photography and Related Media
  
• 1998-2002 Camera Obscura School of Arts, Tel Aviv Israel. B.A. - Photography
  
• SOLO EXHIBITIONS
  2009 Infected Landscape Israel, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX
• 2008-09
  Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
  
  

About the Work:

• "This project is a seven year metaphoric portrayal of the military disfiguration of the Israeli landscape. To describe the complexity of this ever-changing and multi-layered terrain, I chose to keep a distance. The aesthetic, orderly and beautiful compositions parallel the defense mechanism that Israelis have developed in order to protect themselves from the painful reality of the current political situation. The wounds in the landscape correspond to the wounds in the Israeli collective consciousness. My goal is to reveal how every piece of land has become infected with loaded sediments of the ongoing conflict. "- saul gallery, artist statement
  

Shai Kremer Website

Julie Saul Gallery

Review type thing by Amy Stein

Safety Forum Lecture 3/25

Previous to this panel discussion, VCU students submitted questions about campus safety to be answered by some of the VCU administration, including the Senior VP for Administration, Head of the VCU Police, the Vice Provost, and about 5 others.  Questions asked by students included  things like .."How large is the VCU Police, and how do they compare to the Richmond Police?" and numerous inquiries about the "undesirables" around campus.  Most of the questions asked, were mainly "resolved" by the head of the VCU Police stating that "you shouldn't put yourself in harms way," and other comments of that nature.  The Senior VP for Admin. was full of statistical data, which he used to answer his portion of the questions- for instance, I did not know that there are over 300 emergency phones around campus, and that 56% of all criminal act reports are larceny.  

Warp Command

Evening, Martin.  Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers. Pages 397-98.  Focal Press, 2009.  

This particular section of the book discusses Free Transform methods used in Photoshop.  I often use these tools to adjust  how large a piece of my image will be, to rotate, distort, stretch out specific layers, or the warp tool which can change the image dramatically to add movement, depth, or perspective.  

A problem that I have when constructing one image from multiple images is that sometimes when you take an element from one photo and put it with another it can become flat.  Most of the time, when I work I have the issue if making foreground objects look like they were shot at the same point of view as the background shot.  The warp tool is helping me immensely with this adjustment that I have previously not had access to with my old version of Photoshop.  The image can be adjusted at numerous points which allows for your manipulations to be more controlled and specific.  

Images from
Web Designer Wall

Dr. Olivia Judson Lecture 3/23

Born in the UK, Olivia Judson moved to the US at the age of 10.  Judson is now an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College London.  She graduated from Stanford University, got her doctorate from Oxford, and worked as a journalist before beginning research on a fellowship at Imperial College London.  It was interesting to find out that she had participated in the television show "Animal Pharm," which she described as a "science documentary musical."- strange?  She mainly spoke about her book, Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation. "Written in the style of a sex-advice column to animals, the book details the variety of sexual practices in the natural world and provides the reader with an overview of the evolutionary biology of sex." All of this was pretty intense, and the lecture style itself was very stiff and matter of fact. Interesting to say the least, but I felt really out of my element.

Emma Livingston

Bio

• AGE: 32
  
• BORN: Paris
  
• RESIDES: Buenos Aires
  
• EDUCATION: University College, London
  
• EXHIBITIONS: RO Galería de Arte, Galería Riva Zucchelli, Buenos Aires
  
• AWARDS: London Photographic Association; Px3 Prix de la Photographie Paris
  

About the Work

"Emma Livingston's studies of the natural world play with scale, distances and context. In her photos of the moonscape desert of Northwest Argentina, boulders look like pebbles. Trees burst through the sidewalks of Buenos Aires.

What drives her is her desire to photograph nature in its varied forms, "a need to record something that is so fragile and ever changing," she says. "Some of the trees I photographed have since been chopped, run into or left to die."-PDN

A quote I read from Emma Livingston explained that she shoots pictures of leaves, branches and flowers so close up that they became abstracted, they looked like imaginary landscapes.  This gave me an idea to experiment with shooting extreme close ups to come up with a base for my images, it make look a little to abstract for my series but its worth a try. Hmm..

Artist Website

PDN Gallery

Interview

DNG

Bampton, Victoria.  "To DNG or Not?" Photoshop User Magazine, pp. 78-81.  March 2009.  

The title pretty much explains it all, this article provides answers to the questions about using the Digital Negative format opposed to other raw formats.  This has recently become as an interest to me because of my technical issues, and now with my setup I have no other choice but to use DNG to open my files, so I really want to understand what it is and if it was helping or hurting my work.  The article lists the pros and cons, and is then up to the reader to decide whether this is the route they should take when working with digital camera files.  

The good thing about DNG, is that unlike Nikon and Canon's RAW formats, DNG is explained as being publicly documented.  Meaning that these files will still be able to be opened as technology progresses- which is a huge deal as I found, when computers are not new enough in comparison to the digital camera and their constant evolving file formats.  Other Pros of the DNG format are as follows: All files that traditionally make up a raw file are encapsulated in one file- including the RAW image data, the metadata that describes the data, and an embedded preview- this means less files that can misplaced or deleted; It's lossless compression option is better than that of a digital camera, smaller file- saves space; Conversion to DNG offers early warning signals of file corruption, if the file has potential to be corrupt, it will not convert and explain what has happened, it will then allow u to remove the files and format the card instead of continually shooting corrupted images that will most likely never be usable; DNG works as normal RAW files, with the option to edit the equivalent of a digital negative before actually editing within the photo editing software, preserving the original quality.  The Cons for using DNG are totally worth it to any serious photographer.  Manufacturers software as of yet does not support DNG files, as well as Adobe Lightroom having minor issues with adjusting focusing points of DNG files- a small price to pay for a high quality camera format that will probably never be obsolete.  

