F-Stop Mag

Where Professional Photographers discuss their craft. Such as:

"Our featured image was shot for a Levis campaign. We are inside a mine, and before us is a beautiful model who has just swung a giant pick-axe. In the background a man is straining to push an almost-overflowing mine cart. The composition is tight and triangular, with de-saturated colors and delicate lighting. And with a closer glance we find that this duo is mining not for silver or gold, but distressed denim: the mine cart is filled with designer jeans and above the man’s head more are embedded in the rock."

How the Iraq Resistance Unmasks the American State and the Promise of Zapatismo

"America's Emotional and Moral MalaiseThe explanation of Bush’s hold on the United States developed in The Business of Emotions over the past few years, can be summarized thus:

1. Without authentic emotions, the vital connection between thinking and feeling is lost and the ability to act, morally and politically, for oneself and for others, is compromised.

Authentic emotions in the United States are being commercialized out of existence.

Americans are alienated from their feelings by the emotional labour they perform at work, in what is now a predominantly service economy.

Americans now buy their emotions and experience them as they consume the goods and services to which they have been attached by artful emotional and neuro-marketers.

This is hardly a problem unique to the United States, but the commercialization of emotions is most developed there.

Other countries at least have the counterweight of some historical ballast to keep them in check. The United States, rooted in the topsoil of history, built among the graveyards of the civilization it supplanted, has no such corrective.

The more commercialized the emotions, the weaker the resistance to depravity."

via wood s lot yet again.

Fashionistas!

Did something a bit different the other day and did a photo shoot for a fashion company called Fuze Organics. You can see a pic or two under the Fashionisitas! tag in my galleries. I'll add more when I get more time. When will I get more time you ask?

.Shut it.
I shot everything with the 1ds Mark2 and Vivatar 283's (x4) with Milk Carton diffusers and Peanut slaves for all the nerds out there who care about that shit. DIY lighting FTW.

Everyone had a good time and hopefully I'll be doing more fashion projects in the future. It was interesting to just relax have fun and make people look good.

Umberto Boccioni

Like many other Futurists, Boccioni was heavily influenced by Cubism but in his painting and sculpture he used the Futurist approach to express dynamism of the human or animal form. However there is a marked difference between his work prior to his acquaintance with Cubism and that which came after. After his contact with Cubism, Boccioni retained his Bergsonian approach so that The Farewells(1911) shows the same couple several times in various time-place views rather than several couples. However Cubism gave him not only a wider painting vocabulary but his concept of pictorial language changed fundamentally and appears to be on an entirely different level of experience. His later works tended to break up the subject figure and shifting the parts within the painting rather than repeating them whole as in The Farewells. In Materia (1912), for example, Boccioni "shatters" the image of his mother in Cubist fashion and merges it with a view of her surroundings as an expression of simultaneity. I knew his bronzes, but not his paintings, check them out: Umberto Boccioni

"Heckuva job, Brownie."

"The Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) was the scapegoat, but the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which bungled the levees that formed the city's man-made defenses and ravaged the wetlands that once formed its natural defenses. Americans were outraged by the government's response, but they still haven't come to grips with the government's responsibility for the catastrophe." via wood s lot

A new day begins

"A fresh attitude starts to happen when we look to see that yesterday was yesterday, and now it is gone; today is today and now it is new. It is like that — every hour, every minute is changing. If we stop observing change, then we stop seeing everything as new." ~ Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

Everything that was old will be new again. Welcome to the blog, version 3.0.