Simple concept, beautiful execution

Simon Høgsberg photographed 178 people over 20 days at a train station in Berlin to create a single continuous print that measured 300 feet (100 meters) long. The plan seems simple enough, but its execution is amazing.

Click the link below to see the image.

"We're All Gonna Die - 100 meters of existence"

"This image is 100 meters long (100m x 78cm)

There are 178 people in the picture, all shot in the course of 20 days from the same spot on a railroad bridge on Warschauer Strasse in Berlin in the summer of 2007.

Only a few of the people in the photograph seemed to know I was taking their picture."

From The Online Photographer from Simon Høgsberg's website

cold, snow, warmer, cold, cold

We had a lot of snow last night. Around 14" of it fell in my backyard. Today was a relatively warm day though, and the snow quit in the early morning, so after clearing the driveway I decided to head out and take some pictures of the snow and ice on a nearby river.

I walked to the end of the launch and as I was setting up a flock of Canada geese flew right at eye level in front of me. They must've known I wasn't ready with my gear. So I finished setting up and got a few nice shots downriver when I heard the flock coming back higher in the sky. I swung my tripod around and fired off two frames. By themselves the images weren't very interesting, so I started to play with a tight crop of each and framed a larger shot I got by those long strips. You can see it below.

All in all I was pretty happy with the outing. I stopped at two locations and ended up with five keepers. I'll post a few more in the coming days.

Finally a new listing on Etsy

I just added a new listing on Etsy, opening a new section that I hope to add a few more images to. The print I added is below (same one from a few days back) and if you click on it you'll be taken directly to the listing.

to darkroom or not to darkroom

When I was living in California (Palo Alto specifically) I took a couple photography classes at the SF Photo Center at the Harvey Milk Recreational Arts building (currently under renovation). One class was on creative night photography and the other was on B&W darkroom techniques. The creative night photo one was a bit of a bust, but it did give me an excuse to get out and take pictures. The B&W class on the other hand was a lot of fun and got me my first taste of working in a darkroom.


Now I am faced with a bit of a dilema. I have a couple film bodies that I am trying to use more - a Holga and a Yashica Mat 124g TLR. Both shoot medium format 120 film. So far I've only shot a few rolls of film and of those rolls only have been able to look at 36 developed frames (scans of the negatives that came with the processed film). The challenge with film, at least for me, is getting the images either into my computer for processing and printing, or getting quality proofs made then enlargements of the ones that I like. To get from negative to print I could either scan the images in (via a scanner at home or a high quality scanner at a lab) or I could take my B&W negatives to the darkroom and print them myself.


I found a darkroom nearby that I could use - it's in a community college and for about $350 I would have access to the darkroom M-F until 10pm and Saturdays from noon to 4pm. For roughly the same amount I could purchase a scanner and be able to use it whenever I want to, but I lose that visceral experience of the darkroom. I do gain the ability to shoot color film though, which is a plus.


Dilemas, dilemas...



Anyway, here are three images I took while waiting for my class to start at the Harvey Milk center in SF a few years ago.

JPG Saved?!

From the most recent post on the JPG Mag blog, it looks like a few potential buyers have thrown their respective hats into the ring. From their most recent blog post:

We couldn't ask for a better community. In the week or so since our last email, the outpour of support has exceeded our wildest expectations. Your efforts, such as starting savejpg.com, writing blog posts, commenting on Twitter and Flickr, and generally making your voices heard, have provided exciting new opportunities for us.

We're thrilled to say that because of you, we have multiple credible buyers interested in giving JPG a home. We will be keeping the site up after all, and hope to have a final update in the next week or so on who the acquirer will be. Thank you for making all of this possible.

This is great news. I only ever put one or two images of my own up there for their subscription themes. For me the reason why I like JPG so much is because it is a source of great inspiration. There are countless people out there who make some incredible images that will never get to be seen by the public. It's great that JPG will continue to be that rare place where the everyday photog can get his or her shots out in the wild.

There has been a lot of speculation as to who is throwing their money at JPG. I am hoping that whoever it is preserves the JPG brand.

hanging up my stuff

I'm pulling some pictures out from the archives to hang up in my house - my wife wants to add some art to the walls. The three photos below were taken back in March of 2007 in the backyard of our house when we lived in Palo Alto. Don't ask me what kind of flowers they were - I have no idea, and they were probably ones that our neighbors planted that had crept across and under the fence. 

