Mail Project

After moving twice since I acquired this "junk," I finally found time to take some photographs.

I worked at the New England Journal of Medicine, and sorted some mail while I was there - tons of crazy places of origins all over the world.  The patterns of stamps and rips and ink I thought looked neat.  The pieces of mail seemed to tell their journey through their roughed up packaging.

Let me know what you think.

Open publication - Free publishing - More photography

DNA art

I saw a little ad at the back of WiredMagazine (June 2009) for this art.  Pretty cool idea to take something unique and display it in a high end way.  The idea comes from two guys - a designer and a biotech guy.

dna11.com

More Tilt Shift

The Canon 24mm  TS-E is awesome.  It's a bit different from using a view camera; takes a little getting used to the knobs and controlling the axes (took some brainpower to realize I needed to use the tripod head as a rear standard, not the lens).

Part of the the fun / trouble, is choosing between getting the lines vertical, or using the low depth of field (f/3.5) and miniaturizing things.  For the image with the statue, I took the image "out-of-whack," then corrected the lines in photoshop to try and achieve both effects.

Another cool use is to merge photos.  The image below of the door is actually three separate exposures - I simply shifted the lens, left, center, right.  In photoshop, I chose File > Automate > Photomerge - then followed the dialog box.  There's an article on this in the July/August Picture Magazine

New Website

Finished my website update last Friday. Trying to keep it simple and clean is so tough.  I used the Apple website, and a few other photographers websites as guides.  Let me know any feedback about appearance or ergonomics - codygantz.com

Tilt Shift

Just received some lenses from Borrowlenses.com - a 100mm Macro, and a 24mm TS-E II.  I'm excited for both because they create much different looks than other lenses.  Also, I want to try some video with each of them - slow-motion closeups of bugs or turtles or something with the macro, and try the miniaturizing effect with the tilt-shift in Boston.

Anyway here are some images I just took with the tilt-shift.  It's also great for correcting lines in architecture, so more to come from this.  AJ, you would love this lens.

Issuu - Publishing Site

I mentioned this site in my post on publishing and creativity. Just testing it out for myself now, by uploading a brochure - student work from Hallmark.

The site operates like a bookshelf. You can search or browse the library of uploaded content (that users make public), and can then bookmark the content - anything from presentations, to catalogs, to newsletters. This adds it to your 'shelf,' where you can organize things into folders (like most email programs), or share, or download.

The makers of Issuu pretty much hold your hand through the whole process with little videos, which is nice. Plus, the website interface is simple and easy to use anyway. One of the coolest things, though, is that you can implement their slick document presentation on your own site. Haven't come across any sites using this feature yet, but I'm testing it out offline.

Open publication - Free publishing - More ben and bills

Publishing

Just finished watching Chase Jarvis' talk : Consequences of Creativity. He spoke to ADCD (Art Director's Club of Denver) and ASMP, a photographer's organization.

One point that stuck me, and anyone who reads anything these days, is that creative people can now also be the ones who publish / share their work. It doesn't have to be "validated" by an ad agency or magazine editor, you create stuff and throw it on the web and instantly people can watch your latest cat-themed-youtube video.

The cool thing about this, is that there's and abundance of stuff to find, created by people with no other motive than just to create. For instance my friend Eric Millard - a great musician - just put up some of his songs on facebook and myspace. The 'goal': simply to meet people with similar interests. With social network and publishing sources like TubeMogul and Issuu, the 'why' of publishing is more of a 'why not' - it's so easy.

I started thinking of all this while I was searching my bookmarks and came Motionographer, and this strange video by Terry Timely: Synesthesia. For some reason, it seems less outlandish after returning from Beijing last night. (And yes, there are cats).

Macro video to Radiohead song

I found this video on my friend Sydney's blog - she's a west coast artist.

I love the slow-motion combined with macro scenes. And insects make for great subjects with the lyrics.