Powerhouse Portfolio Review

PowerHouse Books, an industry leader in conceptual art photography, publishers of Patrick McMullen, Helen Levitt, Magnum Photos and more, will hold a portfolio review on Sunday, March 8, 2007. The third annual review has become increasingly popular welcoming all levels of photography from inspired amateurs to established professionals.

Last year’s review included a 37-member panel of experts with leaders in fine art, fashion, entertainment, advertising and publishing and this year’s judges include Time magazine director of photography George Pitts, powerHouse publisher Daniel Power and chair of the BFA photography department at the School of Visual Arts.

The review at powerHouse Arena will include five one-on-one reviews from the panel directed at each attendee’s interest. Apply early because registration is limited and they offer a student discount.

Check out the Web site for more information about the review and the company:
http://www.powerhousebooks.com/portfolioreview/

Also, visit the address below to download the registration form:
http://www.powerHouseBooks.com/portfolioreview/registration.pdf

Here are the details:
The 3rd Annual powerHouse Portfolio Review 
Sunday, March 18, 2007
10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
The powerHouse Arena
37 Main Street, DUMBO, Brooklyn
Contact: Daniela Larcher, at 212.604.9074 ext 100, or e-mail: daniela@powerHouseBooks.com.

Image Critique : Night(hawk) Vision

Nate Shepard, a 16-year-old Junior at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH, has sent in this moody night image, "Laundromat" for critique. (click on the image for a larger view)

From a technical point of view, one of the interesting things about looking at photographs in the digital age is the availability of EXIF data in the image. Looking at that information lets us know that Nate used a Nikon D70 with his zoom lens set on 24mm and the exposure set at f/2.8 at 1/50 of a second. Why does this matter? Because it lets us know whether Nate had any room to move on his exposure for this scene.

I'd like to have seen Nate give the photograph a
little more exposure so as to open up the shadows of the image a bit. I don't want the shadows to be bright, but I'm really interested in seeing a little more detail around the building. For example, look at how the reflections in the foreground add to the interest in the photograph.

Because he sent me a JPEG image, I can't tell if Nate shot a RAW file  or a JPEG. If he'd shot a RAW file, there would have been a fairly large amount of exposure latitude built into the file and he could have used software like the Adobe RAW Converter  that comes with Photoshop CS2 to leverage the extra data contained in the file, allowing for a bit more detail in the shadows without blowing out the highlights.

Though it probably wouldn't have been practical, the most effective method of lightening the shadows in this image would have been to add some light to the scene with additional lighting. In a situation like this, a RAW file could have given Nate what he needed.

In terms of content, I think there is a remarkable relationship between Nate's photograph and Edward Hopper's famous painting "Nighthawks." The diffused light, the mood, the angles of the building— they all add up to having the image be very reminiscent of Hopper's masterpiece.  One of the things that makes Hopper's  picture so powerful, though, is the pool of light that falls through the windows onto the ground outside of the building and the way that Hopper's "camera position" places us in the scene. With the building filling the right hand edge of the frame, we feel as though we are walking up to this location; we're in it rather than observing it.

Nate's image might benefit from a bit more of that "intimate" feel. Placing the camera a bit closer and cropping in from the left side wouldn't lose the great dark sky or the reflections in the lot, but it does simplify the composition a bit by removing the small, distracting details on the left edge of the frame. I would really be interested in seeing what would have happened if Nate had taken a few steps to his right and a few steps closer to the building to put us closer to those wonderful repeating circles inside the windows.

Keep shooting, Nate... nice work!

Let Nate know what you think of his image (or my critique) by leaving a comment below. After leaving a comment, find your best work and send it to me and I'll post it here on the blog. Send me JPEGs at: pdnblog@jeffcurto.com

Image Critique : Inside Out

After an insanely long time away from the PDNedu blogosphere, I'm back with image critiques. This is a chance for photo students to submit their best stuff for the world to see and get some feedback on their work. I'll post as many things as I get in my email, so send me your best work!