The large photo will be blown up to a 20x24 print mounted on foam, the two smaller will be cropped to 8x10 and put in frames.

I am thinking I might add these to the lineup I have at mattallen.etsy.com.

I made the cut - help me get in the top three!

I made the cut on the Boston.com RAW Photo contest for December. The theme was 'Tis the Season. I entered an image I took through the stencil holder I talked about in this post. You can vote once per day I think (maybe more) and I'd appreciate it if you voted for me, but of course only if you think it's worth a top-3 spot.

Here's the image I submitted, and you can click THIS LINK to get to the voting tool:

Thanks!

Cold Winter Picture

Taken of the Muddy River near the MFA in Boston. I was taking a stroll around the river with the twins after they decided that the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum wasn't to their liking. They're art snobs.

I need to shoot more, and poor old JPG mag - will it survive?

I am always forgetting to bring my camera with me. I really need to get in the habit of just keeping it on me at all times.

I also need to start playing with controlled light again. I did more of that in California. Here's a shot of my daughter's buggy with a high-powered flashlight in the foot well. Controlling light doesn't necessarily mean strobes.



I was able to take some shots of our house for Deb using some speedlights, but I really need to setup something in the basement that resembles a makeshift studio to try out more macro and controlled lighting shots.






In other news a magazine that I really enjoy reading is about to close its doors. It actually should've been done this past Monday (Jan 5th) but they were able to extend the life of the site "at least through next week" which would mean this Friday or Saturday.

A lot of magazines are going out of business these days. My wife is a budding interior designer ( http://www.deborahallendesign.com/ ) who subscribes to a variety of home magazines and she's received notices so far from two of her magazines saying they're stopping the presses. Some mags are being acquired by other companies while others who are already part of a bigger publishing company are being folded into existing magazines.

With the increase in people getting their news and media from electronic sources and the state of the economy the reduction in print materials was bound to happen. It's just particularly hard to deal with when it impacts magazines and print materials you have come to enjoy and look forward to.

I'm hoping that JPG Mag gets picked up by someone - the concept is really a great one. With so many photogs out there and so few avenues for publication it was one of the only outlets for the casual artist to get his or her work published.

--UPDATE--
About 3 hours after I posted this a new bit of news was posted on the JPGmag website:

Some of you may have heard by now, but if not, the good news is that we have already received a couple of credible offers from companies interested in acquiring JPG. So that we can find the best acquirer for JPG, we put a Wednesday deadline on all offers, and we expect to receive more by then. We are soliciting all the credible offers we can get, and any negotiations from that point forward will be handled by Minor Ventures. This is an important part of the process, since any deal will need to be approved by our investors and they will be the only ones to benefit financially from an acquisition. All we, along with the rest of the team, are hoping for is that we can find the best new home for the JPG community.

So that could be good news! Have to wait and see at the end of the week if a suitor has been chosen.

Tricks with cut-outs

I've seen this technique posted quite a few times around the web, so with the christmas tree up I decided to try out taking photos of pinpoints of light out of focus through a cut-out stencil. I made a tube to fit over my 50mm 1.4 Canon lens that included a small holder at the end into which I could slide pieces of cardstock that I'd punched or cut shapes out of. The slips of cardstock resembled slides, with a cut-out at one end. I made a snowflake and star cut-out using a paper punch tool I bought at a craft store, then I cut out a smiley face from a third strip using an x-acto knife. Below are the results:

Having the stencil about an inch from the end of the lens adds a nice dark vignette to the photo - none of these were touched, they came straight from the camera with the exception of a little exposure tweak on the smiley face shot which was also cropped a bit.

The star and smiley face were shot at 1/30th second and the snowflake was shot at 1/60th, all three were shot with the 50mm 1.4 at f/2 and ISO 1600 (it was pretty dark in there). I tried some outside shots, but it was damn cold out so I bagged after just a couple frames. I want to try this again maybe as I'm putting away the lights so that I can have a foreground subject in focus and throw the background lights out of focus to create the effect.