It was chilly that morning.

Nikon D90 with Tokina 12-24 at 12mm. 1/30s at f/11

In Lightroom, cropped and straightened, added contrast and clarity, desaturated and used split toning to to bring in the coldness of blue/green.  Added grain which sharpened the image slightly without too much deterioration.

60th floor sky lobby at Chase Tower in Houston.  Photo taken during last Friday’s snowstorm.

Nikon D90 with Tokina 12-24 at 12mm. 1/30s at f/8.

I wanted a little depth in the photo, it is a long gallery so I went to f/8.  Going up more would have meant shooting at slower speeds and risking shake even if I bumped my ISO from 400 to 800 or higher.  I am not afraid to do that but I prefer cleaner images, which is one of my problems with grain (and why I don’t use it much).  This photo was about light and shapes.  It was meant for black and white because color distracted.  The front page of the Houston Chronicle had a similar photo last Sunday.

In Lightroom, I cropped, increased contrast and clarity, balanced the lighting, desaturated, used split toning to introduce blue to the highlights and sharpened the image.

I suppose from here on out, it will be Christmas/winter related posts.  Friday, Houston was hit with (for us) a major snowstorm.  Oh, I know, it really didn’t stick but it was a good 1 to 3 inches, which was enough to shut down the city.  The fact that it was Friday didn’t hurt, either.  A shot of the Pennzoil building on my way home.

Nikon D90 with Tokina 12-24 at 15mm. 1/15s at f/11.

ISO was 400.  In Lightroom, I cropped to enhance the vertical.  I adjusted light levels making the lights a little lighter.  Added contrast and clarity.  Desaturated (it was already almost black and white) and used split toning to add greens into the darker part of the image.  I learned later that to get good snowflake photos, you should overexpose slightly.  I don’t guess I will get much of a chance to try this out as we are unlikely to get more than one snowfall per year.

Exploring an urban setting is enticing.  So much is occurring as movement, color, smell, taste in the air and flavor on the table.  There are millions of sites to indulge the eyes upon, whether you’re creeping down an alley to a reserved local restaurant or venturing across a sweeping bridge to view the waterways of floating traffic, its languid chorus and panoramic views.  Without doubt, taking in a new village, town, city or metropolis with camera in hand is one of the most creative experiences upon the traveler’s road.  But within these possibilities, you don’t want to get overwhelmed.  You want to enjoy it, capture the city-life, feel it’s hustling pulse and bustling vibration, and present its’ personalities to your audience.

On my first trip to India, it took me 45 minutes to ground myself on the hostel rooftop before I felt comfortable entering the New Delhi chaos.  This is the most important rule in any new city.  Get grounded.  Find your bearings.  Take a few long deep breaths before leaping into the crowds of a foreign culture, especially in a massive population.  Activate and calm your senses.  You’ll need them not only for photography, but for your basic survival.  Realize the earth is beneath you, and then jump into the fray.

When photographing a city for the first time, everything looks new and enthralling.  Get warmed up and start snapping.  Approach the city streets with intrigue and view each subject as a creation of civilization.  Men and women built it with their hands.  This rudimentary understanding will give a whole new perspective to architecture.  It has personality.  It has angles, unique to its design.  It has caricatures within its face.  Find them by stopping and observing.  Take your time before walking around, circumnavigating the towering building while exploring with the eyes and lens.  Squat down, crane your neck and view it from various angles.  Then stand tall.  Find the highest vantage point.  Every change in your personal viewpoint will present a new element within the building or cityscape.  It is a structure of artistic design.  See it with as many eyes (or perspectives) as possible and don’t forget to explore all of its features, from the historical districts and monuments, to those mundane alleys with debris, dumpsters and unexpected surprises.

From the gallant, most gawdy form of spires and gargoyles to the elementary adobe huts of a nomadic tribe, architecture is an expression of a civilization’s art history, whether practical or conjectural.  However, the thrill will eventually wear off.  Here is where your skills are put to the test.  Go to the same building or viewpoint, but witness your subject during a different time of day when the light will effect mood, reflection and personality.  Lit up at night in the quiet of darkness or active under the bright sun of rush hour, your subject will always give you something new, rain or shine.  A good practice is getting out and walking your own hometown.  Do this as much as possible and rewire your vision to see the new in what has been called “the old”.  Step back and see your main street from afar and then creep in to find the most intimate details of cracks in the paint.

