Daily Photo 3/10/15

Ok when I said "daily" I didn't realize that it would be every day. Just trying to keep up. This shot is from the photoshop class that I am teaching. We are focusing on compositing so as an exercise the students had to take several photos of themselves and composite them into the same image. This obviously is not the composite, but one of the more successful images.

Daily: Snow

Daily Photos, this one was just shot outside of my house. It had snowed last night and there was a fair covering on the ground, and also on the trees. Since whenever I need ice or snow I usually have to create it, this was pretty fun. This was hand held Macro (don't recommend it unless you don't have anything else) so I had to have my lens wide open in order to get a fast enough shutter speed. As you can see my DOF was reduced to about half a centimeter. For this shot I used my Nikon D7000, with a 24-120 lens, and a 36 mm Zeikos lens extender, F6.3, SS 1/250, ISO 800.

Daily: Macro 10,000 hours

We just recently had a great guest speaker at Stevens-Henager College from Disney Interactive. His name was Geoff Shupe and he is a Senior Concept Artist. His presentation was amazing and was very relevant across the board, but especially to my art students. There were quite a few great take aways, simply because it was just so great. My biggest take away was a number, 10,000 hours. That is the number of hours you need to perfect your craft, to get where you need to be to have "arrived" with the exception that when you actually have "arrived" then you're dead in the water. It got me thinking about how much I need to keep working on my photography, so here goes. I'm going to attempt to do a photo journal, where I take at least one interesting photo every day. Here is Day One.

Dance Photography

Here are some images from a photo shoot I did for The Edge dance company in Logan Utah. Most of these dancers are the instructors and it was a cool chance to do some promotional pictures for their web and printed materials.

Animation Class

Recently at Stevens-Henager College we started offering a bachelors degree in web design, which built off of all the classes that were taught in the Associates Graphic Arts program. The new bachelors included a lot of coding classes, and quite a few additional graphic arts classes. One of those classes was Flash Animation. What was really great about the way the syllabus was written (which I had a part in) is that it allowed us to really taylor the course to the strengths of the students and to the software that was in vogue at the time. Since I already knew quite a bit about flash (not everything) I decided to use flash to teach some animation. Now this wasn't just basic animation with tweens, this was embedding animations within animations, and all that fun stuff.

The projects they had to do was to shape tween an eye blink, a flag wave, and then animate a walking sequence. My only regret is that we didn't have enough time to rig and animate a face. Anyway, here are some examples of the students' work.

This one is supposed to be me. My student Gabby did a quick illustration of me and then animated my eyes blinking.

I'm really happy with how this one turned out. Ian (my student) worked so hard to get it right. 

Des Moines

For work I travel around the country managing the photography for the Color Me Rad 5k fun run. On these trips I like to run the course the day before, mainly for the exercise, but also because I get to see some really cool places, and you just don't get that same experience driving in a car. On this day in Des Moines I was almost done with the run (I did a variation on it to log more miles) and the sun was just setting at the right time and it was perfect. The only thing though, was that I was a mile from my camera, and the sun had about 15 minutes before it set. I clocked the best mile I have ever run. It's amazing what a little motivation can do for your run.

Relative Existence Continued!

My body of work that I did for graduate school is entitled "Relative Existence" and it's kind of an interesting name and was suggested by one of the members of my graduate committee. I'm the kind of guy where I really don't like to name things and put labels on them, I just like to make art. Heck it was hard for me to name my kids. I guess these images are like kids, except it took a little less work to get them here (well not on my part, my wife does all the work with bringing the kids into the world, except for my small contribution).

 My artist statement regarding this was whittled down and re-examined multiple times (such is the life and toils of a grad student) and it wasn't until after I kind of snapped one day and finally wrote down what I was feeling about my work and avoided all the art speak crap, that I came up with something that actually meant something. It was eventually refined, and brought to a very concise and understandable few sentences, but I am looking at adding an addendum. 

 The artist statement I had for grad school worked for that time, and it felt complete and good at the time. But since then I have come to realize that an artist statement truly is a living, breathing document, and can be adjusted and added upon as the work progresses. Here is my original statement.

" The imagination is the tool of creation. Before something can exist physically, it must first be envisioned mentally, as an idea. Fantasy morphs into a reality and I am transported to a realm where I can walk along canyon floors and grapple peaks. I am forging these worlds…my primordial creation."

I liked it, but now it seems too concise. I want to say more, and I am starting to understand what I want to say. It's funny how grad school gets you started and it isn't until after grad school that you really start to make sense of what happened to you the past three years. I haven't quite figured out how I want to say the rest of it, but it kind of goes like this,

"Creation and science work hand in hand. One does not defeat the other. Creation defines the why, while science explains the how." That's really pretty rough but the gist of it is that I am a firm believer in God, but I am also a very practical human being and I look at the world scientifically. Science is fascinating, and Creation is inspiring. Then why can't the two work together? It's not a question of who is right and who is wrong, it's more about what is truth. My goal is to try and open up a dialogue between people of faith and the atheist community and let them discover common ground. There will be differences, obviously, but currently there is such an attitude of disrespect on both sides and it really bothers me. This is where my work stands now, by using myself as an example of creator and ultimate scientist when I create these worlds. Enjoy!