Photographer Project: My Best

These are my best pictures from my shoot in which I recreated a picture taken from Erwin Olaf's Paradise Portraits.

The original name of his picture I copied is called Matt

Micro Macro

Macro Photography Trick

Knowing that I love to do macro photography but don't have a macro lens of my own, my photography teacher showed me this video. After watching it, I was literally jumping in excitement! I grabbed one of her cameras, 2 lenses, and tried this trick myself....

Salvation Army

So a while ago we went to volunteer for the Salvation Army. My teacher was lead to believe that we were going to be working with the homeless one-on-one with them, or in the soup kitchen, so that's what she told us we were going to do. So this made me very excited for a certain reason; I was going to photograph and interview some of the homeless that I was going to be around. Before we got to the Salvation Army location, we had a bit of time to just walk around and take our own photographs.

When we got to the Salvation Army, however, we were told otherwise; we were not allowed to photograph anyone in the shelter, and that we wouldn't be working with the homeless. Instead, we were split into 2 groups; one group was handing out hot chocolate to people who donated to the Salvation Army, and the other group, which I was in, was brought into a room to sort out donated items for Christmas gifts for the homeless. These are a few pictures I took when I was walking around.

Library Books

So a couple days ago, I was doing a random roll. The only thing I was really wanting to do for that was go into a local antique store and take photograpgs there, but becasue it was raining so badly I decided to stay  at my school. But because that was the only thing I was wanting to do, I lost my ideas I had so I went into my school library to get some inspiration off the internet. From doing that, I decided to take photographs of some older looking books in the library. So I went and got a tripod, and took some pictures. These are the bese of what I took.

Photographer Report

                                           

                                        Erwin Olaf

       Erwin Olaf was born in Hilversum in the Netherlands in 1959, and has lived and worked in Amsterdam since the early 80's. Using a combination of both photojournalism and studio photography, Olaf emerged in the international art scene in 1988 when his series 'Chessmen' was awarded the first prize in the Young European Photographer competition. Following this award was an exhibition at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany. Since then Olaf has continued to explore issues of gender, sensuality, humor, despair and grace in each of his many series.

       Starting with his early work in being printed in documentary style black & white, he gradually worked into color and then finally into digital manipulation. Looking at each of his series, you will be able to see a great contrast between each. Olaf has also worked in the fields of video, film, and music. His first film Tadzio, was followed by comic videos for children's television, music clips, short films and documentaries, and even commissions by the Dutch National Ballet.

       Olaf has created video works of his photography pieces, starring models that also appear in the accompanying photo series. The models play different characters in the films, as though his moving images provide a parallel history to his color photographs. These short films have been selected for film festivals all over the world. Over the years many of Olaf's works have provoked controversy. With the ability to attract attention, his work has been embraced by the advertising world resulting in commercials for Lavazza, BMW, Microsoft and Nintendo among many others. Olaf is also frequently shooting in commission for magazines such as The New York Times Magazine and The Sunday Times Magazine

       Many of Olaf’s pieces have been made into publications. His 274-page book Silver served as the catalogue for his retrospective in 2003 at the Groninger Museum. After other published books, the Aperture Foundation published the monograph simply named Erwin Olaf, that was presented during the opening of his solo exhibition in The Hague Museum of Photography, was ran from September 2007, to January 2008. Olaf had another major solo exhibition at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam. Other solo shows have been staged in institutions like the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the Chelsea Art Museum in New York, and Space E6 in Shenzhen, China.

       In 1999, Olaf was awarded the Silver Lion at the Festival for Advertising in Cannes for his worldwide campaign for Diesel Jeans. Two years later, he was awarded the same for his imagery produced for Heineken. Among numerous other international art and media prizes, he was awarded Photographer of the Year in the International Color Awards in 2006. In 2007 Kunstbeeld magazine chose him as Artist of the Year of the Netherlands. Most recently, he received a Lucie Award for his entire oeuvre.

Photographer Project

A new project that we got was the Photographer project! What we have have to do is pick a photographer that is well known, right a short report on them, and then take pictures in their style. Sometimes students recreate their pictures, other times students just take pictures in that photographer's personal style. The project itself differs between the grade 11's and grade 12's; the grade 11's need to choose a dead photographer and copy their style, while the grade 12's have to choose a living photographer. Once we have chosen our photographer, taken the pictures, and then done our report, we have to do a presentation on them, showing our pictures next to theirs, and talking about them with the information that we have found. 

At first, I didn't know who I was going to choose. There were a lot of styles that I could choose from, but I wanted to choose a photographer whos style was one I haven't really gone into; portraiter. My teacher gave me a few photographers to look at. As she Googled them on my computer, I saw one that I absoluelty loved; Erwin Olaf. His style is very theatrical, and explores issues of gender, sexuality, humor, despair and grace in each of his many series. The series of his that I am going to recreat are 'Paradise Portraits', 'Fashion Victims', and 'Squares'.

{Here is a link to Olaf's website}

String

These are my favorite and best shots from my string project photoshoot.

Sushi & Exposure

A field trip taht my teacher set up for my class was to go out for sushi and take night shots in the down located around my school. Sadly, not everyone was able to go on the field trip because it took place between the times of 5:00pm and 7:30pm in late november. Out of the students that did come, it was only me and another who stayed to take night shots after we had sushi. My teacher didn't even stay! It was very, very cold and wet that night, so me and my friend were only able to take 1 picture each. It took a while to set up the cameras and lights, but so these are the only pictures we came up with.

 I was just playing around with a flash while using a very long shutter speed.

 Take 1

Take 2

I don't really know why you're able to see what I assume is his breath in this one but not the first.

SELF Favorites

These are my favorite self portraits from the 'Self' gallery.

 I really like how this student chose to use a piece of concrete instead of a canvas, and I love the detailing of the creasing on her shirt.

 I just plain and simply loved the mere size of this piece.

 This portrait was one of the few that looked so life-like! And when you look at it up close, all the different colours, and the way she used all of them are so amazing!

 The portrait of this student matched the pose and the actual way the portrait of the real painting perfectly!

 This portrait was done in only graphite, and the detail is just incredible. This has to be one of my top favorites.

 This student's style of painting is one of my favorites between all the students.

I really like how she chose to do her painting on a round canvas rather than a box canvas, and her medium chose of pastal adds a lot to the piece.

SELF

The grade 11 and 12 art majors put on an gallery called 'Self'. What they did, was take a picture of themself, and include an interesting pattern as the background. Some students used the pattern strictly as a background, and others intertwined it with their portrait. The poses that the students chose were from those of paintings that famous artists used, for example 'The Scream' and 'The Mona Lisa'.

 This is the artists who this project was inspired by. Kehinde Wiley goes on the street and takes black people's portraits, and then paints them with a patterned background as he did himself.

These are the grade 11 self portraits (above). Personally, the one of the girl holding the paint brush and wearing round glasses is my favorite from the 11's.