first shoot

This weekend I shot for my project about empty rooms and charging that space.. and it was off to a bumpy start when I couldn't figure out how to turn my camera to RAW format.. I did sort it out eventually and now I am having trouble downloading the images to a location other than iphoto on my mac.. if you have any suggestions please let me know! Thanks...

Hoping to post some images soon...

empty rooms

I've been struggling with an idea for my first project. I've been trying to think of a way to incorporate new technique that I am and will be learning in photoshop with my base idea. It's still very raw, but I know that I want to photograph empty rooms. In the last six months I've had a lot of the important people in my life move away and it's been a really difficult adjustment for me. Three really close friends and two of my sisters is a lot to live without on a daily/weekly basis, and while I can call and email with them the lack of physical presence is a struggle for me. Whenever I think about this my mind returns to my sister's room at our parents house.. the day after she left I walked into this now empty space and completely broke down. Her room hasn't been empty for 16 years. The idea of photographing empty rooms and spaces is to feel through theses peoples absence in my everyday life.

I really do want to learn how to composite images and so i was thinking that maybe photographing these empty spaces, but showing a presence of these people would be a way to express this idea of their absence and also their continuing presence in my life.

I came across a blog that had images with people in the empty spaces. I don't want actual people in the space but I like the way this artist uses light to express a certain mood. The address of this blog is http://monicamurgu.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2009-01-01T00%3A00%3A00%2B02%3A00&updated-max=2010-01-01T00%3A00%3A00%2B02%3A00&max-results=31

I also came across this stock image at the top of the page and I really like the light and the way the wheelchair represents a presence of someone.

I've also been listening to a lot of Damien Rice.. Grey Room is a song that been an inspiring factor for this project so far. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ylVSn6qo_Q

Chinatown Art Walk

I spent last night at the Chinatown art walk and I have to say that I wasn't very impressed with a lot of what I saw at the galleries. A lot of it seemed very commercialized and more like stores or boutiques instead of art galleries. The exhibition Patterned After by Christina Muraczewski at the Fifth Floor gallery was commenting on the mass production of furniture and household items from places such as Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel. The work seemed very sloppy and the ways in which the artist was trying to comment on mass production was very obvious and not all that convincing to me.

I did enjoy the exhibition at Sam Lee Gallery. This gallery featured a series of photographs called East Of Eden by Pipo Nguyen-Duy. He is a Vietnamese American artist who photographed the landscape and the people of Vietnam to show some of the after affects on both from the Vietnam War. I highly recommend going to see this series. They are done with large format color negatives and then digitally printed. They images can be somewhat over-whelming but are definitely worth a look.

They site is - samleegallery.com

The Play Ground

A friend of mine works for a graphic design company based in London. He recently designed the layout for a new Paris-based magazine. It's called The Play Ground and it focuses in on art in relation to the family. It has an interesting array of photographs and essays that are done by both professionals and children. Unfortunately because it's a new magazine there isn't a website yet. I'm listing a couple of the photographers that I found interesting along with their websites. My favorite was Paolo Roversi. Roversi is mainly a fashion photographer which isn't really an area that I am interested in but I still find some of his images interesting. He has a lot of traditional looking nudes and portraits but I prefer his color images and the way he plays with texture and light.

Paolo Roversi - paoloroversi.com

Jean-Paul Lefret - jplefret.com

5 freeway

I had to drive 1,300 miles on the 5 this weekend.. almost to Canada. I was trying to see the beauty in this highway that stretches on forever, but the only thing beautiful about the 5 freeway is when you finally can exit it.

Fallen Princesses

I came across this article about this body of work and I thought it was an interesting way of looking at how disney stories shape our life perceptions at a very young age. We grow up thinking about happy endings and learning very specific gender roles that are not necessarily accurate. The artist is Dina Goldstein and this link provides a brief artists statement about the work.

http://www.jpgmag.com/stories/11918