Danklife Mention in The Portland Egoist

The Portland Egoist Gave a lovely write up of my March Madness Project done with Travis Barteaux as the AD for Nike in 2012.

There's something that we deeply love about the art of photo compositing. When it's done well it is a great mix of fantasy and reality. We hadn't seen much of the work from Portland-based illustration and re-touching crew, Danklife, before today. What we're seeing though we're digging. The hyper-realistic, fantastical nature of the work is what we look for in this type of work. The above illustrations were created in conjunction with Nike for last year's March Madness. The effects add to and heighten the already amazing physical nature of young ball players in today's game.

Awesome sauce!​ Link

1939 Ensemble

Awesome stuff.  Drummer owns Revival Drums up here in Portland.​

News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.

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News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what's relevant. It's much easier to recognise what's new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age. Media organisations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we're cut off from the flow of news. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.

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News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation.

Yeah, time for a danklife news blackout.  NPR be gone!

Publishers need better photography to stay relevant on the web

Today a sluggish economy and tectonic changes in the media landscape are squeezing editorial outlets. Publications understand that they need to compete on the web and in social media, and to compete they need to maintain a hyperactive content cycle. A handful of long articles every month won't cut it. With a requirement for daily content, hiring two creatives for every story is an unaffordable luxury. Since, through a sort of institutional inertia, the writers have remained the prime movers for most media outlets, publications have addressed this problem by asking authors to take up photography on the side. The results: predictably poor.

The irony of this situation is that it is happening at a time when the visual image is achieving ascendancy.

AN EXAMPLE Last September USA Today unveiled a new website design devoting prime real estate to photography. Somebody in the design process understood the visual nature of the web—photos sell stories and increase click-through rates. The layout highlights photography and dedicates the entire area above the fold to images on many pages. The design is smart and attractive, but although the designers understood the value of the image, the editorial staff has yet to catch on. USA Today doesn't seem to be commissioning photos to fill this space. Instead they are relying on writer-supplied images with the occasional wire or stock photo.

A Detailed Explanation of How Photoshop Blend Modes Work

Working with blend modes is almost always an experimental process. Because it’s nearly impossible to predict the results, you always seem to end up experimenting with different modes and Fill Opacities until you get the results you’re looking for.

In this article I’m going to give you a high-level view of what the various blend modes do, and then I’ll dig deeper into the nuts and bolts of the blend modes by explaining some of the math involved, and their interrelationships with each other. I’m not going to “show” you how the blend modes work—I’m going to “explain” how they work. By the time you finish reading this article, you should have a better idea of how to use blend modes and where to begin your “experimentation,” which in turn should reduce the time it takes to achieve the results you’re looking for.

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Great run down on one of the most important parts of a lot of post work.  This all applies to many other FX programs as well.  These modes exist in After Effects and Modo as well.  I Highly suggest anyone interested in geting the most out of their imagery to study up on them.

Danklife on Adweek Talent Gallery

The New Balance Run Light Project shot by the talented Mike Powell made it to the Ad Week Talent Gallery today! ​

Check it out and all our other work on Behance. ​

How to photograph lightning: A tutorial | Richard Gottardo Photography

A common mistake people make when shooting lightning, is exposing for the scene they are shooting instead of exposing for the lightning shot. Shooting lightning has a LOT in common with flash photography, where the majority of the light in your photo will be coming from the strike itself and not from any ambient light sources.  You will want to set an exposure time for between 20 and 30 seconds where a normal shot without lightning will be totally black. The settings I find that usually work for me are around F/7 ISO 100 and 30s  for lighting that is very powerful and very close, down to about f/5 ISO 100 and 30s for lighting that is a bit farther off in the distance. You will need to take a few test shots to really dial in the right settings.  All of the photos shown in this tutorial were taken at around F/7 ISO 100 30s so this is really a great starting point

One of the projects I have always wanted to do but have not had the time or the weather.  Not many lightning storms in Portland.​

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http://www.richardgottardo.com/