The key to capturing the essence of any city is within your mind.  See the beauty surrounding you.  Everyday is a new chance to wake up and live as if it were your first and your last.  Carry your camera as you explore.  Squat.  Stand tall.  Lay down on the ground.  And climb high for more vantage points.  Be that insect and be that bird.  And most importantly, have fun, enjoy, keep your feet moving and be safe.  Cities have hidden jewels to inspire as well as the darker characters to cause fear.  As a photographer, writer or traveler, you need to have your head on your shoulders and both feet on the ground.

Cameron Karsten Photography offers professional imagery. With a unique eye for composition and lighting, Cameron draws excellence into any industry, specialized to help make your business, family and event shine in the light of infinite creativity. Whether requiring the finesse of a skilled photographer, updating old image archives for your website or looking to spark your new product with eye-catching advertisement, utilize Cameron Karsten Photography to professionalize your life, business, product or marketing material.  For more imagery, please visit the following link: http://www.photoshelter.com/c/cameronkarsten

The ECF Art Centers Present:

reSolve

A Group Exhibition

Downtown Art Center Gallery
828 S. Main Street, Los Angeles, CA  90014

Opening: Thursday December 10, 2009, 7-9 pm

Show runs 12/10/2009 to 1/15/2010

Featuring art by:

Virginia Arce

Barry Bridgwood

Alan Bruni

Jennifer Espinosa

Nat George

David Haskell

Jennifer Korsen

Monica Martinez

Jason Miracle

Hershey Moreno

Adriane Mota

Eric Myles

Debbie Nguyen

Olga Ponomarenko

Dianne Powell

Peter Reiss

Brenda Stark

Chad Steel

Allen Terrell

Javier Valenzuela

Amelia Vella

Joyce Washington

Jerry Weems

Street parking available and several paid lots in the area.
For information please call (213) 627-7374‎

]]> http://kullaf.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/gestural-urban-landscape-drawings/ Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:14:37 +0000 kullaf http://kullaf.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/gestural-urban-landscape-drawings/

black acrylic on paper with white charcoal

black acrylic and white charcoal on paper

Black acrylic on hot press (smooth finish) watercolor paper or bristol pad makes an excellent drawing medium. I like to add a bit of white charcoal at the end to draw out highlights and to create reflective effects. Drawing with a brush (I used a 1/4″ angle brush on these) enables you to stay loose and capture a lot of gesture. I work transparently blocking in large shapes and moving through the value range. Typically, I can acheive a range of 4 to 5 values including the white of the paper. I like doing these both as studies and as finished drawings in and of themselves. They are highly valuable when working on the images in color, and make a nice presentation when matted and framed.

‘You Never Know What’s Around The Corner’ – oil on linen – 12″ x 12″ I decided to give in to my inclinations.  After yesterday’s playful landscape venture I thought I’d play around again with some urban landscape elements…moving them around to satisfy my whim.  If you know Kingston you might recognize some landmarks in this painting, but they have been whittled down to simple elements… you definately wont recognize the exact place! ha ha. It’s a product of my imagination.  I really had fun with this. 
I will be showing 7 or 8 paintings in an upcoming show at Kingston Frameworks Gallery beginning November 6.  The work will be in the gallery for the month of November and some of December.  The show is to feature the work of 3 artists: Sylvia Naylor (stitched paper collage), Florence Niven (fused glass) & myself (with oil paintings).  All of my pieces for this show have a whimsical bent…a little bit of magic  and frolic for the holiday season.

Not much time for sightseeing.  Its a shame because Minneapolis is a beautiful city.  Oh, and I did get to see that Mary Tyler Moore statue.  This photo shows how close I got to St. Paul.  This is a bridge across the Mississippi that leads to St. Paul (at least I think it does).  It was taken from the roof of a garage on a cold (for me), breezy, cloudy morning.  My next visit to Minneapolis should be a little longer with perhaps just a smidge of free time.  I want to see more.

