Web 2.0 part 2

Michael Wesch, our friendly web 2.0 guru at Kansas State has a new look at the we and how it can/has/will drastically change we way we organize and access information. Wesch produced an earlier piece that we featured on the blog earlier in the semester, which you can see by clicking here.

Joshua Davis – Dynamic Abstraction

The Apple Pro page has a regular series of profiles of creative types, everything from photographers to designers, video developers and a myriad of artists. One of the more recent profiles focused on Josha Davis, an artist based out of New York who works in both commercial and non-commercial design. A snippet of the profile is below:

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Davis creates electronically generated graphic compositions of almost unimaginable complexity and individuality. Equally at home with print and electronic media, he builds his own Flash-based programs to combine and recombine colors borrowed from nature with forms that include organic shapes, text elements, and other symbols.

The resulting works of “dynamic abstraction,” as Davis calls them, are fluid, intricate, and unique as snowflakes. There’s an ephemeral quality even to his print work, which captures a single variation in a potentially endless sequence of design permutations.

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A little farther down in the profile Davis talks about defining your niche, and how the work that he is hired to do generally mirrors the work he produces on his own. After all the talk from Chase Jarvis, Junkie XL, Joshua Davis and the other people on the blog who talk about creating your own work and generating your OWN ideas, hopefully you guys are picking up on that theme. This is a large part of the answer to that puzzle of how you go from a kid in college with a camera to a professional who spends the rest of his life making creative, compelling work.

“I’ve always done kind of weird, strange things, and that’s what I get hired to do: weird, strange things,” he says. “The type of work you make is the type of work people will hire you to do.”

Carissa Ray – Bio

For those of you coming to see Carissa Ray speak on Thursday night, here’s a quick bio to get you up to speed.  We will be meeting in the library in room 165 on Thursday at 8:00.

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Carissa Ray is a multimedia producer at MSNBC.com, a general news web site seen by over 30 million unique users each month. Ray has worked at MSNBC.com since spring 2005.

In this role, Ray works as a photographer, photo editor and producer to create multimedia content across all sections of MSNBC.com, though she acts specifically as a liaison for multimedia with the Health section of MSNBC.com helping to create projects like “America Unzipped” and “Babyquest.”

Ray also often produces popular multimedia features such as The Week in Pictures and the Year in Pictures.

During her time at MSNBC.com, Ray’s projects have earned her recognition from the National Press Photographers Association for her original video reporting/production and audio slide show production.

Before coming to MSNBC.com, Ray worked as a staff photographer for the Chautauquan Daily in Chautauqua, New York, and moonlighted as a wedding photographer and free lancer while waitressing and rock climbing full time (well, almost). Ray graduated with a B.A. in Photojournalism from Western Kentucky University completing both the PJ and Multimedia tracks of the program.

Speaker :: Carissa Ray from MSNBC.com – Thursday

This coming Thursday Carissa Ray, a multimedia editor/producer for MSNBC.com out of Seattle will be coming to speak.  As of right now we will be meeting in the Classroom Building at 8:00 for her presentation.  In addition of producing some really great multimedia for MSNBC, she is one of the photo editors responsible for putting together both the Week and the Year in Pictures.

Hopefully I’ll have a bio for Carissa in a day or two, and when I get that I’ll post it here.

Jill Greenberg

Jill Greenberg is a quirky little lady with an amazing control over light (and Photoshop). Greenberg does a lot of high end photo work for both commercial and editorial clients, and shows up in Wired Magazine on a fairly regular basis. This two-video post gives you a little of a behind the scenes look at some of her recent work, which includes bears, crying babies and monkeys.

In this video with Gwen Stefani you get a fairly good look at her lighting setup, which to best that I can tell involves at least six lights. To get an idea of what you can create with six lights and a heavy Photoshop hand check out Greenberg’s website, The Manipulator.

The Business of (commercial) photography.

First off, sorry that the blog updates have been so sporadic over the past few weeks. Now that workshop is over hopefully I’ll have a little more time to keep this thing current.

That said, the video below is a clip from Chase Jarvis’s presentation at the Atlanta Photoshelter conference last week. The entire clip is about 55 minutes long, so you might need to set a little time aside to watch the entire thing. Even if you bounce around Jarvis says a lot that applies to you as emerging photographers. In his talk Jarvis talks about the “universals” – the standard ingredients that go into making a great photographer. Those ingredients are: Hard Work, A passion for photography, Developing a personal photographic style, good people skills, good buisness skills, being unconventional with your work, and giving back to the photo community.

There are a lot of things that stand out when I listen to his talk, but one of the most glaring is the piece where he talks about producing your own work. If at the end of the year you’ve only shot assignments that have been handed to you, then you have a portfolio that represents someone else’s ideas and creativity, not yours. In a buisiness as INTENSELY competitive as photography it is really important that you stand out in some form or fashion, and one of the best ways is to work hard on producing and creating your own assignments and projects. This is an idea that Jarvis feels so strongly about that he sets aside tens of thousands of dollars a year just to shoot pictures he’s interested in. Self assigning your own work is very important and it will make you better, faster.

The Britecove video I had planned on embedding here isn’t working out, so to see the video click HERE.