Growing my summer skin.

Today, was the last day that I will be printing in the darkroom for four long months :( With the end of the spring semester brings the end of work and stress. But with the happy end of these things brings the sadness as my friends and I leave each other for what will be the longest summer of our existence. As my last week ends I decided to spend the rest of my wednesday after noon (I had a final this morning!) printing photos that I have been wanting to print from old and new negatives. I must say, it was a good day in the darkroom because I printed three prints and finished printing one that I had started on Friday.  Just a forewarning I had scanned all of these images in and that it why they are fussy :)

She was really happy for me to take her picture.

She's crooked from scanning oops! 

I love this guys dog! Look at his face! But what drew me to him was his flowers.

This is one of the guys in madison square park. The stone/metal guys? You know the ones on the buildings. Haven't seen them? Go to MSP and look up! (This guy was on the ground haha)

I thought she was just lovely.

This is actually a scanned negative- although I do have the print. This was taken during January at my home.

End of the Semester

This Friday I have my critique of all the work that I have done for the year! Which consists of the color and Black and White photographs that we have printed. All the freshmen in the photography have their critique during the time that they would have their workshop class. For the spring semester, in my workshop class we had to come up with a series of photographs with a consistent theme. I decided to do something on architecture.

At first I wasn't sure what and went around New Jersey looking for something to inspire me. When I got back to New York, during the first workshop class I had a number of photographs that I was enthused about and immediately started printing away. I was thoroughly enjoying my work and what I was producing. Although for a few weeks I had began to doubt my series and strayed away; I had come back to it in the last two weeks and created work that I thought went well with the photographs that I had taken in New Jersey.

Yesterday, I spend 5 hours printing the last of my photographs for my series. Happily, I hung my work on the wall and my friends and I looked at how it had all come together. Today, I am posting those photographs along with the rest of the series. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I do.

New Series

I have abandoned the prior idea for my series, that I have been working on in my color workshop class. I had started in the beginning of the semester to work with architecture, that you can see here. For some reason I had changed my mind and thought to go back to working with people. The idea that I had come up with for that series can be seen here. I realized after 4 weeks of working on that series that I was trying to push it too much, I had one good photograph and that was it. Everything else was too forced and was not producing the imagery that I wanted. I think that it was the way that I was going about it and also the fact that I was not that enthused about the subject matter. So last week I decided to go back to architecture, and I am very please with the results. In the photographs that I have printed so far have been taking roof tops and cutting them from the rest of the building. All of the photographs seem to have an industrial feel so far. Here are three of the photographs that I was able to print on Friday. These photographs were all printed on  11x14 paper, that is why they are fuzzy when you click on them. My scanner is not big enough to fit them on the screen so I had to let them float a little bit above the scanner.

In Chinatown, next to my favorite dumpling place.

From the same building as above.

A building next to a playground in SoHo.

A lot of people in my class think it looks like a jail. 

This next photograph was taken over winter break and I had never added it to one of my prior blog posts. I think it works well with the series. Size: 8x10

Drummers for Haiti

In February, my friend Chris Golinski asked me to take pictures for his event Drummers for Haiti. This was a drum festival that was working with the American Red Cross to send financial aid to those who are in need. To get into the event, all participants had to donate at least $15. This was a small price for the knowledge they would learn that day from the professionals. The drummers that donated their time to support Haiti were Peter Retzlaff, Tommy Igoe, Glenn Webber, Ron Thaler, and Jason Gianni. Drummers for Haiti took place on Sunday February 28th, here are some of the photographs that I took.

Chris Golinski, Peter Retzlaff, Tommy Igoe, Glenn Webber, Ron Thaler, and Jason Gianni.

From left to right.

Tommy Igoe, Glenn Webber, and Jason Gianni receiving declarations of their contributions from West Orange and Newark.

