In case you have not been to the Danklife Behance Portfolio recently, we added a few new galleries there. One for Nike in store imagery for the House of Hoops style and another for a "Workout" project for Sanford Health shot by Robb Long.
Pricing and Negotiating: In-Store Display for National Retailer
Shoot Concept: Beauty shots of professional talent in a studioLicensing: Use of three images in any media (excluding Outdoor and Broadcast) in North America for 2 years. Although we avoid vague language whenever possible, the client insisted on using this language, effectively conveying Advertising, Collateral and Publicity use of the images as defined in our T&C.
Location: A studio in New York
Shoot Days: 1
Photographer: Up-and-coming beauty and fashion specialist
Agency: Mid-sized, based in the Midwest.
Client: Prominent retailer with approximately 2,000 stores in North America.
Here is the initial estimate:
You should all probably bookmark this as well. These types of examples are priceless.
Danklife Essay on A Sporting Life, daily inspiration for sports creatives.
I have a new Essay published on A Sporting Life about the importance of Photography for great post work and a brief write up of the World Basketball Festival Project we did last year. Here is a small section:
“Some people like to say how something is all done in post and that photography does not matter anymore. In my experience that statement could not be further from the truth. A bad image can only be pushed so far before it falls apart. With bad photography post time is spent making images look acceptable instead of making them look great. The better the starting file, the more that can be done with the image in post, the better the final image. It’s pretty simple.”
Been wanting to write up something discussing the importance of a great Photographer for awhile now as I am getting tired of people saying it's all done in post. So I was very happy to have the opportunity to publish this.
Rick Rubin Interview
I never decide if an idea is good or bad until I try it. So much of what gets in the way of things being good is thinking that we know. And the more that we can remove any baggage we’re carrying with us, and just be in the moment, use our ears, and pay attention to what’s happening, and just listen to the inner voice that directs us, the better. But it’s not the voice in your head. It’s a different voice. It’s not intellect. It’s not a brain function. It’s a body function, like running from a tiger.
“There’s a tremendous power in using the least amount of information to get a point across.”
Great stuff here for anyone in the arts.
Mind.... Blown
Bela Borsodi shot this album cover to look like 4 different photos, but it is the same frame. VIA: Kottke.org
Adobe Photoshop CC Has Already Been Pirated In Just One Day | Fstoppers
Now that Photoshop Creative Cloud went live just the other day, we didn’t know what to expect. However, news is out that just a day after the release, Photoshop CC has already been pirated and available.
So much for that stopping pirating. Another great example of how DRM just annoys the honest customers of your product while doing nothing to stop the pirates. I will not be updating to CC until I have to this time around. I'm sure they will stop upgrading the CS version of Adobe Camera Raw any day now and I'll see how long I can get by with Capture One for that side of the business.
I say this as someone who has been a first day release buyer for the past ten years. Way to go Adobe.
Vogue/Condé Nast Contest Attempts To Secure Free Images For Unlimited Use
The core problems we see are that:The sponsors have the perpetual, unlimited use of all contest entries. There is neither compensation for contest participants nor is there credit given for their work. Participants are required to sign a liability release and copyright assignment, and to indemnify Botega Veneta and Condé Nast against any lawsuits that may arise as a result of the usage of the photographs. Every entrant is required to waive any right to sue in the event of misuse of the photographs entered. The winner is being offered $10,000 for a shoot that would normally command several times that amount. The winner will be required to grant copyright ownership of all photographs from the shoot.
Annnnnd did it again! On AdWeek.
Once again we are featured on AdWeek! This was a awesome project we worked with Remco Vloon at Nike on. Lots of fun on this one.
Weekend Personal work
Been busy as all get out here so I have not been posting as much, many apologies. But in trade have some images I made this weekend.
Most shots are from a hike at Wahclella Falls on Saturday with a dead phone booth on Alberta on the same day and a 3d render test from Sunday night. The render is noisy and unacceptable but I still enjoy the direction it is heading.
Danklife on AdWeek
We made it into AdWeek's Curated Gallery again! This time with our a project we did with Travis Barteaux at Nike for their World Basketball Festival. Thanks to Travis for the the great direction and to the team here who made it possible.
Art Producers Speak: Kenji Aoki
All of my inspiration comes from geometry. When you have an object that needs to be photographed with a certain concept, you always come across complex visual problems that need to be solved. By thinking of the object as a pure geometric shape such as a circle or square, the speed required to visually communicate the concept of the image and the object itself is accelerated. The space that it’s in, the color, the shadows — balancing all of these elements allow these sensations to penetrate a deeper place.
Via: A PhotoEditor in the links on the left.
Nike Air Max ‘Sunset’ collection goes live.
A project we worked on with Photographer Ryan Unruh, ADs Brian Foster and Remco Vloon at Nike just went live and is getting some press. We were asked to go for a very "real in studio" vibe on this project and I do quite like the outcome. Read up more on it at Size Blog.
Fun project, thanks all!
