Miss Aniela Photography

A friend of mine has entered Microsoft and Lenovo’s competition ‘Name Your Dream Assignment’ and needs your votes…. have a read, and click the link if you are up for supporting his project idea.

His assignment is as follows:

“To Kill the Indian in the Child”
100 Years of Genocide in North America

“To document Native North American survivors of genocide who, as children, were forcibly taken from their families and sent to abusive government boarding schools to have their culture destroyed as a “final solution” to the Indian problem.

“From the 1870s through the 1970s the Governments of the U.S. and Canada embarked on a program to eliminate Indian culture and language by rounding up native children and shipping them to boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their language and forced to learn the white man’s ways.

……”On my Dream Assignment, I would visit pre-selected Indian reservations in the U.S. and Canada, shoot portraits of the survivors and interview them about their experiences and how their lives were impacted then and to this day. I would also document some of the old school buildings that still exist. The images, along with relevant excerpts from survivors’ commentary, would be published as a book and prints for a traveling exhibit would also be prepared.”

Read in full HERE

Here’s how to vote:

1. Click here where you can read the complete Dream Assignment proposal. There’s a voting icon to the left– click on PIC IT.

2. You’ll then be asked to register –which takes only a minute or so. This to prevent multiple votes by the same person. If you do not want to receive promotional material from the sponsor, just leave the “Communication” box unchecked.

3. Within a few minutes after registering, you’ll get an email with a URL. Click it and you’ll be taken to a log-in page.

4. After logging in, you’ll find yourself at the project page again. Once there, click on PIC IT and your vote will be cast.

My friend is counting on your votes to give this project a chance –it must be voted into the Top 20 to be considered.

The deadline is April 3rd!

On behalf of AB, thanks for reading!

Some more images from my Feb US trip… (see further below for news on my upcoming presentation at Palm Springs Photo Festival on 2nd April as well as a link to a competition for young photographers.)

Fuel stop!

Big thanks to Daniel Buchmaller who I met on my Seattle photowalk in February, who invited me one my first small aeroplane flight! It was fantastic. We flew over to Bremerton, landed and parked the plane for a spot of lunch then flew back over the skyscrapers of Seattle.

Amused by the surreal, lonesome plane-filling fuel station at Paine Field airport…

…I had to set up a pic. Daniel helped me to take these ‘trying to get the gas pump to the plane’ (!) shots. We used his swarve Nikon D3. I wasn’t quite sure about any of them enough to upload to Flickr but it was fun to edit them nonetheless!

Above: with the kind permission of these men we experimented with taking pics with another plane that landed… these ones are too cheesy for anything but my blog!

Some poser shots from the airfield, on the left wearing ‘the pilot’s’ sunglasses ;))

Our plane

Above: Damien, who was having a flying lesson

Some shots from the air:

And flying back over Seattle - which was amazing (and a bit scary):

Space Needle from above

The pictures weren’t that great, using my 17-85mm lens but it was nice to have some captures from above anyway, once I’d got over my jitters from being in the small plane which wasn’t as rickety as I expected!

———-
NEWS
Soon, I go to the US to attend and speak at the Palm Springs Photo Festival. I am giving a presentation on the 2nd April, speaking about my work, and also, how I use Blurb books, with my own book Self-gazing.
If you are in the area, come along!
We are also having a bit of a holiday out there afterwards, Las Vegas, Death Valley, Sedona, and the Grand Canyon. I look forward to some great pic opportunities!

And another thing I will do in this blog post is call attention to this year’s Microsoft Future Pro Competition which is open for entry until 30th April. The competition is open worldwide to college and university student photographers.
I get alot of emails from young photography students who are looking for inspiration, direction, advice, or just to be able to reference my pictures in their work (the latter which I’m always flattered by!) I would point out this competition to every one of those young people. I had the pleasure of meeting the winners of last year’s competition, at the Pro Photo Summit, as they were flown out to Seattle to receive their prizes. The winners included Ed Salter from the UK. They were in a great place to meet with photography professionals and kickstart their creative career, so if you’re a photography student, I recommend taking a look at the competition. It’s free to enter, and you could win $20k…. read more about it and see the pics from the other winners from last yearhere too.