Russian Criminal Tattoo Archive

Between 1948 and 1986, during his career as a prison guard, Danzig Baldaev made over 3,000 drawings of tattoos. They were his gateway into a secret world in which he acted as ethnographer, recording the rituals of a closed society. The icons and tribal languages he documented are artful, distasteful, sexually explicit and provocative, reflecting as they do the lives, status and traditions of the convicts that wore them. Baldaev made comprehensive notes about each tattoo, which he then carefully reproduced in his tiny St. Petersburg flat. The resulting exquisitely detailed ink drawings are accompanied with his handwritten notes and signature on the reverse, the paper is yellowed with age, and carries Baldaev’s stamp, giving the drawings a visceral temporality – almost like skin

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Various cat tattoos. The cat is one of the oldest symbols of criminal world. They are the personification of the thieves’ fortune, prudence, patience, the speed of their actions, their ruthlessness and rage. At the same time they represent the expectations of their victims. The abbreviation KOT (tomcat), which is found in tattoos, is the language of thieves, it means: Korennoy Obitatel Tyurmy (Native prison inhabitant).

Top right: Text reads ‘NVOVDO’.

This is a rare acronym, understandable only to the initiated: NVOVDO – ‘Do not touch the thief, he will always make you surrender!’ 1950s.

Bottom left: The symbols on the hat worn by the cat signify the bearer of the tattoo is otritsaly – a thief who refuses to submit to, and is a malicious infringer of the prison rules.

Bottom right: Text reads 'All power to the godfathers!’.1980s.

LED Flashlight photography: How to make an Ice Light

LED technology is currently developing at a rapid rate and in this article we look at how you can utilize the latest LED technology to light your images until the photographic lighting industry catches up. See how for under £20 you can make a portable, rechargeable light that can produce results like this in a totally dark room:

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I love this kind of DIY stuff.  I have used milk jugs as diffusors for years myself. ​

New Behance Portfolio

Just posted a Project we did for HBO's Celebrity Apprentice and Poker After Dark to the danklife behance portfolio.​

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Copyright Controversy After Appropriated Photo Used to Win Art Contest

In the two photographs above, the bottom image is a photo-manipulation created using the top image. Are they completely separate works of art? What if we told you the second photo was created without the original photographer’s permission and submitted to a contest as an original artwork? What if we told you it actually won?

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I'll side with it being a rip off and he should lose his award of a new mac laptop.​

Art Producers Speak: Nadav Kander

The industry has so drastically changed that the art director’s position can be very difficult. I think art directors are saints who are coming up with brilliant ideas that they wish could be a certain way, and sometimes they are thwarted by the client. I am there to help the process come together as smoothly as possible for them. It’s a collaboration.

Judge Rules William Eggleston Can Clone His Own Work

About a year ago, I mentioned a lawsuit by a collector, filed after William Eggleston decided to re-print older photographs, using inkjet printing and a larger size. A judge now ruled that the photographer had the right to do that. On the surface, that’s great news for photographers. It also blows a huge hole into the whole editioning game that galleries have been relying on. (more) Most photographs can be printed in large numbers, so it’s not all that obvious why someone would pay a lot of money for a photograph. Editions provide an easy solution: Even though there could be thousands of copies of a single photograph, the promise is that there will be merely, let’s say, eight. If you buy a print you got one out of only eight, and this - artificial - scarcity then justifies your investment. Thus, as a photographer you need to think about editions if you want to work with a gallery, since that’s part of the game.

What this means is that if you want to re-print a photograph that was issued in some edition you can’t - unless, and here’s the trick, you can show that your new edition is very different. That’s essentially what the Eggleston lawsuit was about. And why wouldn’t a somewhat different size plus a somewhat different process truly be a different edition, right?

Do bigger images mean improved conversion rates?

The mega-sized image lowered visitor bounce rates by 27%, plus it increased leads generated by 36%. 

Dell was so impressed by these results that the testing team ran out similar redesign tests for other B2B product lines… and so far they’ve all raised lead generation and contact form conversions as well, sometimes into the triple digits.

Bigger images lead to better sales.  Can I ask if BETTER images do anything? ;)​

Something to keep in mind when talking to clients.

Rumored Canon EOS 1D Xs (1Ds X)?

