Composition – A photographer’s journal

Pro Phot Tours Launches

2008-08-07T10:30:00.011-04:00

Contact: Catalina Ramirez For Immediate Release
Telephone: 704.810.8589
Cell Phone: 440.228.1660
Email: CatalinaLoves@gmail.com

Pro Photos Tours Announces Upcoming Workshops

Fine Art Nude - Photographing and Lighting The Human Form
Pro Photo Tours has announced new monthly tour dates beginning August 8-10th in Tampa, FL. Bobby Knight, David Lawrence, and Lochai are three professional photographers, each well known and respected within their specialty, who work together to provide workshops that were crafted specifically to meet the needs of advanced amateurs and working professional photographers.

Join master photographers in their fields of glamour, fetish, and fine art erotic photography to learn how to Shoot for the Walls and not just your computer screen. Anyone can take a pretty picture; it takes skill to produce an image that is good enough to hang on a gallery wall. This three day intensive weekend provides the knowledge base to capture and produce images that art collectors will want to hang in their homes, not just view on their monitors.

Pro Photo Tours teaches you to create the setting with stylists, rope artists, and other artistic props. You will learn how to work with models, both professional and amateur, from both an artistic and business angle. You will learn their lighting set ups for the dramatic and mysterious, and give you the secrets for capturing an emotion and story in just one image. To finish the workshop you will learn their post production techniques to make it a keeper.

The resulting fine art collaborations will be published in a limited edition coffee table book, in which each participant will be represented. This intimate workshop is hands-on, side-by-side, learning the recipe for award winning art from the chefs themselves. Visit ProPhotoTours.com to see when they will be visiting a city near you. (http://prophototours.com)

For more information about this topic, please contact Catalina Ramirez at Quid Pro Quo by calling 440.228.1660, or e-mail CatalinaLoves@gmail.com.

Photographer of the Week Alain Etchepare

2008-02-11T20:14:00.000-05:00

Today I want to share, what I consider, a moving genre that I call "Chilling Landscapes" by the photographer Alain Etchepare. Alain was born on the Basque coast in Biarritz the south west of France. A former PR agency owner, he was always drawn to photography even more so to the printing process of Black and White. His work to me is chilling, almost haunting, but striking and worth sharing and if possible; collecting.

His photography has stunning tonal values and amazing composition. You can feel the darkness in his images. When you see his work you can tell that he grew up on a coastal town. His dramatic images of coastlines grab me the hardest. I too come from a coastal town and I have learned that the sea has a strange way of capturing your soul.

His, I believe, has been captured too.

On my favorite images Alain has captured is “The Watcher” (shown above) the shot is Kerpe, Turkey just this year. The glassiness of the water, matched by the cloudy sky and broken by the sloping cliff is striking. The two small islands dot across the glassy water - crossing mid frame almost reaching out to the edge of the cliff, a small hole in the ridge ties the whole image together. I find this to be one of his best captures, and he has so many.

You can see more of his work at his site, where you may also purchase limited edition prints of his work. I hope that you have enjoyed this segment,each week I will search out a new photographer and share a bit of knowledge about them and some of their work for you to enjoy.

By Robert DiMarco
Knight Digital Photography

Picture of the Day - Tim Hetherington's Photo of The Year

2008-02-09T10:52:00.000-05:00

World Press Photo of the Year 2007

Tim Hetherington, UK for Vanity Fair.

American soldier resting at bunker, Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, 16 September

History of The Nude in Photography

2008-02-07T20:55:00.000-05:00

A while ago I wrote an article about the history of Nudes and photography. Images of nudes and sexuality go back through the history of man. As a photographer and artist I find myself constantly listening to both sides of what is a never ending debate of what is and what is not art. Many do not consider nudes art at all, some classify it as porn while others claim that there is no art in taking a picture of a naked body. To me the human body in every way is a work of art. Not only in its physical form but how we are all put together and how each part of us functions. I can never get enough of how our amazing bodies work and how many things are functioning in harmony all the time.

Photography, as we know it today, could be said to have begun in 1839 with the deguerrotype, although the earliest "photograph" in existence dates from 1826 by Niepce, the deguerrotype was the first practical and widespread process.

It is not really known who was the first nude photographer. Some believe that is was N.P. Lerebours (1808-1873) who was photographing artist's models in 1840. In 1841 Voitlander was producing faster lenses that reduced the exposure to 1.5-2 minutes and later in the year new emulsions were developed that permitted exposures of only seconds thus opening up the field for portrait photography and there we have the beginning of the nude.

One of the first to embrace the nude form was Eugene Durieu, an amazing artist. He was commissioned to shoot nudes for Delacroix the painter in about 1850. He was born in 1800 France and lived till 1874 right through the dawn of photography. While many painters thought as photography as a threat to their art Delacroix was one of the first to recognize the difference between camera vision and human vision. He believed that photography was potentially of great benefit to art and artists. Many masters found it easier to paint from the photo than from life.

Pioneering photographers such as Nadar who was know as “the father of photojournalism" began taking pictures in 1853 did nudes for artists. Some of the other photographers in this field were Belloc, Braquehais, and Valon de Villeneuve and such began the era of the naughty "French Postcards".

Gaudenzio Marconi (1841-1885) took over the studio of Belloc and began shooting nudes for the sculptor Rodin. It has been thought by many that Manet's famous Olympia was painted from a photograph, rather than from life.

Muybridge was producing multiple exposures of nudes by the late 1880s in his various scientific researches into motion. Right around 1900 Wilhelm von Gloeden and W. Pluschow rejected the Pictorialist soft focus and produced their nude works in a precise and sharp focus and erotica was born. Even Von Gloeden was mostly known for his male nudes posed in Homeric themes.

By the early 1900’s the figurative nude was well established. We then enter the technical age where advances and new art movements were beginning to affect how the nude was presented. You had Man Ray who embraced surrealism which had a tremendous affect on photography and produced amazing works of art by Andre Kertesz, Frantisek Drtikol, and many others were experimenting with distortion, solarization, and abstraction in the nude form. Edward Weston at that time focused on lighting the body his works on form and light are legendary. By the 40’s nudes, pin-ups and figure photography was as varied and complex as any other art movement and most of the work you see today were established.

So the next time you see an image of a nude body remember the artists who paved the way and you’re looking at a style that’s over 100 years old!

Have great day and an ever better tomorrow, and don’t forget to laugh for life is too short not to smile…

Knight Digital Photography

Welcome

2008-02-06T08:18:00.000-05:00

Thank you for stopping by and reading my blog. Here you will find stories of my shoots, Photoshop tutorials, information about my workshops and reviews of other artists' works in photography and other mediums that I personally like. Feel free anytime to email me with questions or comments and I will try to address them. Also this blog will cover all forms of photography, so at times there will be artistic nudity and erotic images in the blog as well.

Rob
Knight Digital Photography