Images and description of my talks for MS at Focus on Imaging, at the Birmingham NEC, 22nd - 25th Feb 09…

Above images: the MS booth. At this event three of my images (mounted on hardboard, 1m x 70cm) were on display on the Microsoft booth which was great. I managed to take two of them home afterwards.. I gave The escape to my sister and put South by southeast on my own wall, which actually looks very nice. I like being able to slap up a print on the wall without having to go and pay for mounting/framing first…

The presentations

Above three images taken by John Mathieu

My talks were 40 mins each, two a day for the whole 4-day event. They were similar to the presentations I did at Photokina, except since Photokina I have come to know the products much better and use them more intuitively in my workflow. Whereas the Photokina presentations were about communication being an important part of the photographer’s workflow, the thrust to the presentations this time was RAW, and getting the most from shooting and processing RAW before destructively editing your images in Photoshop, the latter being the stage with which I’ve always been preoccupied.
There are also specific tools in Capture One Pro which are great for my own methods: the colour picker, meaning I can tweak specific colours in an image like this before the original has even been converted from RAW:

Also, the prospect of shooting tethered. The first time I shot tethered was with Alexandra at Pravda studios in Seattle. With regards to self-portraits, I’m starting to tether up my shoots (at least, indoors) to be able to view my images as they come in, not only larger than I would see them on a camera LCD but also in a way that avoids me having to keep getting up to go to the other side of the camera. Instead I can turn my laptop towards me. Not only that, but process an image and set it as a style to be applied to the other images as they come in.
In the case of clones, the ‘Overlay’ feature, a referencing tool in the program, can reduce the opacity of one image to exemplify how it would layer over another.

This is great for any of my clone composites, the one I showed as an example in my presentations was The evening banter (below) in which the clones are particularly huddled. If this image hadn’t have worked out, I said to my audience, I probably wouldn’t have gone back to reshoot it. I’m interested in guaranteeing a better chance of success in my fine-art shoots, without surrendering too much of the spontaneity I enjoy so much….

I showed a range of work in my presentation, and as in my presentations at other events, alluded to the three ‘categories’ of processing in my work. It would be misleading to say I love the processing more than the shooting and that the processing is always more important for me. Some images take more processing than others, some barely any. So, I refer to three categories: the ones that take only a slight tweak of processing to be presentable, which have been composed almost completely in-cam, and for which the role of processing is to emphasise and enhance, not to ‘create’ as such. An example would be Life on the downs:

Here is the image with the original capture on the left:

Other examples would be The dance, Girl dreaming, Stretch, Pink & read.

The second category is what I call ‘50/50′, for images which aren’t dependent on neither shooting nor the processing, it’s an equal weighting of both. South by southeast, for example, may have taken on it’s filmic look through b/w conversion but no other shot taken that afternoon resulted in that same effect, so the original capture’s windblow hair and expression are just as important key components to the final image:

Original next to the processed version:

Other examples would be At Portland Bill Lighthouse, Light wielding, Memoirs of a woman of leisure, and The right way.

The third are the images, such as the clones, which are composites needing more intricate work, with more than one image, but several.

…and a breakdown of the original shots and the processing stages:

All the images in the Multiplicity category would belong to this group, but also, other kinds of composites, such as my recent ‘Trick’ images which do not use clones but use compositing to create the illusion of an impossible feat. I think one of the most interesting parts of my presentation was a breakdown of the processes used to create these trick images. I showed the original images and method I would use to create different levels of ‘tricks’ in these images, and a brief slideshow of the compositing in process (to see the full process of the trick images you’d have to attend one of my presentations)

Above left is part of the process of creating Sprung:

And above right, The smothering:

And… I met Lara Jade! You might know Lara Jade from flickr. She was with her boyfriend, Luc, whose does equally stunning work.
I was just a couple of minutes into one of my presentations when I saw Lara Jade in the audience, instantly recognisable by her distinctive hair and looks which i know well from her self-portraits. I managed to track her down afterwards and have a lovely chat with her, and introduce her to Drew Gardner, a fashion photographer who was also at the event presenting for both Microsoft and Phase One. Here is Drew pulling in the crowds:

Above: me with ‘the cavegirl and the naughty schoolgirl’, just a hint of the very cliched use of female modelling roles on other stands…
Above photo taken by John Mathieu

It was a great event and I had some interesting chats with people… some opportunities afoot, will reveal more later :))

The title of this blog post is rather academic, but I got so complacent after thinking of the cat and dog bit that I couldn’t think of anything more exciting for the bit after the colon.