Glimpsing St. Paul, October, 2009.

Nikon D90 with Tokina 12-24 at 24mm.  1/160s at f/8, ISO400.  In Lightroom, I had to do some work to bring out the color and detail.  The day was very drab, so I adjusted the light levels, increased contrast and added a little clarity.  I increased vibrance and then went to work on the colors themselves.  The trees in the center of the photo were washed out in the image, so I boosted red to make them pop.  I realized that they were the central piece of color, so I cropped the photo to feature them more.  I played with Lightroom’s new grain feature but I am uncomfortable with it and so removed grain.  I adjusted white balance and the camera profile (used Landscape mode with adjustments).  I added a vignette using the color priority option and I am enjoying the feature.

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Someone asked me today if I was happy to be home.

Well, of course I am. Happy to be home with my family and my pups. But for the better part of today I sat in front of a computer answering email and dreading doing my expense report. Last week at this time, roughly, I was standing in a lake bed at the base of the Himalyan mountains on a photo shoot.

Kinda hard to compare….

Still going though my images, trying to see which ones I like best. There’s a lot. I’m really happy to be home to have acess to my big desktop screen to edit on, as well as to my Nik Silver filters, which I don’t have on my laptop. As I started to look at a bunch of images from our time last Saturday in Chor Bazaar (i.e. Thieves Bazaar), I really how they reproduced in B&W using Nik. Here are some of my favorites.

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That first image here may be my favorite from the entire morning. The family, on a moped, coming back from a doctor’s appointment, apparent. Her expression is priceless. They passed within a few feet of me and that was meet pressing the shutter button while the camera was around my hip area. Sometimes, I guess, it’s better when I don’t look through the viewfinder….

Here’s some further reading on Chor (which means “thief” in Hindu-Urdu) Bazzar here. In addition to just being a superb place to do a photo walk, I bought a pair of antique cufflinks for about 50 cents and a small dagger that I’ll use for a letter opener for about $2.

You name it, Thieves Bazaar has it.

At a price…

© Mark V. Krajnak 2009 | JerseyStyle Photography | All rights Reserved
Unless otherwise noted, images captured with a Canon 50D, SanDisk digital film, finished with PS4 or PSE6 and Nik Software.

So, what else can I do to make the view interesting?  In my efforts to control the distortion of the wide-angle, I took this shot.  It was ok in color but I liked it better in black and white.  Again, I like the dizzying feel.  I still have quite a few of these photos to go through and I am sure I will experiment a little more.

For those of you that are Lightroom fans like me, the version 3 beta has just been released…I can’t wait.

Bird's Eye View

Nikon D90 with Tokina 12-24.  1/80s at f/16, ISO125.  In Lightroom, adjusted white balance,  desaturated, increased clarity and contrast, used split toning to introduce blue in the dark and browns and red into the highlights.  Darkened the sky a bit.  Converted to Landscape mode.

A shot to the west.  I rotated orientation and went portrait mode on this because I wanted to catch the reflection in the glass in this part of the roofline.   The orientation allowed me force more into the image as I was starting to understand the dizzying feel of where I was.  The more I took photos the more I began asking, how can I get an image that is different and the more I realized the challenge of shooting on the roof.

I arranged the rooftop for a friend that I met on the DPReview photo forms.  He uses gigapan software to stitch hundreds of images together and make lovely, long, detailed panoramas.   I will post a link when it is complete.

Looking West

Nikon D90 with Tokina 12-24 at  12mm.  1/250s at f/11, ISO160.  In Lightroom, adjusted white balance, added clarity and vibrance, adjusted light levels, increased the darkness of the blue sky and increased contrast to bring out the window reflections.

From the roof of the Chase Tower in Houston, Texas.  I could not have picked a more beautiful day on which to go up.

Houston Skyline

Nikon D90 with Tokina 12-24 at 12mm.  1/320s at f/11, ISO160.  In Lightroom, adjusted white balance, straightened photo, increased clarity and vibrance, increased blue saturation in the sky, changed mode to Nikon DX2 mode 2.  Sharpened.

