Wednesday, January 6, 2010
I bought two cameras over the holiday break, a SuperHeadz Digital Harinezumi 2 and a Canon S90. The Digital Harinezumi 2, or Zumi 2, is a plastic "toy camera" built from the ground up to take really crappy-looking pictures with a vintage-inspired feel. Think Diane and Holga cameras. There is even a movie mode to capture terrible-looking movies, too, great for hallucinogenic dream effects. The Canon S90 replaces my old pocket camera, the Canon SD550. I think it might even replace my Leica D-Lux 4, too, because flash photography on it is excellent. It turns out that I can't take the Portrait Photography course I wanted because enrollment is now closed. The maximum number of students in most of these advanced photography courses is ten to twelve and some of them fill up fast. I may have to wait until next year to take it. In its place, I'll take either Lighting for Editorial Photography or Photo-Based Installation.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010
I attended my first Lighting for Editorial Photography class today taught by Michael Bryant, staff photographer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. "I'm convinced that most of our students don't know how to use flash properly," he said. That might be true, since we were all taught to use ambient light as much as possible. Michael presented examples of his work, which included amazing images all created without the use of Photoshop! "By the end of the course, you will be able to make images just like these," he said. Pretty damn cool.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Today in Lighting for Editorial Photography class, we learned some basic flash concepts, reviewed an equipment list of items we'll need for at least 90% of our projects, and reviewed students' past work. "You have a really good eye," Michael said to me. I admitted that lighting for nightclubs was a real challenge for me and he gave me some tips. "We're here to help you with lighting," he said. Cool. In Portrait Photography class, we studied the three gazes of the sitter: confrontational, averted, and looking away. A portrait could exhibit two or all three. We reviewed the use of Lowell DP lights, tungsten lights also known as hot lights, and the use of umbrellas.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Today in Lighting for Editorial Photography class, we learned bounce flash techniques using a bounce card, an Omni-Bounce, and a Lumiquest bounce. We also learned how to use a light meter to meter flash light. Our first assignment is to use different bounce techniques to light three different scenes, a portrait, a small group of people, and a large group of people. A good picture has a subject that looks like it pops out of the environment. We had our first critique in Portrait Photography. Each of the eleven students had to shoot snapshots of people we didn't know from two disposable cameras and select their ten best pictures to show the class. We were asked to choose our favorite snapshot. A couple of people chose more than one. Two of the thirteen selected were from my set. "It's a great shot," the professor said of my picture of two Asian kids dressed as Civil War soldiers pretending to blast each other with plastic shotguns. Some of the students started chiming in as to why they liked the picture. We also learned how to use the Hasselblad camera and were given a lecture on voyeurism and surveillance in art.

Thursday, January 28, 2010
I was thinking about why some students take photography and some of them might take great pictures, but nothing about what they do really distinguishes themselves from anyone else. There are thousands of bird photographers, so what makes someone think he or she can capture the next great bird image? Wouldn't it be more exciting to delve into the one or two unique things you are truly passionate about than to limit yourself to what everyone else does? • After listening to a lecture by artist Sam Durant, I can say with great conviction that using art to convey your political views is something I have no interest in whatsoever. Durant believes that all art is political in nature, but I don't believe that at all.

Friday, January 29, 2010
I teamed up with one of my classmates to shoot a model she had hired for her photo session for Portrait Photography. The model was friendly, easy to work with, and had gorgeous, expressive eyes. After my classmate and I finished our work for our class, I helped her and the model with their fashion shoot. They thanked me for my really helpful posing advice and lighting skills.

Sunday, January 31, 2010
After being bored to tears at the Sam Durant lecture, I found the Orit Hofshi artist talk at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) to be engaging, entertaining, and inspiring. Hofshi is a woodcutter and printmaker who studied at PAFA and has travelled the world finding inspiration from such countries as Germany, Ireland, and her native Israel. She discussed her monumental work, "If the Tread is an Echo...," made of wood panels that span 24 feet by 12 feet and has a shelter construction in front of two of the panels and an overhead hanging woodcut making it a three-dimensional work. The work is a combination of woodcut and print. Traditionally, woodcutters display all of their works in print, but Hofshi explains that some of her woodcuts have added depth and dimensionality that would not be seen in a print, so she included the woodcut in place of roughly half of the panels. The work looked awesome when seen from thirty feet away in the audience. After the talk, I had a chance to examine the work up close and it looked even better. Hofshi encouraged us to touch her woodcuts. "God, this must've taken forever to make," I thought to myself. It was simply amazing.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Last night, one of my fans stopped in to buy me a drink and to congratulate me on my "Clublife" gallery at the William Way Community Center. He gave me a gift in the form of a coffee table book titled "Physique," which is filled with gorgeous black and white photographs of nude athletes.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010
In Lighting for Editorial Photography class, we learned more bounce flash techniques and the use of a Stofen diffuser or Tupperware container as a diffusion dome. In Portrait Photography class, we learned strobe techniques using professional Profoto lights and power packs.