This time out, we've got some images from R. Scott Victor, a freshman at Rochester Institute of Technology studying Business Management. He's sent along three photographs of some sumptuous, light-drenched interiors for critique. (click on photos for larger views)

The strength of the first two images is in their composition and point of view. Scott's taken us into these spaces and really made us feel a part of them by placing his camera at an "eye-level" height. The light that pours through the windows is beautiful, and the second image has a reasonably nice balance of exposure to allow us to see both inside and outside.

Even though Scott's balanced the exposure fairly well, I would like to have seen him do a bit more with the light for the rooms. Both of the "furniture" images could use some fill light to help brighten the shadows and show us more of the structure of the furnishings and the rooms themselves. The top image here could use a lot of additional light to brighten up the table, which would allow us to see the chairs and give us a better sense of what the near part of the table looks like.

This extra light could be in the form of some big pieces of foam core that reflect a bit of the existing light back into the shadows of the space or could be artificial light. One thing to keep in mind is that using tungsten (incandescent) lights will result in a color temperature (color of the light) that is different from the daylight that is coming through the windows. This is why some strobe flash would probably be a better choice than either bounce-fill cards or "hot" lights, because there would be enough intensity to overcome the dark shadows, and enough control to not let the shadows be too light or too dark.

The second image is, I think, the best of the bunch because it has enough light to show us the room and furnishings (though look at that black chair in the middle; I think it needs a little light to show us its interior) and a great composition. It has an issue, though, in that it suffers from some perspective problems by virtue of being shot from a slightly downward-facing angle with a camera that has no perspective control (like a view camera, or a  shift lens on a smaller format camera). Because of this, the window frame is distorted and the room doesn't look as good as it could. This perspective problem could be fixed to some degree in Photoshop, but the best quality results are going to come by shooting it with a camera that allows for correction of the perspective problem in the first place.

Scott's third image also suffers from not enough fill light, causing his subject to be a silhouette with little to no detail in the flowers or the vase. Again, some additional light, balanced so that it fills the shadows but doesn't overwhelm the natural light from the window would be a great help here. I'd also like to have seen him choose a camera position that moves the flowers a little bit farther away from the window's vertical element so there's a bit more separation of those forms. A slightly lower camera position might have been nice to experiment with, as well, just to see if there could be more interesting, somewhat less bright reflections on the table's surface.

Scott's got some great ideas here, but he has to spend a bit of time tweaking his setup in order to get photographs that work a bit better as illustrations of these spaces. Sometimes (OK, a lot of the time) we have to "think like a client" and figure out what it is that a client would want to see in the photographs. If the client is a furniture company, it wants to see the furniture presented in a beautiful, stylish way so that prospective buyers can see how great it is. If the clients are builders or decorators, they will want to see the interior as something that is perfectly assembled and perfectly designed.

Even if the client is "just you" (as I often hear my students say), you have to be able to know that you have controlled all aspects of the photograph that fall within your control. In the case of a set of images like these, where the subject doesn't move and the photographer can spend some time getting things right, it's worth thinking about how you want the photographs to communicate how you saw the space and realize that the camera's limitations of range of brightness and perspective recording don't always match up with our human vision.

Have some advice for Scott? Post it below by using the "comments" section.

Have some photographs you've been working on? Send them to me at pdnblog@jeffcurto.com and I'll post them for the world to see and make some comments about them.

Jeff Curto is a photography professor and coordinator at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

 

Image Critique : A Plethora of Portraits

Lauren Lallone, who graduated this past spring from the University of Alabama at Birmingham with a BA in Art has sent me her website address so I could critique her images.

Lauren's website is www.laurenlallone.com.

Lauren's body of work is primarily portraiture, and there are some fine images on her site. I like that her site leads off with 3 images of the same subject, an idea that lends a sort of "stop motion" look to the work. She's employed a web layout that allows her work to be all lined up in one left-to-right scroll (did I miss the memo on this one? It seems like every third student portfolio website is set up like this).

