Been cranking on new things as of late: portraits and portfolios. I’ll get to the latter, but just tackled another set of portraits for the Bemis Art Community blog. This time around it was John Gascon of Occhio Cafe and Ouch My Eye gallery.
Image above is the one that ran, but I had the time to do a couple versions on account of John’s relaxed nature and willingness to help a fellow artist experiment. That said, I was quite fond of the two images below.
Either way, do yourself a favor and head on over to the full post to read more about John and his longtime efforts helping artists and the SODO community.
In other exciting news, I now have prototype/1st round versions of my new portfolios that will be hitting photo editor/creative desks very soon.
How can I show you and not allow a peek inside?
The scan above is from inside the editorial book. Then here’s a grab from the portrait book.
These first round looks comes courtesy of none other than photo consultant extraordinaire Amanda Sosa-Stone. She did an amazing job pairing and juxtaposing themes/subjects/events that had been unobserved to my own eyes.
**A word of advice: get someone to lay your book out for you. If anything, it’s just another set of eyes on the ground suggesting what stays and what goes. I’m not speaking to every photographer, but I know I can oftentimes be a little too close to the work I love creating. It was certainly helpful to get someone else’s take.
More always,
Mike
Photo Illustrations for Mental Floss Magazine
I hit the newsstands once a month to look for magazines that jump out at me. Have always liked thumbing through Mental_Floss for the nerdy factoids, fun design and catchy feature openers.
It then came as a great surprise to get an email back in September from their AD, Winslow Taft, asking if I’d photo-illustrate an upcoming feature. After reading his abstract regarding science attempting to solve 10 of the world’s most annoying problems, it really wasn’t hard to say yes.
WRONG WEATHER FORECASTS
WHINY KIDS
WOMEN WHO DATE JERKS
SPAM
OVERHEARD CELL PHONE CONVOS
SONGS STUCK IN YOUR HEAD
NAME AMNESIA
LONG WORK MEETINGS
CEREAL DUST
BEER GOGGLES
His list above had some immediate contenders for me, so I got started straight away on my typical doodle-sent-to-creative exercise that helps to gauge which ideas he liked most.
Our collaboration was effortless, and I really loved how this thing came into being as a barrage of emails sent over one weekend. Perhaps one of my favorite Winslow lines from our convos:
maybe something with powerpoint slides – slide 4 of 1000. . . maybe rip van winkle is passing a plate of donuts with dust and spiderwebs on it?
I wanted a very distilled look to the images that would put the concept front and center. Because these images were photo illustrations — their payoff being completed in post — we opted to photograph all the scenarios in a controlled, studio environment.
In the end, we decided to pursue cereal dust, overheard cell phone conversations, songs stuck in one’s head a.k.a. earworms, long work meetings and spam email.
Sounds weird, but I just saw the spam image so clealy in my mind’s eye before it was ever completed. Because of this, the direction for the shoot had already formed as this modern-day everyman in a quasi-purgatory space going about his daily tasks.
All of the images were preconceived, so it was just a matter of marrying plates containing subject matter — the cans of spam above for example — with the everyman character in another image to create the final, finished photograph.
If you have seven minutes and are still in the dark as to what I’m getting at, there’s a pretty good video tutorial on the compositing process within Photoshop over on Layers Magazine here.
Thanks to Ian Goode for coming out of his squid tank to lend that stellar face of his, not to mention his rad photoshop skills.
Must also extend a big thanks to Mr. Donald Markwick for his amazing beard and Ms. Alexandra Rose Dennis for her multiple personalities (chuckle).
Couldn’t be more pleased with how these turned out, I hope to tackle something like this again soon. Either way, keep your eyes peeled for more exciting updates coming up!
More always,
Clinard