Neil Burgess on the death of Photojournalism

We have now reached the stage where magazine supplements offer me less for a story which might be used over a cover and eight pages than their associated papers pay me for a single picture of a celebrity. The picture editors shrug and say, “This is just the way it is.” But, it is an active decision that has been taken by the managing editors who believe that photojournalism is not valued, it can be got for free, and so needs no budget. Money is still around in newspapers, it’s just that it’s spent on other things.

I woke up this morning with a dream going around in my head. It was as if I’d been watching a medical drama, ER or something, where they’d spent half the programme trying to revive a favourite character: mouth to mouth, blood transfusions, pumping the chest up and down, that electrical thing where they shout “Clear!” before zapping them with 50,000 volts to get the heart going again, emergency transplants and injections of adrenalin …, but nothing works. And someone sobs, “We’ve got to save him we cannot let him die.” And his best friend steps forward, grim and stressed and says, “It’s no good. For God’s sake, somebody call it!”

Okay, I’m that friend and I’m stepping forward and calling it. “Photojournalism: time of death 11.12. GMT 1st August 2010.” Amen.

<A href="http://www.epuk.org/Opinion/961/for-gods-sake-somebody-call-it">Neil Burgess on the death of Photojournalism.</a>

Sad but true. But I have to say there is a glimmer of hope and that is the iPad / tablet computers. I know I have said it before, but you just can not fuck around with shitty images on those things. Plus it seems like people are willing to shell out $5 a issue for it. That is some serious revenue for the magazines who no longer have to print and ship dead trees around.

VIA wood s lot who proves yet agin he is a much netter blogger then I.

On Routine

I like routine. I like structure in my life. I guess this is because the nature of my work is anything but structure. When I first started in photography, one of my first assisting gigs the First assistant said to me to think of this job like a volunteer fireman and that pretty much sums up the business. Each day is it's own minor crisis for my clients and nothing is ever planned ahead of time. It can wear a person out some days and be wonderfully surprising the next. But I digress, I like routine and structure so I impose it where I can. I have a certain wake up routine that I like to follow.

• Coffee. Strong, locally roasted. Currently addicted to Ristretto Roasters to anyone curious.

• Light exercise of some sort. Dawn sessions at the local skatepark (I'm the old guy who just goes fast) or some stretches and such at the house if I'm trapped with work.

• 20 minutes of rudiments on the drum set. Reverse paradiddles are all the rage right now you know.

• On good days I get some journal writing done.

And lastly, before I start on the work I like to try to dredge up something inspiring from the interwebbies. Usually I hit the links over on the right to start and then branch out from there till the hunt is over. This is the hardest part of my routine but also the most consistent. I need to find some beauty out there before I can start the day.

All this is done by 8:30 usually so I am around for the clients. Then I am ready to go.

So that is that. Now go get yourself a routine going.

Painting studies

Did another painting study as I work on leaning more about the program Painter.  This series really seems to lend itself well to this treatment.  Need to figure out how to add some more splatter like strokes in there but I have not figured out drips yet.

Really enjoying it.

The Rolling Stones - Gimme Shelter (ISOLATED DRUMS)

Charlie Watts is one of my favorite RnR drummers of all time. So solid and clean. Damn fine tasty.

And this from the WikiLink.

A famous anecdote relates that during the mid-1980s, an intoxicated Jagger phoned Watts's hotel room in the middle of the night asking where "my drummer" was. Watts reportedly got up, shaved, dressed in a suit, put on a tie and freshly shined shoes, descended the stairs and punched Jagger in the face, saying: "Don't ever call me your drummer again. You're my fucking singer!"

Now that is flipping epic.

Lighting Studies #3

[gallery link="file" columns="2"] Had a lovely BBQ the other day (Thanks to all who made it!) and when the wife walked in with these tomatoes for the salad.... well, she had to put off making the salad for a bit. 9 lights were used along with everything and the kitchen sink. Turns out tomatos are stupidly difficult to shoot and I am still not entirely in love with these.  I could not get a good background to work so I just went with default black.  But since these are just studies I am posting them anyways.