Press Ctrl and + to make the text bigger!

Recently an artist on Flickr, Rosie Hardy, was discovered to have plagiarised other artists in her work. A character called ‘Harry NY’ appeared on Flickr, posting the images in question side by side with the originals from the artists whose work Rosie Hardy had copied. The originals had been found in Rosie’s own favourites on DeviantArt, so her initial claims to have ‘never seen the images before’ were futile. After Harry had his account removed several times, he resorted to posting the images on a blog which you can view here.

People started discussion threads on Flickr such as here and here, in discussing whether they agreed that Rosie had plagiarised other artists or whether it was the age-old debate of artist originality at hand. In many people’s view, Rosie did plagiarise other artists in these pieces, and it is made even more serious by the fact that she sells her work.

People waited to hear what Rosie would do and whether she would apologise. And eventually she did, on an upload entitled rock bottom, where she said sorry for ‘not giving artist credit’, a little vaguely, before deviating to discussion on other areas of her present emotional disposition. She wrote that she was going to take a break from Flickr, which invited an inevitable stream of well-wishers, most of whom did not even recognise the issue at hand - that Rosie had plagiarised other people’s work, and that she had fooled them into thinking all her ideas were as ‘original’ as her website sales pitch says. On her return, as expected, she was inundated with ‘welcome back’ messages, from people professing they’d missed her, even though the time she’d been gone wasn’t different from the duration between her uploads anyway.

People on Flickr love a story, love drama, love having a god, especially if that god can also be an underdog. (Maybe we can coin the term ‘undergods’?) The apology itself was enough for most of Rosie’s fans, the word ‘sorry’ was enough for them to completely skirt over, well, whatever Rosie had done wrong. Naysayers were shunned by Rosie’s hardcore fans on the strength of the fact that ‘Rosie has apologised’. Nothing more need be said.

Surely the whole point of an apology is that you have aimed to correct what you’ve done wrong, and to be open about the faults so that you give the impression you won’t do it again? The reason why Rosie’s apology meant little to her more cynical viewers was because she didn’t actually put things right. Being in such a spotlight on Flickr unfortunately brings responsibilities with it. Yet Rosie has only made about half of the images in question ‘private’ on her Flickr stream, and left others just as they were, with no credit whatsoever. So, the ‘lesson’ she professed to have learnt was unclear. Surely it would be appropriate to turn off comments (and those notes) on her apology upload, and surely any apology should be aimed at the plagiarised artists she fobbed off, not a love-in mosh pit of teenyboppers?

Before I am in danger of sounding petty, I’ll explain what this boils down to, for me. This is not just about Rosie, this happening has merely raised an issue. What actually bothers me most of all is the significance of people’s reactions to plagiarism on Flickr – people’s ignorance of an important issue, by Rosie setting a sallow example. Rosie is indeed only young (18) qhich makes it more understandable that she should have the chance put it right for the future; but does not make her instantly forgivable - everyone who goes to school is taught not to cheat, and at college and university level, the rules against plagiarism are hammered home.

If people are not trying to claim that Rosie didn’t plagiarise, that she just took inspiration – “it’s hard thinking of an idea every day of a 365!” (as if being over-ambitious about one’s artistic resolutions is a valid excuse for ripping off other people’s work), they are almost backing plagiarism, which is even more disturbing. Laidback types appear mid-discussions to mystically guffaw out-of-content quotations as ‘good artists copy, great artists steal, said Picasso’. I was equally stunned by the sentiment of someone’s pro-Rosie image on Flickr called ‘copycat’, where the person emulated one of the offending images of Rosie’s, similarly using handprints on a wall. The person argued against Rosie being plagiaristic and insisted Rosie had put her own spin on the images, and that no-one could possibly patent handprints – which of course was never anyone’s point, Rosie had taken more than the handprint element of the original image, she had replicated the components around it, the standing person with the garment drawn over their face, etc. Although the woman’s ‘copycat’ image was hardly third-level plagiarism, it was strange to encounter her pleasure in copying the handprints to produce what seemed like a self-professed celebration of unoriginality.