Urban Art Agenda #3 is an international street and stencil art at Famous When Dead. This is the 3^rd year that JD Mittmann has organized the Urban Art Agenda exhibition. The 1^st Urban Art Agenda was held in the middle of winter in Shed 4, an old corrugated iron warehouse shed way out in Melbourne’s Docklands. The works was hung on temporary fencing partitions within this large space. The exhibition had a variety of artists from Europe, USA and, mostly, Australia, mostly, Melbourne, to be precise. And a good variety of styles, from cartoon style to multi-stencil realism but there were a lot of stencil art of urban landscapes by Kenji Nakayama, Fremantle, Logan Hicks, Klingatron and Ralf Kempken.

There are still many urban landscapes in the exhibition but there are many differences between Urban Art Agenda #1 and #3. JD Mittmann now runs Famous When Dead gallery and so the exhibition is properly hung in a white walled gallery. The exhibition appears less-street oriented; OZI’s “Tinker Bitch”, an image of a stripping Tinkerbell is one of the few street-style works. The exhibition is focused more on stencil art. Urban Art Agenda #3 has artists from Europe, USA, Brazil, Iran and Australia but there is only one Melbourne artist in; El Moocho, El Moocho is also the one artist in the exhibition using found materials in his art. His work using street signs is particularly effective; using a Stop sign for a painting to say ‘stop child soldiers’.

The technique of multi-layered stencils to create images of urban landscapes has been a constant feature of the Urban Art Agenda exhibitions. Kenji Nakayama from Boston is again in the exhibition with stencils of the Brooklyn Bridge. Stencil art is an excellent media for these images because the colour separation (often computer assisted) makes the urban landscape more aesthetic. However, there is little content to these urban landscapes, unlike the political and humorous content of the street style art. Orticanoodles, from Milan, and Penny, from London, manipulate their images more on the computer. But these stencil urban landscapes are becoming as common as once were watercolour rural landscapes.

The assignment: To do a little location scouting for an upcoming photo shoot.

The target: Urban landscapes, where decay creates beauty.

The results: Turns out the alleyways and hideaways of Wilmington’s historic downtown have no dearth of  surprisingly stunning backdrops. Here, a collage of some of our favorites.

(Photos by Jeff Boykin and Amanda Heironimus)

I’ve been to Chicago many, many times now so it’s sometimes hard to find something new to shoot. To get my camera in a new place, so to speak. But the architecture of the city is so grand, it’s hard not to go back and shoot what I’ve already shot.

Thought I’d share with you a few “postcards” from my trip to Chicago last week. You’ve probably seen everything here before, nothing earthshattering, but some interesting frames nonetheless.

I really wasn’t going to shoot The Bean again. I really wasn’t. Then I saw the nine birds lined up on top, the sky and the skyline…and then the gull to the right swooping down. Well, I just had to.
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Would have loved a fish-eye lens to shoot this one. There’s a few ways to approach this structure, but I wanted to sit dead middle and just get the criss-crossing lines.

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When I was in Chicago in July, I tried shooting this J. Steward Johnson (NJ’s own, by the way) statue from a couple of different angles, at night. Nothing really sang to me. Then, as I was sitting on Michigan Ave on a gorgeous morning, eating a breakfast burrito, it hit me. I could see the Wrigley Building reflecting in the glass behind the couple. That I happened to catch a tourist looking up in the bottom left of the frame is an added bonus.

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Here’s the interesting thing about this shot of the statue of Nathan Hale that stands in front of the Chicago Tribune building. I used the biggest reflector I could find – the building across the street and behind me. And my primary light source was 93 million miles way, camera right and behind my subject. Heckuva bounce, eh? It’s tough to transport but does give some nice light.

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And this was just a fun one, right place, right time. I was across the street and just hoping a car wouldn’t drive into my frame and mar it. I really like the richness of the colors here.

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Sometimes you just have to go for the postcard shot…

© Mark V. Krajnak 2009 | JerseyStyle Photography | All rights Reserved
Unless otherwise noted, images captured with a Canon 50D, SanDisk digital film, finished with PS2 or PSE6 and Nik Software