I had to use a diffusion screen above for the backlight which also had some diffusion clipped to it.

Metal screen on two other side back lights to bring them down and scatter highlights. These are what are giving the highlights around the stem on the horizontal.

A focusing lens so I could get a dollop of light onto the stem. Metal screen with a postage stamp opening focused pretty harshly. Took some effort to get it blended with the other lights.

Sculpting wire underneath the tomato so it would stand up.

A Prism in front of it that took the front light and bounced it up a bit more focused.

I think that's all. I should really start photographing the lighting set ups I guess... lol.  And so much for B&W formalness. That lasted all of one post....

..So I got that going for me.

Bill freaking Murray

The very thing that makes Bill Murray, well, Bill Murray is what makes sitting down with him such an unpredictable enterprise. Bill Murray crashes parties, ditches promotional appearances, clashes with his friends, his collaborators, and his enemies. If you—movie director, journalist, dentist—want to speak to him, you don't go through any gatekeeper. You leave a message on an 800 number. If Bill Murray wants to speak with you, he'll call you back. If his three and a half decades in the public sphere have taught us anything about the 59-year-old actor, it's that he simply does not give a good goddamn.

And that he is eleventy billion times cooler then we could ever be.

Lighting Studies #2

More Lighting Studies done over the weekend.  Here I busted out my old set of oil paints and found some of these wrinkled old gems in there.  The oil paint was still good after 20 years, crazy stuff.  Six light set up for this series but once I had the lights set right I could just move in new tubes of paint and position them as I wanted.  The hardest part was getting the composition and backgrounds set up in a interesting way. I had 5 different sets I went through till I just went to close crop and black BG. I could see this mounted all into one frame in rows of three.  Hope you like them.

Lighting Studies

Did a couple lighting studies yesterday here in the studio. Man, I just have to say it again,  I love my Dedolights. I am using those with a Foba Combitube System here and it's addictive. Very enjoyable to throw light around with this set up.

This cymbal was just a attempt at stark and clean. Used about 4 lights on this as you can see by the streaks of light on the top. Had 4-5 little flags all around to help keep the highlights at bay. The glove had 6 on it. 3 from the back, 2 from each side and one snooted just on the fingers in front for some fill.

Forcing myself to explore B&W imagery again as well. I get a little too distracted by color sometimes and I want to bring these back to more of a formal study of texture and light. The goal is to shoot some random object a day. Hope you all enjoy them.

The glove is supposed to be a bit creepy by the way.  The wife comes in and says, "Nice murder glove." ;-)

Tweet, by Oyl Miller

TWEET.