That strategy works well, but I think Lauren could use some paring down and editing to have her strongest work be seen more clearly. If you take the time to scroll through the whole "lineup" of work, it looks like Lauren has included nearly every assignment she turned in in school (pinhole, fisheye, environmental, conceptual, etc, etc). While there is nothing inherently wrong with a "greatest hits" approach, focusing your portfolio (physical or online) gives viewers a better sense of what you want and where you want to go.

It's that last part... where Lauren wants to go, that should be center stage here. What should the viewer know about Lauren? Does she want to get a job in a portrait studio? Does she want to exhibit this work? Does she want to offer to make portrait photographs of the people who come to her site? In other words, the lack of focus in the work as a whole makes Lauren's approach look unfocused.

The portrait work is quite interesting. Lauren has a wonderfully intimate sensibility about how she photographs people and she's not afraid to take her big camera (looks like 4x5 was employed quite a lot here) and get right up close to people. That proximity of view and the shallow depth-of-field it often produces makes these portraits very evocative, especially because Lauren seems to be able to coax really relaxed but intense expressions from her subjects.

After looking at her site for a few minutes, I discovered another body of work that I think is pretty interesting, but it's a little hard to get at because of how it is presented on the site. Her photo collage work is as interesting as her portraits and even seems to extend the idea of personality that she's dealing with in her photographs of people. I'd like to see more integration between these two bodies of work, perhaps even making portraits of the people whose living spaces she dissects with her collage idea.

Lauren's got a great sense of photographic style started here; some fine portrait work and some other interesting conceptual images that seem to fit in well with her ideas about photography. I'd like to see her take that next step and show us only the wheat and none of the chaff.

What do you think of Lauren's work? After you use the comment button below to leave your thoughts, send me a your best stuff at pdnblog@jeffcurto.com and I'll comment and post it here on the blog.

Image Critique : I Am The Avalanche

Matthew Adams a senior photojournalism major at Point Park University located in Pittsburgh, PA sent in a few rock concert images for critique. Matthew says that his primary focus in his photography is rock and indie rock bands and two of the images that he sent are of a band called "I Am The Avalanche".

One of the images succeeds rather well, I think. The photograph of Vinnie Caruana, the band's lead singer thrusting himself into the audience and the audience pushing back towards him really gets at the raw energy that a great concert experience has. Caruana's red shirt and his aggressive pose give a real sense of strength and power to the image.

Another image that Matthew sent, though, doesn't have that same sense of energy. This photograph is also of Vinnie Caruana, but this time it's his hand playing guitar. The "caption" material that Matthew has sent along says that Caruana has the letters "IATA" (I Am The Avalanche) tattooed on his wrist as a symbol of his devotion to his band. My thought is that the small tattoo is too subtle and represents too tenuous a connection for a viewer of this photograph. Unless the viewer is already a fan and already knows about Caruana's symbolic wrist-art gesture, then the photograph is of just another guy playing a guitar. I'd rather see a "portrait" of Caruana's wrist, showing the tattoo in all its glory, or see Caruana playing in a more forceful pose.

What do you think makes a great rock music photograph? Do Matthew's fit that description? Use the comment area below to let us know and then send your best stuff to me at pdnblog@jeffcurto.com and I'll post them here on the blog.

Image Critique : The Art of Waste

John Boal is a part time student at The Northern Virginia Community College, working towards an internship in photojournalism.

John sent along the URL for his website, www.johnboalphotography.com. His site contains several images under the  "people" and "places" categories, but the most fleshed-out group of images on his site is a set of photographs about waste management and recycling in various parts of Virginia. It's a nicely realized project that not only has images of the massive waste reclamation and processing facilities, but also images of the workers who sort and deal with the enormous amounts of trash that we produce. The images themselves are quite good; making the steam and smoke of the processing plants look both beautiful and menacing and showing the workers as individuals who sometimes seem overwhelmed by it all.

An interesting strategy that John has used is that in addition to individual images on his website, he's also included the complete waste management story on the site as a downloadable PDF file. This means that he can show how his photographs integrate with text, lay them out in a way that makes sense for the overall story and use captions to enhance the images that he has used. It's a clever way to make sure that his images get seen the way he wants them to be seen.