24th We're told [thanks] that a 'preview announcement' for a high MP camera is likely for September/October, along similar lines to announcements associated with some of the recent EOS video cameras [hopefully not for a timescale like the 200-400 lens] and that it is currently most likely at around 47MP, although 39MP and '50+' versions are in test. The camera is dependent on technologies that will appear later this year in the 7D Mk

So look to the release of the 7D Mk to se what might be in store for the fall from Canon. ​

"Fly Through" of March Madness 2012

I have been working a bit in After Effects and here is a little study I did of a simplified Photoshop file from the March Madness project for Nike.​

Clearly I have a lot to learn about animating the camera, but this was a fun weekend project!​

Magnum Photos approaches new audiences in deal with Vice magazine - British Journal of Photography

For Magnum, the collaboration with Vice is a positive one, says Bell, as it will allow the agency to showcase the scope and breadth of its offering by including interviews with photographers who are not typical of the Vice brand. "Vice has featured [Magnum] photographers in the past who are perhaps more traditionally suited to their market but we've always wanted do something broader. We hope to feature a range of Magnum photographers - not just those who are working on subjects that are in the news but photographers working on long term projects or those who are outside of the spotlight. It's important that [the series] represents Magnum across the board," he adds. "There are a lot of photographers at Magnum who have work that hasn't been widely seen; I hope we'll have the chance to represent all the different sides of the agency and its membership.

Photoshop illustration of Contra

This is pretty awesome to watch and it's pretty much what I do all day, lol!​

Each frame in this video represents 10 seconds of work. The image spans across 3 PSD files with over 500 layers at a resolution of 9600x5400 pixels. The project took 25 hours to complete over the course of 6 days.

Conscientious Extended | On Process

A good photograph is a good photograph in such a way that the process itself might be an integral part of it, but it’s not the focal point. In other words, the moment you can almost separate out the image from the process - just like you’d think about Hipstamatic as picture plus filter - you’re in trouble: Suddenly, the process itself becomes part of what is being evaluated. But who cares whether it took you three days to make a picture or whether you got that great picture seeing something and then snapping it very quickly?

In photoland, the cult of process is tied to the cult of work. It’s almost as if the more physical and technical effort you put into a photograph, the better it is, or rather: the more we have to admire it. But why would we?

This is one of the issues I have all the time.  It's not about the process, it's about the image.  Many times I will get into discussions about the work I do and someone will snarkily ​say, "It's all done in post, the photographer does not matter!" Which is so far from the truth that now-a-days I either get a bit offended or just dismiss the person outright as uneducated. It sounds a bit harsh, but I am over that statement.  The difference between a well composed, beautifully lit, perfectly timed shot and a careless "one off" has huge repercussions for what I can do with it in post. 

Thomas Hawk - Why I Quit Getty Images and Why I’m Moving My Stock Photography Sales to Stocksy

Since the Carlyle Group (read their wikipedia page actually, it’s fascinating) has taken over Getty Images, things seem to have changed. Maybe Getty’s parent is trying to wring as much profit as their stock business as they can, but it feels like artists are getting the short end of the stick even more these days.

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While Stocksy isn’t exactly “occupy” stock photography, rather than me getting 20% and Carlyle getting 80%, I’ll be paid a much fairer 50% payout. The exciting part about Stocksy though isn’t just the higher payout, it’s that the members of Stocksy actually OWN the agency. That’s right, after paying out costs, Stocksy will distribute profits to it’s members — so members will get dividends and actually hold real equity in the business.

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If you are a photographer, consider signing up. One bit of warning here though, Stocksy is being *very* selective about the photographers that they are adding. I have felt a little bad because some of my good friends and talented photographers haven’t been asked to join

​And here is more on Stocksy via Cnn.

"Photographers kept coming to see me, coming to visit, telling me how bad the industry was, telling me they were disenfranchised, telling me about the competition, this sea of images. That, combined with declining royalties -- they were super frustrated," he said. "They were looking to me to get back in the game. I just couldn't ignore it anymore."

He's not aiming to conquer the world -- something iStock did as it pioneered the "microstock" market that exploded when an army of digital photographers mobilized to sell photos globally on the Internet. That growth accelerated dramatically when Getty Images acquired iStock for $50 million in 2006. This time around, Livingstone is looking for "sustainability," concentrating on a high-end foothold