BY OYL MILLER

- - - -

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning, same hat wearing hipsters burning for shared and skeptical approval from the holographic projected dynamo in the technology of the era, who weak connections and recession wounded and directionless, sat up, micro-conversing in the supernatural darkness of Wi-Fi-enabled cafes, floating across the tops of cities, contemplating techno, who bared their brains to the black void of new media and the thought leaders and so called experts who passed through community colleges with radiant, prank playing eyes, hallucinating Seattle- and Tarantino-like settings among pop scholars of war and change, who dropped out in favor of following a creative muse, publishing zines and obscene artworks on the windows of the internet, who cowered in unshaven rooms, in ironic superman underwear burning their money in wastebaskets from the 1980s and listening to Nirvana through paper thin walls, who got busted in their grungy beards riding the Metro through Shinjuku station, who ate digital in painted hotels or drank Elmer's glue in secret alleyways, death or purgatoried their torsos with tattoos taking the place of dreams, that turned into nightmares, because there are no dreams in the New Immediacy, incomparably blind to reality, inventing the new reality, through hollow creations fed through illuminated screens. Screens of shuttering tag clouds and image thumbnails lightning in the mind surfing towards Boards of Canada and Guevara, illuminating all the frozen matrices of time between, megabyted solidities of borders and yesterday's backyard wiffleball dawns, downloaded drunkenness over rooftops, digital storefronts of flickering flash, a sun and moon of programming joyrides sending vibrations to mobile devices set on manner mode during twittering wintering dusks of Peduca, ashtray rantings and coffee stains that hid the mind, who bound themselves to wireless devices for an endless ride of opiated information from CNN.com and Google on sugary highs until the noise of modems and fax machines brought them down shuddering, with limited and vulgar verbiage to comment threads, battered bleak of shared brain devoid of brilliance in the drear light of a monitor, who sank all night in interface's light of Pabst floated out and sat through the stale sake afternoon in desolate pizza parlors, listening to the crack of doom on separate nuclear iPods, who texted continuously 140 characters at a time from park to pond to bar to MOMA to Brooklyn Bridge lost battalion of platonic laconic self proclaimed journalists committed to a revolution of information, jumping down the stoops off of R&B album covers out of the late 1980s, tweeting their screaming vomiting whispering facts and advices and anecdotes of lunchtime sandwiches and cat antics on couches with eyeballs following and shockwaves of analytics and of authority and finding your passion and other jargon, whole intellects underscored and wiped clean in the total recall 24/7 365 assault all under the gaze of once brilliant eyes.

Via Riley Dog.

Harvey Pekar - October 8, 1939 – July 12, 2010

Harvey Pekar has passed away this morning.

Some pretty weak news that someone else will no doubt write a better tribute about. Harvey Pekar, of American Splendor fame was found dead in his Ohio home early this morning. Many will remember the 2003 movie starring Paul Giamatti based on his life and work. My Uncle was an avid collector of his when I was a kid, so I got to appreciate his work as I grew up. For fans of the non-hero comic genre, this is a dark day. His well documented battle with prostate cancer, as well as recent bouts with depression have taken it's toll. Check the link for the full story, I just wanted to say thanks for all the great work. Farewell Harvey, you really knew how to make us laugh. The author of American Splendor found dead at 70.

Book photo for art project.

Jason Leisge just finished a art project for Parking Block Publishing where he used a book as a sketch book. You'll have to wait for the inside pics. Me no post sneaky pics of it for you.

You can check out the blog behind Parking Block at Such Luck, quite a nice Chicago-centric blog on art, skateboarding and food.

Shot this with some awesome Dedolights, which are crack for any still life shooter. These puppies are a whole lot of fun to use. Thanks goes out to Hill Street Studios for doing a work swap for these.

I'm tired and need more coffee.... and I'm grumpy... Bah.

And so it goes....

Companies brace for end of cheap made-in-China era - Yahoo! Finance

At the other end of the scale, some in research-intensive sectors such as pharmaceutical, biotech and other life sciences companies are also reconsidering China for a range of reasons, including costs and incentives being offered in other countries.

"Life sciences companies have shifted some production back to the U.S. from China. In some cases, the U.S. was becoming cheaper," said Sean Correll, director of consulting services for Burlington, Mass.-based Emptoris.

That may soon become true for publishers, too. Printing a 9-by-9-inch, 334-page hardcover book in China costs about 44 to 45 cents now, with another 3 cents for shipping, says Goodwin. The same book costs 65 to 68 cents to make in the U.S.

"If costs go up by half, it's about the same price as in the U.S. And you don't have 30 days on the water in shipping," he says.

Even with recent increases, wages for Chinese workers are still a fraction of those for Americans. But studies do show China's overall cost advantage is shrinking.

Labor costs have been climbing about 15 percent a year since a 2008 labor contract law that made workers more aware of their rights. Tax preferences for foreign companies ended in 2007. Land, water, energy and shipping costs are on the rise.

In its most recent survey, issued in February, restructuring firm Alix Partners found that overall China was more expensive than Mexico, India, Vietnam, Russia and Romania.