Harddrive not on desktop or Finder but visible to Disk Utility in 10.8.3
Work up to a odd little bug this morning. Booted up the Mac and one of my drives was not showing up on the desktop or in the Finder window. So first thing I do is launch Disk Utility and I see it sitting there all fine a dandy. Odd, me thinks. So I run some repairs, fix permissions, sfae boot, zap pram and everything is all good but no hard drive on desktop still. Perplexing. So then I right click on it to reveal in Finder and this happens.
I get a "Ghosted" version there with all my files there and I can browse just fine (I just greyed out the file names in the screen cap). So it turns out that the Preferences somehow got scrambled and set this drive to invisible and repairing permissions will not fix it. Off to the googles where I found this page on how to fix it. Basically open terminal and enter this:
chflags nohidden /Volumes/YOUR DRIVE NAME HERE/
And there you have it. Apple seems to have a lot of bugs at start up and with permissions these days. If you keep losing connection to your PC look into this hack to fix that glitch as well.
On the Constant Moment- Clayton Cubit.
Imagine an always-recording 360 degree HD wearable networked video camera. Google Glass is merely an ungainly first step towards this. With a constant feed of all that she might see, the photographer is freed from instant reaction to the Decisive Moment, and then only faced with the Decisive Area to be in, and perhaps the Decisive Angle with which to view it. Already we've arrived at the Continuous Moment, but only an early, primitive version.
Evolve this further into a networked grid of such cameras, and the photographer is freed from these constraints as well, and is then truly a curator of reality after the fact. "Live” input, if any at all, would consist of a “flag” button the photographer presses when she thinks a moment stands out, much like is already used in recording ultra-high-speed footage. DARPA has already developed acamera drone that can stay aloft recording at 1.8 gigapixel resolution for weeks at a time, covering a field as large as 5 miles wide, down to as small as six inches across, and it can archive 70 hours of footage for review. This feat wasn't achieved with any new expensive sensor breakthroughs, but rather by networking hundreds of cheap off-the-shelf sensors, just like you've got in your smartphone.
Just Like Being There
Damn good documentary on the gig poster world. Available on NetFlicks instant watch now, highly recommend it. I worked in a screen printing studio in the 90s for a bit shooting and pulling screens for band merch so I can relate to a lot of this. The "Test Print" pile of shirts were my favorites to wear.
2013 World Press Photo of the Year faked? Mmmm, I'd say no.
The photo, dubbed Gaza Burial, was purportedly captured on November 20, 2012 by Paul Hansen. Hansen was in Gaza City when Israeli forces retaliated in response to Palestinian rocket fire. The photo shows two of the casualties of the Israeli attack, carried to their funeral by their uncles. Now, the event itself isn’t a fake — there are lots of other photos online that show the children being carried through the streets of Gaza — but the photo itself is almost certainly a composite of three different photos, with various regions spliced together from each of the images, and then further manipulation to illuminate the mourners’ faces.
....
The Huffington Post has learned that Paul Hansen is working with the WPP and independent imaging experts to determine the photograph’s level of manipulation. Hansen has said a single file was used, though it was “developed over itself.” It’s being determined whether or not what he did was in violation of the WPP’s rules.
Interesting. I do not think I would call reprocessing the RAW for multiple exposures and stacking them faking. It is still one frame captured and not a composite of different images. It is something that is akin to burning and dodging in the darkroom to me so it's fine. If he composited another frame then I would call it illustration. That's my Two Cents on that.
Thanks for the link Mike!
Entropy – Long version
2000 pictures compose this piece- that is, 2000 perfect different water drops into which we mapped an animation. Droplets that behave and look strangely similar at the stage of less entropy, and become more disordely as they splash.
Fuji X100s Review - Fallin'in Love All Over Again
Because this is a romance-rekindled kind of article, a lot of what follows focuses on improvements on shortcomings over the X100, and things I would still like to see improved. All of that might give the impression that the X100s isn't a great camera in it's own right. It ain't so. If this were a stand-alone review of a brand-new machine, without a rich family history, the bottom line would be this: the X100s is the best rangefinder-style camera Fuji has made. It produces superb images, focuses fast, processes fast and breaks every meaningful barrier to working in low light. All-around it is all good. That said, my detailed review follows.
Take Time Out To Appreciate The Power Of Photography Today
These films that MediaStorm created for the ICP Infinity Awards this year are simply fantastic. Do yourself a favor and take some time today or this week to watch and appreciate the emotion and power of photography in the world.
Photo Project: Tattoo Machines
Portland Tattoo Artist Jason Leisge, owner of OddBall Tattoo asked me to photograph some of his hand built Tattoo Machines before he left for a convention in NY. Here are the results of a two hour shoot. I hope to continue this project with the title, "Machines of Ink and Blood: Images of custom built Tattoo Machines."
Photo nerd notes: Shot with a Canon 5dm2 with the 90mm tilt shift lens and lit with a few Dedolights. I love my Dedolights! Shot a few frames for focus stacking then made the background in Modo.
Sweep, gun block model and lights in Modo.
Composited it all together and there you have it. Fun stuff. If you build your own Tattoo Machines please drop me a line, I'd love to photograph them.