It isn’t all too bad. The strong bustle of people who believe that Rosie plagiarised, and that plagiarism is wrong, haven’t been too shortcoming in their involvement in discussions, even on Rosie’s own photostream. Rosie thankfully doesn’t delete all critics’ input, so there’s a mixture of opinion going on. Some have said that the whole debacle has only served to further bolster Rosie’s popularity. However, it’s Rosie’s generally young fanbase who don’t see anything wrong, who are too enamoured by the ARF love story, who are suckered into some kind of American dream conjured up in the works of the transatlantic coupling. These are the people who, I say this in the nicest way, are never going to be Rosie’s clients, and whose opinions therefore, in a professional sense as a photographer wanting to make a living, are important only if you can make a quid from every fluffy comment you get from the Twilight-loving demographic. However, these are people who are might go on to plagiarise other artists in the future - me or you, even, whether in amateur or professional work. Not all ‘artists’ are intelligent and trustworthy enough to know the meaning of plagiarism, I guess there are many who just want to make a living under that title. I learnt a year or two ago of an ‘artist’ in San Francisco who was painting my photos stroke-for-stroke and claiming it to be all her own work. My confrontation of her came as no legal threat but I hopefully brought for her, and the gallery, alot of embarrassment.

One motive in speaking openly about someone else’s saga on my blog is to try and counteract the lax attitude towards plagiarism, that you can take what you want from anyone’s work, physically or conceptually. However, this essay wasn’t supposed to be all about Rosie Hardy, so where does this take me in my rambling? To the topic of Flickr itself. Flickr: a democracy. When I first discovered it, loved it. Upload what you want, when you want. (Of course, if you’ve got your tits out, make sure you slap a content filter onto it. If you get moderated, don’t expect a reply from staff until the next leap year.) What ensued was a love-hate relationship over three years as I started to become more aware of how and why I use it. Recently, started questioning the way I rely on it for self-esteem as an artist. The sight of all those buddy icons, even the ones on my own stream, waving superlatives, glitzy icons. The obsession with getting into ‘Explore’ when it’s full of kittens, sunsets, babies, and another fucking flower. A place accessible by anyone’s old tired clichés, a place where ideas get pilfered like apples off a cart and bounced around like milk bottles on recycling day, and in the case of Rosie Hardy, a place where you should question no-one, unless you want to be told ‘you are Hitler’ (yes, that really happened).

So, where does one go when one is cheesed off with Flickr? Well, there’s a site called Onexposure, that a friend told me about the other day over tea and scones. You sign up for an account, and submit a picture for ‘screening’ before it can appear on the site. So as opposed to free access as on sites like Flickr, on Onexposure you have a set of bespectacled experts on the door. My friend said his intrigue in first discovering the site was actually further sustained by the fact that his first submission had been rejected. On what grounds? Overprocessed. Uh-oh, probably no good for me then, but I checked it out when I got home, and selected a picture from my portfolio to submit. Even though there are categories for ‘Creative Edit’ and ‘Illustrative’, to start with I purposely chose one that wasn’t one of the more heavily-processed images (leaving the clones well alone). I decided to choose ‘Girl dreaming’, which I think is one of my strongest images - popular on Flickr, the frontispiece to my camara oscura exhibition in Madrid, and now framed large on sale in the window of Impure Art in Brighton. Importantly for this purpose, it’s one of my more natural pieces, at least, it doesn’t look as if too much unnecessary processing has been done:

It was rejected!

“Of those who voted against your image, three indicated that there is a problem with editing, three noted story as a weakness, and two selected composition as a reason for not publishing the image.”

“I think the window draws me too much away from the subject. A crop could help. Dreaming?”

“I think it could be better whith [sic] a softer and cooler attitude of your model. Here, she seems to be suffering. It’s a pity, light, composition and treatment are very good…”

I’ll give you “it’s a pity!”

The notion of being rejected was made even sourer on reading the lame feedback, comments that related to people’s own personal taste more than anything. Someone thinks the model should be ‘cooler’. Someone thinks she looks like she’s suffering. Someone doesn’t understand or like the title. Someone thinks it should be cropped.
Maybe I should have put the Balthus shpiel with it, so people had more of an idea what was going on with my intent, and the title.
But I don’t give two turds what these random ‘someones’ think. In the same vein, I don’t upload to Flickr, generally, for constructive feedback, mainly because I don’t want anonymous tutoring (unless I ask for it). If I want to learn, I’ll go to someone I know and can trust, preferably face to face. At the same time, I don’t believe that it’s only people who are artistically ‘qualified’, by profession, degree or otherwise, whose opinion is valid. I do like the fact that on Flickr, indeed all across the net, everyone CAN have a say. Maybe I’m not always comfortable with the fact that everyone DOES have a say! ;)) Yet this website with its screening process makes me sick. It makes me sick because I look at the pictures already on the site and most of them do nothing for me, but a panel of people assume the right to judge other people’s work and deem it suitable, or not, for others to view. The site admits to favouring less processed images. In the manner of the snobbiest gallery, the attitude that assumes that the processing age began with the Photoshop age, the site demands a particular style, leaning toward the photojournalistic, the dark, brooding, fine wine of photography. The stuff that bores me to tears, basically… my advice to my friend? Go somewhere else, don’t wait for this particular elite to like your work, to see it as their brand of ‘quality’.