I'd like to see John pare down his website to just two or three really fine picture stories like this one and remove or otherwise de-emphasize the other content that he has there. The other images are good images, but aren't as cohesive as the photographs of waste management.

Image Critique : The House of Winged Gables

Sam Pyeatte, a resident of Siloam Springs, Arkansas, is a student of the Academy of Art University, Online. Sam sent in this photograph of Magruder I, a house designed by architect Cyrus A. Sutherland.

Sam's goal in making the photograph was, as he put it, "to bring out the building's strongest design element which I feel is the 'swept' gable." Architectural photographer Timothy Hursley is one of Sam's influences and he cites Hursley's "more candid, less a glossy Architectural Record type image" as his inspiration for his photographs.

I think Sam's photograph of the Magruder I structure is effective at making this "winged" house seem to fly. By framing the photograph to eliminate the place where the house is attached to the earth, and by including a goodly amount of sky, Sam's picture makes the house feel "light." The reflection on the big front window enhances this feeling by lightening the image overall.

I might be tempted to lighten the wall on the right side of the photograph (either with on-site reflectors or in Photoshop), which would tend to brighten the image up some more, but that's a quibble. I also would have thought about removing the red flag in the image, as I don't think it adds anything to the image and competes a bit too much with the rest of the photograph's content.

Do you think Sam's image is effective? Would your approach to the subject be different? If so, how? Use the comment section below to leave your opinion and then send your own images to me at pdnblog@jeffcurto.com and I'll post them for critique.

Image Critique : A Little Traveling Music

Sean Work, a student who has just enrolled in photography courses at Tidewater Community College in Norfolk, Virginia, has sent in some photographs that he made as he backpacked through through Europe this past year. Sean plans to apply for admission to the Photojournalism program at Ohio University later this year.

Click on any of the images presented here to see a larger verrsion. To see more of his work, see Sean's Flickr site.

Sean describes himself as a "self-taught" photographer and also says that he has "adhered to a strict philosophy
regarding image manipulation, and all manipulations
have been universal" which should make folks at the NPPA happy.

Sean's images are fine, though it seems to me that they lack a depth of content and purpose. As individual images, they are reasonably well composed and exposed, but don't seem to convey the excitement of "being there" as much as they could.

The two images here that involve "music" ("Blind Street Performer- Donostia, Spain" and "Young Folk Dancers- Riga, Latvia") could have been enhanced, for example, by the inclusion of a bit of motion blur... a slow shutter speed could have conveyed the activity of playing and dancing more than the static images we see here. Getting in closer would help, too, as we'd be more in the physical space of the participants. In the "dancing" image, for example, you can get a sense of how the activity could be better conveyed by the little bit of twirling skirt that is seen at the right edge of the frame. A closer viewpoint and a lower camera angle would have helped here.

The photograph of the statue in the fog (that Sean has titled "Independence Monument- Budapest, Hungary") has an interesting angle and mood, but doesn't really show me the statue well enough for me to see much about what it is. Moving camera position might help, so that the head and the statue's "pose" would be more easily read.

What I'd like to see Sean do is to think about the story he's trying to tell. Like writing a story in words, with photography it's usually necessary to pare down the details of an event to their essence. What is it about the dance event that interested him? It may be that he can't tell the story in one photograph per event and needs to work on a short picture story project. I can imagine a set of 5 or 6 images of the dance event that would help tell the story not only of the dancers' movement, but also a bit of their cultural heritage and the bridging of the gap between the "old world" culture and the current generation's practitioners.

I'd urge Sean to keep shooting and to keep working on trying to find the essential aspects of a subject. Ask yourself questions: How do you convey the soul of a blind performer? How do you best express the enthusiasm of a group of dancers who are expressing their age-old heritage?

What do you think of Sean's work? Where do you think he could improve? Or, do you think that I've missed the mark here on what Sean has done? Let your voice be heard by using the comment box below and then send your best work to me at pdnblog@jeffcurto.com and I'll post them for the world to see.