Thursday, February 4, 2010
I shot a number of images today for part of a Portrait Photography class assignment. We were asked to design three images using one model in three different environments. The model must be looking away from the camera in each image and the three images must form a narrative. I designed my own twisted version of love and friendship in honor of Valentine's Day. The mirror in the second picture shows the man's hand holding the flower. There were six other images we had to do to show a confrontational look and the averted gaze. I have four assignments due in the next two weeks, so I'm glad I got this one done. Both of my models thought these images turned out great.

Sunday, February 7, 2010
For an upcoming Portrait Photography assignment, our class was divided into groups and we were asked to research and select a famous Hollywood glamour portrait and imitate the lighting as closely as possible in our school's studio. My group asked Tasha, our beautiful equipment room manager we see every day, to be our model. There were so many challenges to this assignment that it was difficult to get the lighting to look exactly right. On several occasions, we came really close, but it was never quite exact. The image of Tasha on the right is one of the better shots we captured following the sketchy instructions found in a Hollywood glamour lighting book. The actual lighting setups are a closely guarded secret so the book only provides basic ideas of how they could have been achieved. We were exhausted after three hours of lighting, so we took a break and goofed around with different lighting setups and placed ourselves in the pictures. This is me getting all hammy like I usually do at my parties. Ironically, the group member who shot these pictures is a Russian woman named Alina. My other group member, a foreigner from China, had a difficult time accepting me as a transsexual because he believed that a transsexual was someone who changed their sex through vaginoplasty. I told him that that was an antiquated definition and that nowadays a transsexual need not have that final surgery.

Saturday, February 13, 2010
I find self-portraiture to be the easiest yet most difficult form of photography. With minimal training, it's not hard to look good smiling and posing while your camera snaps pictures of you every few seconds, but it's a much greater challenge to place yourself in a scene and capture the mood or feeling you want and it's almost impossible to capture a scene that has all of the exact nuances you are looking for, especially if you are doing it all by yourself. My goal with the voyeur project in my Portrait Photography class is to recreate the feeling of gazing upon an intimate moment as seen through the eyes of a voyeur. For this project, I set my camera's brightness, contrast, and sharpen settings to maximum, set the ISO to 6400, and shot in monochrome to capture a surveillance camera look and feel. The final images had to look gritty, somewhat creepy, and erotically charged. Self-portraiture is a hit or miss, so my first pass through the over 1,000 images yielded 67 I'd be fine with showing in class. I have to reduce the number of images in my second pass.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010
I saw Eleanor Antin's lecture today at Penn. She's one of the great artists of our time. It's refreshing to see such a successful person be so down-to-earth.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010
In Lighting for Editorial Photography class, we learned about fill flash. We also critiqued our first and second assignments. It's a little unfair that one of my classmates is a professional photographer with her own photography studio. Her pictures were flawless and one of her models was breathtakingly beautiful and curvaceous. This model was the type of girl who could make me look really bad if she stood next to me. It reminds me of how far I have to go in order to be like her. I will constantly strive to reach that ideal each and every day. I met with my Portrait Photography professor today during his office hours and he liked the results of my voyeur project so far. We selected images that could be edited out to make the grouping stronger. I already reduced the number of images to 30. A handful more should make the grouping much stronger and less repetitious. Basically, I will be presenting six sheets of anywhere from two to five images per sheet and each sheet will be read as a single image.

Thursday, February 18, 2010
We're supposed to write two artist lecture response papers for my Portrait Photography class. I'm done with one of them. It's about Eleanor Antin, one of the most prolific artists of our time. She came to Penn this past Monday to speak. The second paper will be about woodcutter Orit Hofshi. I saw her speak at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Friday, February 19, 2010
I completed my Orit Hofshi paper. Yayyy!!!

Previous Blogs

My September 10, 2009 to December 14, 2009 blog is entitled Body, Gender, Me and is viewable here. It contains work related to my Body and Photography class as well as my photo gallery exhibit at the William Way Community Center.