I hate being judged. It’s mainly why I didn’t continue Art post A-level. It’s why I’m not massively inclined to enter competitions. It’s why I hated Picture This, with its panel of super-dooper experts. It’s why my passion for photography started when I buggered off behind locked doors and across A-roads to deserted places with a camera to snap pictures completely by myself, of myself. And it’s why I love Flickr, and hence why I wouldn’t want to use a site like Onexposure. I’ll probably submit another picture next week to see how it does, just out of interest. Or maybe not.

The values of a site like Onexposure to me reek of traditional routes into art, of art teachers, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the complete user-control offered by Flickr, but does it have to be so black and white? I’ve certainly noticed that there are different areas within Flickr, as if it were a marketplace with everything from organic cheeses to £1 bags of sweets. People of different types congregate in different areas, within the one vast site. You do have a vestige of control, as the uploading artist, in determining what kind of crowd you maintain, although everyone’s bound to get a troll or two passing by.

I once dropped into a manipulation-debate on Rosie’s stream, with a friendly comment, but one that undermined her audience. I got an email of appreciation from Rosie, but for fellow commenters, my words came like bird poo on a huddled ceremony of Year 7s at a school gate. I spent a good while extracting myself with the aid of some emoticons and gestures of goodwill, breathed a ‘phew’ and reflected interestingly on my own audience. By comparison a lot of them seem somewhat smarter, though I still have my share of sycophants. Another thing that reinforces my belief in the value of the Flickr community is that I have met good friends though the site, some still virtual, some I have had the pleasure of meeting in real life - Lara Jade, Ilina S, Reflecting truth (Katie Lee), and Haggis Chick to name a few. And the Female Self-Portrait Artists’ Group is the best thing since sliced bread.

Maybe I just need to try out a few more photo-sharing sites to discern their differences over one another, to satisfy the part of me that’s uncomfortable with the ego element of Flickr. I have a feeling however that Flickr will remain top of the bookmarks, especially with a cosy figurative treehouse like this blog, branching out from it as a private retreat.

On Friday 6th February (which happens to be my sister’s birthday) was the last of the photowalks - in Seattle, at an early start of 8am. It was wet weather, but this turned out to be the best one in my opinion. There was a great turnout (thanks to Paula posting on the Seattle meetup calendar). Here are a variety of pics from the morning’s proceedings (all pics mine unless otherwise stated):

We decided to venture first into the market to shoot some pics and avoid the rain…


Above two pics (both images by Daniel Buchmueller): arranging a shot inside Pike Place market, where sellers were just setting up…

Above: a self portrait in Pike Place with the help of a flash gun… here I talked about multiplicity, as well as posing techniques, use of timer, use of action in shots…

Above images: by Henry Yang (all b/w images in this post are by Henry).

After taking some self portraits inside the market, we took some abstract shots of fruit stalls, and then went back outside to shoot some images on the street and by the famous Public Market sign…

Above: by Henry Yang.

Above left: pic taken by Yoni, amusing as it was just the moment before I realised Amy (from Microsoft, who was popping to the market to buy some flowers) was there - and then pic on right, taken by Daniel Buchmueller, was just the moment afterwards…

Above: both images by Henry - I really admire the pic on the left, sums up the photowalks perfectly! I love the way he has caught Josh (left) and Daniel (on the right) looking through their cameras as if they were stuck to their bodies… one pointing one way and one the other way, as if looking through binoculars, and perfectly composed within the frame.

Above: then going into the cafe for various beverages, chat, and a break from the drizzle. Image by Henry Yang.

—-
Thanks to Yoni, Daniel, and Henry for giving me permission to blog their pics!