Thomas Burke & Others

A flurry of rather frenetic projects lately has kept me away from my blogging duties…well, no, not duties, rather… ahh…joy, not to be confused with ah..chew. Let’s recap: My son Lucien, you’ll find him as a fan of TBO, was, until last week, also an employee. The guy can make paths!! He did some journeyman work here, but is employed more lucratively for the summer with his step father in constuction. He drives a dump truck. He’ll be back in the fall with the start of Cabrillo’s school year. Before leaving we conspired on a location shoot at Jardines in San Juan Bautista.   A bit different than the usual fare what with food and models involved.

We’ve also started a lifestyle project for SanDisk. The success of the shoot was do in great part to the quality of the models. We were fortunate to work with skilled models and have a great location, although were plagued by fog for most of the day. One shot we needed was by the pool and the sun finally cut through about 4:00 in time for the models to get on their bathing suits and pose for some stuff by the pool. It was about 62°. I was nice and warm behind the lens though.

Links in this article

http://www.sandisk.com/

http://www.jardinesrestaurant.com/index.htm

Two or three times a year, we host a photography class from UCSC. Sort of reminds me of when we went to the fire station in grade school. They wouldn’t let us slide down the pole.

On Tuesday morning a couple of weeks ago my friend Katie brought her Photo 1 class to the studio to disabuse them of any notion they may have of pursuing a career in commercial photography. TC and I put on a cart and pony show, demo-ing some gear and talking a bit about lighting.

We usually finish with a simple set for them to take their own shots. Since we work tethered, they can see their efforts in something like real time.

While this was a photo 1 class, (their efforts  in class were all with film, not digital), this does bring up a gripe I have with too much of the educational focus (no pun intended) of college offerings. They provide too little technical instruction. There’s not enough about the physics of photography, the behavior of light, or how the choice of lens can affect the outcome of the image, of how these things aren’t the art, but the brushes with which you craft your art. Katie doesn’t entirely agree and I would probably have to confess that I’ve probably been locked in the studio for far too long to be objective.

That said, check out the efforts of these guys. In the days of digital, they take photography back about 150 years. God bless them.

Links:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/wallflower/detail?&entry_id=62778

Instead of enjoying our wet spring here on the Central Coast, I bugged out of town in mid March to Joshua Tree and Arizona. Having grown up in Phoenix, I can tell you that Spring in Arizona is beautiful, but since it only lasts 3 days, you’ve got to get your timing just right.

Every time I visit Phoenix, I’m struck by contrasts — the beautiful desert, unrestrained development, water delivered over 300 miles from Colorado River dams, fantastic golf courses, a fountain that blasts water 300 feet in the air, the sweet smell of citrus blossoms, — a state where the former Republican Presidential candidate is too liberal.

Sometimes I think the adaptations we’ve made to live there are kind of nuts. The temperature reaches or exceeds 100°F on an average of 110 days during the year, and tops 110 °F an average of 18 days each year. That’s hot, Riyadh and Baghdad hot.

To cope with all that heat Arizonans live in air conditioning, and to run them they built the largest nuclear power plant in the U.S., Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station. Even with three reactor containment vessels, it’s a little hard to find. As it turns out, it was right on my route home. I find this sort of thing fascinating, so here are a couple of photos.

Spring has sprung

The grass has riz

I wonder where all

The flowers is.

-Anonymous

This effort is the first blog by one of the Others. TC and I went off to shoot for one of our oldest clients.

Corn Poppy (Papaver rhoeas)

Well, we found them, at our location shoot for Sakata Seeds in Salinas. We travel there several times a year — in the spring it’s flowers, in the fall it’s broccoli, and in the heat of summer we’ll head out to the Central Valley to shoot melons.

Astronomically speaking, spring arrived back on March 20. But, here in Santa Cruz this past Easter weekend felt as if spring just arrived.

The temperature hovered around 70 degrees Sunday afternoon as the kids walked around the yard carrying Easter pails to look for bright colorful eggs.

Spring has definitely sprung, and it’s a great time to celebrate the new beginnings — and warmer temperatures — all around us.

This, better than anything I’ve read to date, addresses the phenomenon of “Social Media”

“We’re collaborative animals, it turns out, and joyful amateurs, interested more in entertaining and informing ourselves than in being entertained and informed by professionals.”

It takes a couple of reads, but if you’re willing to slog through the word soup and get your knickers wet, there is a lot to find in Michael Wolff’s article in Vanity Fair, “Ringside at the Web Fight” What doesn’t make sense to my old brain when first read, gathers meaning, sometimes more than one, with review.

Very difficult to know where one fits in all of this, but it does mean that we’re swimming in a much bigger pond, that your words and thoughts are nested right there with everyone else’s, just as valuable and fraught with meaning (or not) as everyone else’s. If he’s right, there is some sorting out going to happen in the next few years. It seems that the internet ain’t over yet. I think, though, there’s place for photography in the mix.

Now for something completely off topic and totally cool. My friend Mike sent me this link:

Now here’s a photo contest. Why don’t they extend the offer to photography students in Northern Ireland as well?

Some years ago Annie Leibovitz did photograph the queen. It was a shoot that caused a row at the BBC. We like to stick to inanimate objects for just that reason. She did get some great shots however.

Here’s a link from Mike James that will inform those who want to know just how to shoot a portrait. This is from Jorg Colberg’s weblog about fine art photography.

Here’s the article:

Oh, those were simpler days. There is a reason why we, here at TB&O, tend not to take portrait commissions. We’ll do it when its an executive who needs his image for a corporate publication, but we’ll say no to a picture you might want of Aunt Maude.

In practice, photos like these are, we found, more difficult than they appear. When we made the staff images for our website, we tried to model the look and feel after images by George Hurrell who shot many of the great portraits of the stars in the 1930′s and 1940′s. (Sorry George) It wasn’t easy! Who would have thought.

Darryl does look a bit like Tyrone Power though.