Jill Greenberg and John McCain – Atlantic Monthly Shoot

Jill Greenberg and John McCain Controversial Atlantic Monthly Shoot

I think she went a little MAVERICK on us!!

Jill Greenberg is a LA commercial photographer who has made famous photos of famous people and a very famous set of photos of crying babies.

I am including a few screen grabs from Jill Greenberg site.  Copyright Jill Greenberg!!

The crying baby series is a privately financed personal shoot by Jill Greenberg which was produced as a commentary on the re-election of President Bush.  Click the thumbnail above to read her statement about the work.  Many of us have seen these images, but you may not know what was the message or the intent of the series.  People in the industry however would certainly know her position politically as they would research this photographer for an assignment such as a Portrait for the cover of the Atlantic Monthly.

So here is the cover shot that the Atlantic Monthly chose from the shoot but at the end of the 15 minute session Jill Greenberg turned the main light off and shot some with the light on the floor producing a goolish style of lighting and clearly an unflattering view of John McCain.

She made these to stir up things a little…

“Good. I want to stir stuff up, but not to the point where I get audited if he becomes president.” Jill Greeenberg

She didn’t stop there, she completed several of these images with retouching and captions that are pretty rough.

This is the most mild of the set that is now been removed from her site but are available if you have the stomach for it.  Mark Tucker a great editorial and commercial Photographer has posted a set of forteen questions about the controversy Here.

3. If Greenberg was truly being an “artist”, why didn’t she submit ONLY the second setup, which was the bottom-lit frame, as opposed to her formula-lighting commercial solution? Wouldn’t a true artist submit only their “best statement”?  Mark Tucker

Photo District News posted these comments about the situation:

How Jill Greenberg Really Feels About John McCain

I think this situation is certainly of some interest to the student of photography.  What are our rights and responsibilities as photographers and artists?  I am sure that it is a complicated issue with the possibility of complicity of the Atlantic Monthly.

I am including a youtube of a shoot with Jill where you see her shooting tethered with the Hasselblad digital camera.  One might imagine that the the McCain shoot was also shot tethered so anyone present could have seen the results on the computer as she was shooting.

This is a good behind the scene video showing her kickers and use of a ring light for fill which must be part of her signature look.

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Young Guns at UCM Spring Classes – Jerry Schmidt

I was impressed with the efforts of my students last semester and I wanted to share a few pics that stood out.

The first photographer is Drew Woolery, these shots where done in the Creative Class. He has captured a set of portraits of the locals that is quite telling and impressive.

Sarah Gaughan combined a great shoot with creative use of lightroom presets. These shots were done for an assignment in Advanced Portrait.

Tara M Schlotzhauer made these Psychological Drama images in the Creative Class.

Layton Powel did some interesting work this semester… Here is what he says about these shots: “Having recently watched Sweeny Todd and being influenced by painters within the photoshop community I came up with the idea to mix HDR with a bit of photoshop painting. Here are a few of my attempts at the such.”

 

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Food Photographer Michael Ray

Here are some word from the food photographer Michael Ray about editorial food photography. He has developed a great SITE and BLOG with tons of info and comments about food photography. You can tell from the great portfolio that he is certainly an expert in the field. Check it out!!

Editorial food photography
This is the type of photography that most food photographers love the most. The most important thing is “making a beautiful image”. Instead of needing to communicate “Heinz’s hot, moist, meaty, abundant, corn fed ground meat stew”, you just need to make the viewer say “Wow!” This kind of shot usually makes “lighting” the big issue of the photo. Ya, it has to be well composed, and beautifully styled and nicely propped, but if the lighting isn’t spectacular, the shot ends up being just so-so. One of the greatest compliments I ever received was from a food stylist that said, “Mike, you can make a turd on a paper plate look good”. Now that’s high praise!

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Expressive Portfolio Class – Defining Style

Recognizing and Defining aspects of a body of photographic work that

Define Style

• Selection of subject
  • Ghettos
  • Politician
  • War
  • Children
  • Landscapes
  • Mailboxes
  • Animals
• Approach to the subject
  • Sympathetic
  • Satirical
  • Detached
  • Graphic / Design
  • Political
  • Ethical
  • Humorous
  • Journalistic
  • Illustrative
  • Commercial
• Use of color
  • Bold and saturated
  • Monochrome
  • Dull and moody
  • Surreal
  • Natural
  • Palette choices
• Type of story
  • Optimistic
  • Dark
  • Historical
  • Humanistic
  • Heroic
  • Quirky
  • Impressionistic
• Use of lens/cameras
  • Focal Length
  • Depth of Field
  • Creative lenses
  • Selection of camera
•  Post Processing
  • HDR
  • Photo-Shop collage
  • Photo-shop enhancement
  • Panorama
• Output Systems
  • Ink-jet prints
    • Special Papers
    • Canvas Prints
  • Traditional Prints
  • Silver Prints
  • Digital
  • Animation
  • Web based

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Frames Page Template on the Phot/Schmidt Server

I just put a folder called FrameTemplate1 You can see it here!  You just get it off the server and put it in your website folder.  Open it in dreamweaver and check it out, keep previewing and use save all not save as until you get the idea.

This is set up for navigation and logo about 250px wide I think that is plenty of web site real-estate for navigation.

Also you may like to look at the Porta gallery link on the working link above.  This is a FREE PC gallery generator.  Download it and give it a try.

Here is a template folder for a TopBottom Gallery it will work nicely with wide display photos etc.   I will take the link for the porta gallery off because it will not work after I put it on the server.  It is a simple matter to select your navigation graphics and browse to the INDEX inside the Porta Album. Them select mainFrame as target and its all good.

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Dreamweaver Remote set up.

Several students have acquired hosting for their web site.  A popular source for this is Go Daddy.  Students may be advised that they should acquire a Domain Name early in their career and GoDaddy has free hosting to get started.

Dreamweaver is a great software for designing and managing the files of a website.  Here is how the Remote info is filled out for my go daddy site.

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Embedding Soundslides in WordPress

    

I did find out that WordPress does not support embedding flash on their free hosted sites.  I was able to get it to work on our SchmidtPhoto Blog that we host ourselves.  I worked with Joe at soundslides and he has created a utility for blog embedding. I did however discover that I had to click the “ol” button before and after I pasted the code that the utility created. 

Here is the link for the word on it from WP

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Professional Photographers do Blog

I was poking around a bit and found a LA photoblog  site with lots of links to LA shooters, could be fun!!

While I am thinking of it here is a link to lots of portrait wedding photographers’ blogs on opensourcephoto.

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Photography Business Blog

This is an assignment for the business class in the the photography area at UCM.  Each student will be required to complete a professional photography blog as part of their class.

Here is what will be requires for a completed project:

• All blogs will be produced on wordpress so that we can share our discoveries about professional blogs.
• Each student should select a theme that allows for a custom header.

• A custom header will be developed in photoshop to fit the selected theme.  The theme will let you know what size the file needs to be as you see in the screen grab below.  My blog requires a custom header of 730 wide by 180 tall.  To make a custom header for my blog I will need to make a new document in photoshop to be that pixel dimension.

• All blogs will contain a Blogroll including all the students in the business class as well as 5 links to professional photography web sites.
• Students will post a minimun of 5 post with a minimum of 5 images content.  Tags should be included for each post, all post will include UCM, photographic education, photography, and your name as a tag.
• Each blog will include several pages that will include: 1. About,  2. Portfolio,  3. Professional Photographer interview,  4. Resume.

• Each blog will contain a minimum of two slide shows created at Slide.com and inserted in a post or on a page.
• Lets get started!!

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