Image Critique : Shiva on the Pitcher's Mound

Last week, I posted a photograph of a softball pitcher made by  Gary Meidinger, a student at Emporia State University in Kansas. When Gary had sent in that image, he'd also sent in a few others, including this one of a wildly contorted pitcher in the middle of her windup.

While I think that it has some problems (the white scoreboard behind the pitcher makes for a difficult intersection of competing values with the pitcher's jersey, and it appears as though the highlights are a bit blown out) I couldn't help noticing an interesting similarity between this photograph and an image of the Hindu God Shiva.

Some of the most frequently seen depictions of the deity show a four-armed, dancing figure. Shiva's dance is usually seen as being a symbol of the forces of creation and destruction, as well as the balance that opposition brings. The four arms are seen to represent the four cardinal directions of space, suggesting Shiva's omnipresence.

So, what's that got to do with a softball pitcher? Well, not all that much in the literal sense, but I want to use these two images to make a "pitch" for the idea of a liberal arts education. Learning photography's techniques is only a part of the process of learning to be a photographer. A greater part, it seems to me, is figuring out what to do with photography; to decide what you want to say with your camera. The more you know about the world around you and the more parallels you

 

can draw from your

 

understanding of that world, the more likely you are to be able to make images that draw on bigger and more powerful ideas. Taking classes outside of your photo department - - - classes like art history, humanities, philosophy, literature, drawing & scupture - - - can help you learn more about the world around you.

So, while you are cultivating your photographic skills, don't forget that balance, grace and opposition of technical and intellectual forces can help inform your sense of what photography is for you.

Let great knowledge be your mantra!

 

Image Critique : America, Seen Darkly

Randy Illum, a student at Burlington County College (and about to transfer to Rutgers, Mason Gross School of the Arts in the fall)  has sent in several photographs from a current project called "America". I've included two of the series here; more can be seen at his website, www.randyillum.com and it's worth taking a look at the whole group for a sense of what this project has to offer.

Click on the images on this page for a larger view.

The concept is interesting: closely (often very closely) framed images of people engaged in the "tiny little moments" of life; a prom dress, a sporting event, a gentle embrace... the "stuff" that we don't always remember but don't want to ever forget.

The idea works well, and the content of the images nearly always hits the mark, if in a slightly overly-stylized way. The issues that I

have with the work stem from two places. One is technique, the other is scope.

 

In terms of technique, I want to know whether the extraordinary darkness of these images is something that is a choice that Randy is making or whether it's something that he is overlooking. Is his "America" a dark enough place that he has to bury his higlight tones so far down and lose the shadow detail that these images could otherwise have? Is it a function of scanning the original images or is it some concious decision that he is making? Personally, I'd like to be able to see the images' details a bit more clearly and that would mean lighter photographs. At the very least, I'd like to know in a more concrete fashion whether the tones in these images are what Randy wants, or simply what he's getting. Controlling your image's content means controlling every aspect of the way the image looks.

In terms of scope, I wonder if the images are a bit narrow. If you're going to use a title like "America" to describe a body of work, I'd like to see either a much more clearly defined sense of what Randy's "take" on America is, or I'd like to see something that  is much more of a broad-based concept that encompasses bigger ideas than what is in this grouping so far. Perhaps Randy is planning on a much more comprehensive exploration of the idea. With any luck, he's looked at Robert Frank's seminal work "The Americans" or the culturally oriented work of William Klein, the autobiographical work of the great Wright Morris or even the more ambiguous color images of America by Joel Sternfeld. It may be that Randy has a fairly strong sense of what he is doing, but neither his email to me nor his website give me any sort of "artist's statement" (make it short!) that explains the work. It's often important to give the viewer a brief explanation of the ideas behind the images.

So, here's a project with "legs" but legs that need a bit of exercise. I think the idea here is strong, but that the body of work can be improved by some careful consideration of both concept and execution.

What do you think about Randy's work? Submit a comment below and, once you've done that, send in some images that you have been working on. Send them to pdnblog@jeffcurto.com and I'll post them and make some comments.