Harriete Estel Berman

Bio

Education

1980 M.F.A. Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pa.
Major: Metalsmithing
Minor: Fiber
Awards: Temple University Tuition Scholarship

1974 B.F.A. Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
Major: Metalsmithing
Minor: Fiber
Awards: Outstanding Metalsmithing Ives Scholarship

Work

"My work begins with post-consumer material diverted from a destiny as trash. Revitalized from the mundane, these recycled tin containers are deconstructed, cut, folded and reassembled into the extraordinary. This metal may not be as precious as gold or silver, but in many ways reveals more about the values of our society. Does value exist within the craftsmanship, by who made it, or by what materials are used? Or is value created through mass-marketing and mass-consumption?"

I am mainly interested in her Grass series, and the idea of constructing representations of natural objects with obviously recycled metals.  It might be an interesting thing to experiment with in photoshop that may or may not add more depth to my images. 

Harriete Estel Berman

Museum of Contemporary Craft

Audio Interview

The VLA

"The majority of the beautifully crafted sculptures have an easily legible pop aesthetic; but how they are linked to their immediate neighbours and the work as a whole is the result of the more subtle, and at times complex operations.  The result is a portrait of something that appears to involve life, the universe and everything."- Mark Rappolt

Rappolt, Mark. "A Portrait in 300 Parts." Art Review, February 2007. http://www.artreviewdigital.com/index.cfm/artreview-digital/magazine.view/title/february2007.

50 miles west of Soccorro, Mexico on US Highway 60- there's something called the Very Large Array (VLA). The VLA consists of 27 satellite dishes each weighing 230 tons which are pointed towards the heavens.  These huge satellites map out the universe which allows a bit of mysterious phenomenon to be explained.  This very large array of satellites has become more of an attraction in this small town- they have even appeard in movies and novels.  The concept of this is intriguing, how such a monstrous grouping of satellite dishes that merely observe space doesn't really mean much to the common person.  It literally becomes a whole lot of nothing.. but really it is something- a mass of information too large to comprehend.  

The VLA is merely described as "big", in comparison to Keith Tysons sculptures titled Large Field Array- which is described as being magic cubes.  His sculptures are simple and graphic, with the pop like aesthetic that was mentioned above.  They are representations of fragments of information that was collected by the VLA- in translation are completely basic in comparison to the actual details. In conclusion, the sculptures dont even reveal a fraction of the entire picture.  Tyson's work "coheres through a fusion of more or less mysterious "science" and straightforward representational aesthetics."   What I am drawn to about this regarding my own work is that his work forces the audience to realize that it should be taken at more than just face value- that it has something to do with the larger understanding of the involvement of life and just about anything that affects it.  

Carlotta Brunetti

Bio

1969 – 1970 Studied art history in Florence and Munich

1970 – 1972 Studied at Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich
1972 – 1973 Studied at City and Guilds of London Art School
1973 – 1976 Master’s Degree at Staedelschule, Frankfurt/Main, in Michael Croissant’s class and also with Karl Bohrmann
1994- Worked with Julia Lohmann
1997 Founded Pozzo Pozozza Berlin with Julia Lohmann
2002 –2004 Member of the Board of the Malkasten Artists´Club, Düsseldorf

Work

My wish as artist has for several years been to link my outdoor works with my interior installations.  Pieces have come about that reflect man as a part of nature. Humans are not directly visible in my works, but pear in relics such as trash, footprints, etc., or in cultural associations. In the countryside I create my own spaces and take up the cultural givens of the respective region.

My work outdoors or in landscapes is often felt by many people as superfluous. Art within nature seems to contradict nature itself. Nature doesn’t need us is the usual argument. What is mostly forgotten is that we ourselves are part of nature. We will always have a share in nature, also negatively. What is important is that we do not become oblivious to nature’s unspoiled state and that we thematize her destruction by man. Conceptual interventions in natural, cultural and city landscapes is one of my deepest concerns, and showing their human traces in my work another." -Brunetti

Carlotta Brunetti Site

Jardins-A-Suivre Gallery

Interview

Brushes

After giving in and just buying the entire Adobe Creative Suite so I can end my troubles here and now .. I began looking into the various Photoshop tools that I could really get into that could help my work.  It never really occurred to me that using custom brushes for trees and foliage would help me tremendously in blending in areas of the background to look more realistic.  And after searching around for free brush sets I found many that I am all too excited to experiment with.  I have used a lot of the brushes that come with the program, but never thought about using others that I could find in the numerous places online that let you use them at no cost.  .. Why? I don't know, probably because I like to make things harder for myself.  I will just need to be careful about not making it too obvious that these things are computer generated, because that is definitely not an aesthetic that I am going for.

(Still looking for a good article.)

Christophe Gilbert

Bio

• Born in Brussels in 1962, Christophe Gilbert started by taking courses of photography to the Academy of Ixelles in the course of the evening during one year. He integrates then the professional millieu in the capacity as assistant, posts that he will hold during two years, which enables him to discover the sector of publicity. The CCB Awards (Creative Club of Belgium), whose objective is to precede and promote the Belgian creativity, reward it in 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2005. Its Levis countryside was retained in Photograph Awards 2005 of the AOP. In the same way, the public could discover its creations with the AD Print Festival 2006 of Brasov (Romania). It currently works on a personal project on the topic of the heritage.

Work

• Gilbert uses a lot of photoshop in his images, I believe his work fits well in the realm of commercial art, but each piece can be taken in so many different ways- where it crosses the line into the art world. All of his pieces are amazing, but I chose to show his landscape pieces as they better relate to what Im doing.

Christophe Gilbert site

BA Representatives