PJH Studios

Category: Art

Fine art, painting, photography, mixed media, sculpture

  • Ones and zeros are free

    On the plane this weekend, I watched David Hobby’s photo lighting seminar from his Lighting 102 material for Strobist.com.  At one point he’s explaining that you don’t have to get the right exposure, and sometimes it takes some fiddling to get the proper combined flash and ambient exposure.  You may need to take more than one shot, he says. With this digital stuff,

    Ones and zeros are free.

    So true.

    Take as many pictures as you can.  Often, I see people take a picture, look at it, and not be totally satisfied with what they took and accept mediocrity.  If they took a few more shots, they might take one they actually enjoy.  Digital photography and cameras these days are limited by two things: the size of the memory card and the person taking the picture.  The former is a scarcity of space for those ones and zeroes, and the other is a scarcity of effort.

  • Detroit Art City

    Economic collapse means you can build a lot for your buck amongst the rubble, especially if you’re an artist in Detroit.

    But its particular brand of civic and economic decay has also drawn something unexpected: a small but well-publicized movement of artists and other creative types trying to wring something out of the rubble.

    TED, Banksy and Make Magazine are some of the big names, and the mayor has hired a special position to help coordinate art events.

  • Dennis Hopper – Bucharest Nights

    Eccentric and edgy Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper avidly collected art, and photography was a lifelong active hobby. In 2005, he published Bucharest Nights, a collection of “digital paintings” at night with a digital camera. The majority of the images are ghostly and ethereal. Stark figures in golden tones against a black backdrop, light trails down a street, neon glows from a casino. A few are stunning but for the most part the book contains good pictures that work better on a whole as a body of work. The random photos of naked women taken with film, jarringly contrasts the preceding 30 or so pictures as if you were listening to soft trance music and someone turned on a buzz saw.

  • Click: The Ultimate Photography Guide for Generation Now

    Charlie Styr published Click: The Ultimate Photography Guide for Generation Now using pictures from the Flickr Teenage Photography group. It’s aimed at the beginner or wanna-be-a-little-bit-cooler-by-by-taking-cool-pictures photographers. It’s balanced covering all the essential photography topics-exposure, aperture, shutter speed, light, composition, etc. It goes a little further with the example photos and includes camera settings. This comes in handy when wanting to figure out techniques specific to certain situations, such as macro, low-light, creating light trails or portraits.

  • 1000 Fences and Gates

    1000 Fences And Gates by Jo Cryder should contain the subtitle Wrought Iron of the American Southeast.  The majority of the pictures are snapshots and hardly vary.  I’m not sure if it meant to be a coffee table book or a sampling for Southern belles to fence in their magnolia trees.

  • Art Space Tokyo, a Kickstarter postmortem

    After a project, it’s a good thing to capture your thoughts on how you did.  This includes everything from the initial idea, the the steps you took to get everything together and complete it, for better or worse.  Craig Mod did a writeup about the whole process of creating Art Space Tokyo using Kickstarter as a means to raise funds for his project.

    Kickstarter.com is a fund raising website. You create an account, describe your project and set a money goal to be obtained within a specific time period. Anyone in the world with an Amazon account can pledge money to help fund your project. Pledges are tiered, with each tier offering different incentives. If your project doesn’t reach your pre-set (unchangeable) monetary goal in the (unchangeable) time limit, nobody pays. If you reach your goal before the time limit, you continue to raise money until the time limit is up. This system has several interesting implications.

    Backers simply can’t lose — if you can’t complete the project, they don’t pay. And if you can, they get both their tier award and the satisfaction of knowing they were instrumental in seeing your project through to completion.

    I really wish I had heard about this as money was being raised. The book looks amazing.