Series

During this semester in my Photo workshop class, we have to come up with a series. I racked my brain for weeks and came up with nothing. Over the winter break I had thought about trying architecture, as seen in my earlier posts. But I soon realized it did not hold my interest for very long and I longed to shoot and deal with people in my work again. Thankfully, with the help from my friend raz marf (his website is razmarf.com) he help rack my brain for ideas that I would enjoy to photograph. One of my favorite ideas is the one posted below. The photo shoot was to make fun of young women who carry their little dogs around in their purses. I feel like they are basically treating them like stuffed animals. So I decided to show this through photography by putting a bear in cage and having my friend treat it like an animal. I wanted it to be noticeable that it was a stuffed animal so that the meaning of the photograph was recognizable. Because my teacher enjoyed this concept, he encouraged me to make it my series and to use the same model with different stuffed animals. The second photograph is my favorite because you can really see the bear and the background does not control the scene but that is as a 8x10, I am hoping to print them both 16x20.

This photograph is from outside my room in NYC during one of our snow days. I've recently been taking photographs out of my own window during different days and have ventured to my friends rooms as well. It is just a mini series that I am enjoying at the moment, maybe it will become something more one day.

Digital Imaging

In my Digital Imaging class, our assignment was to scan in a set of color and black + white negatives. With these negatives we will be editing them and then printing them using photoshop. Because I took a digital imaging class in high school, I've already learned some of the basics of editing. So I decided to go ahead and edit some of the negatives that I scanned in.

Book of Poems

For next year, I am applying to be a RA at The School of Visual Arts. To complete the application, it is required that each applicant create an "About Me" presentation. This presentation is to be a work of art to show who you are as a person and how you express yourself artistically. To complete this project, I decided to create my own book. This book is going to consist of photographs and poems. I have always loved writing and reading. So I figured this would be a good way to show my two greatest passions. Shown here are the cover and a page (with a photo and a poem).

Click to enlarge

Watercolor with Photography

Monday nights, I have symposium classes, which mean that they change every six weeks. During the past few weeks I've had class with Allen Frame. During last weeks class, he showed us slides of many artists work, including Darrel Ellis's. He did a lot of paintings based on his fathers photography. Who had died in Harlem when his son was a boy. Within his work, he had done some water color work where he had painted over the photographs. This gave me the idea to try it for myself.

"During his lifetime, Darrel Ellis created a large body of work that was based on family photographs taken by his father, who suffered a brutal death at the hands of careless police officers a month before Ellis was born. Ellis himself died an untimely death at the age of 34 from AIDS. " 
(excerpt from http://www.artingeneral.org/projects/112) 

Scan Something

The other day I was scanning images for Raz Marf ( you can view his website at razmarf.com). In his note book he had marked the pages that he wanted to scan with little strips of paper. When I had finished I had all of these little strips of paper and I decided to see what it looked like when I just scanned them in. Then half way through the scan I decided to move them around while it was scanning, and this is what happened.

After scanning the pieces of paper I decided to see what would happen if I scanned my own face. I rather like the out come and I also edited the contrast and the levels. I hope you like it.

~Flurt~

The other day, my friends and I decided to get some frozen yogurt. In the freezing New York weather, of course. Flurt was our frozen place of choice, with its many toppings and original yogurt yummyness. I thankfully had chosen to bring my camera along on our adventure and decided to snap some pictures. Although I love bringing my camera with me where ever I go, sometimes I don't so that I can not look at the scenery so objectively. I suppose this happened while we were at Flurt because while I was taking pictures, all of a sudden I realized that everyone else was half way done with their yogurt! While I had only tasted my own. So I put my camera down for a few moments to finish my yogurt, then continued to document the excursion.

I won't bore you with all of the pictures so here are some of the pictures that I altered from that night.

Productivity is sweet

Today my friend Tyler and I decided to be productive and print today in the dark room. We were in the darkroom for 4 hours >.<>Oh and I thought you would like to know that Tyler has a pretty sweet blog - http://tylerdmorgan.blogspot.com/ - you should check it out for a few minutes because it seems like you have the time :)

In the rain

Here are the first contact sheets that I've made this semester. This semester I've started developing color film and we are learning how to process our own prints. I'm also adding the contact sheets that got messed up- due to the fact that the filters in my enlarger were broken :/ I think the red ones look pretty cool though.

Today is the beginning.

These are the first color prints that I made this semester.