{"id":1051,"date":"2014-03-27T03:00:22","date_gmt":"2014-03-27T08:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rickspicscorner.com\/blog\/?p=1051"},"modified":"2014-03-27T03:03:26","modified_gmt":"2014-03-27T08:03:26","slug":"its-all-about-the-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/its-all-about-the-content\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s All About the Content"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know I should really post more than once a month.\u00a0 This semester is kicking my ass a little bit, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.\u00a0 I’m learning a lot and finding out things about my vision that I never realized before.\u00a0 But we won’t go too much into that with this post.\u00a0 Let’s go ahead and keep this one on the simple side.<\/p>\n

I can’t remember if I mentioned this or not (and frankly, I’m too lazy to go back and look), but our in-depth topic of study this semester is portraiture.\u00a0 This is a little out of my comfort zone as I’m not one to shoot people.\u00a0 I guess this comes a little from a view I had of portraiture that was rather limited in scope.\u00a0 I have had models sit for me before and they expected direction from me.\u00a0 The problem for me in those situations was I would go into them with very little in terms of an idea other than “I just want to photograph a person in various poses.” Needless to say, it was a little difficult to get much in the way of content from them.\u00a0 That’s not to say that those sessions were wastes of effort – I did get some good shots out of my subjects.\u00a0 They just seemed to take a lot more effort than I anticipated.<\/p>\n

A couple of years has passed since those early sessions.\u00a0 I found out that having an idea was very important when going into a shooting session.\u00a0 Currently I have 3 active photo projects.\u00a0 Of those, 2 are portraiture projects that have concrete ideas attached to them.\u00a0 One deals with projection and perception while the other deals with emotion.\u00a0 Of course, the emotion project could be a perception\/projection type project as well, but since this is a rather specific area, I am a little hesitant to lump it under that heading.\u00a0 After all, isn’t portraiture all about perception and projection?\u00a0 But I digress…\u00a0 here are 2 images of those projects in progress (click image to embiggen:<\/p>\n

\"andrew\"<\/a> \"_MG_3780\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I’m sure my readers can tell which is which in terms of projects.\u00a0 We just had a midterm critique and I received some really positive feedback on the images in the projection\/perception project.\u00a0\u00a0 The only real negative was one of the professors really didn’t care for the print quality, which I thought was very fair given there were some issues with the color balance throughout the series.\u00a0 All in all, however, the feedback was very positive and the critiquing bodies expressed an interest in more samples as well as how I edit them down for the final series.\u00a0 We ran out of time so we weren’t able to discuss the emotion project images I submitted.\u00a0 I’m not unhappy about it though, as the project is specifically for my class with Keliy Anderson-Staley, and not my overall semester project (which the other is).<\/p>\n

Speaking of Keliy Anderson-Staley, she is a professor that the University of Houston and a bit of a rising star in the fine art portraiture game.\u00a0 She shoots a lot of tintype portraits.\u00a0 A tintype is made when a metal substrate (tin, in this case) is coated with an emulsion and then used as the “film” in the camera.\u00a0 The “film” is then developed, fixed, and washed pretty much the same as film.\u00a0 The emulsion is slow (in this case it was a 15 second exposure) so Keliy used a bar to help keep my head upright through the entire exposure.\u00a0\u00a0 The use of tin as a substrate and the wet collodion emulsion is one of the earliest processes of photography.\u00a0 She took this of me in February:
\n\"Rick_tintype\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I highly recommend checking her website (link at end of article).\u00a0 She has some really good stuff up there.<\/p>\n

Well, at this point I should be heading out as it is late and I need to be awake in a little over 4 hours.\u00a0 I will update again soon as a lot has happened for me, and I have many more ideas I would like to discuss.\u00a0 Feel free to comment at will, and don’t forget to check out Keliy’s work.<\/p>\n

Keliy Anderson-Staley (anderson-staley.com)\u00a0 <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know I should really post more than once a month.\u00a0 This semester is kicking my ass a little bit, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.\u00a0 I’m learning a lot and finding out things about my vision that I never realized before.\u00a0 But we won’t go too much into that with this post.\u00a0 Let’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[31],"tags":[29,53,57,56,54,55,52,58],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1051"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1063,"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions\/1063"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}