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squidflakes posted:I've been checking in to art classes at the local community colleges and I'm not sure where the concept of "affordable college level courses" came from, but it wasn't here. The number one thing is being able to differentiate just something making you say 'oooh pretty' and being able to identify what you like, why you like it, and how it could be changed to make you like it more or less. It´s learning about aesthetics. Most of the exercises in foundation art classes force you to think about this by making you do small exercises. Mock it all you want by calling it bullshit, Brad and I can talk about each others art in a way that is much easier to understand what the other person is suggesting, than two people who just shoot photos all the time as a hobby and have never taken any art education.
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Mar 24, 2010 17:04
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poopinmymouth posted:I'm not talking about hoity-toity modern art "you just don't understand" but just being able to know that critiques are not attacks, recognizing a person's artistic intentions and helping them along that path instead of fighting them to adhere to yours, recognizing how to match a person's vision if they are in charge, etc. This sounds more like learning not to be a dick than anything else.
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Mar 24, 2010 17:08
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poopinmymouth posted:Mock it all you want by calling it bullshit, Brad and I can talk about each others art in a way that is much easier to understand what the other person is suggesting, than two people who just shoot photos all the time as a hobby and have never taken any art education. I'm not mocking it. I'm playing up the "fake it 'till you make it" angle. Myself, I'd love to have a solid foundation of art knowledge because it would probably help me solve a lot more of those "man, this photo is nice, but it's missing a certain something" kind of problems.
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Mar 24, 2010 17:20
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Every profession has it's own language and vocabulary. Mechanics, doctors, lawyers, whatever all have their own way of talking about and framing issues they deal with every day. Art is the same way. I'm not talking about being able to word-vomit an artist statement or discuss theory, just being able to talk about visual things coherently and productively with someone else. If you are going to do commercial (or any kind of) photography you have to be able to communicate to clients what exactly you bring to the table to solve their problems. When you are standing on set with an art director and time is money you have to be able to get straight to what is or isn't working. It is painful trying to work through some kind of visual problem with someone who does not know how to articulate visual ideas. This is why I can't do retail work, I just can't deal with the, "I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it" or "just make it look cool" type of clients. These are just people who can't communicate what the problem you are supposed to be solving is. I was talking with a friend the other day about how when we go to the monthly gallery crawl it is really, really obvious which artists have had formal training and which haven't. Not because they have some secret insider knowledge or the work is automatically super amazing, just that the work is on a different level. You can tell that they have the knowledge to realistically evaluate what they've done, have worked through it to some kind of conclusion, and have dedicated enough to the craft and the details so that it supports that. Art school just teaches you a framework to do those things through the whole process. Even if the idea or execution is imperfect, you can see the thought process that's there. Artists without that training usually lack that coherence and maturity because they are still trying to figure it out on their own, which is a really hard thing to do. Anyways this is getting really wordy, I don't think a BFA is the only way to learn those things at all or that that is the right path for everyone. I just know that for me personally, when I think about where I was with my work before art school and where I'm at now, I have a hard time imagining how I could have gotten to this point by myself or how I would have learned some of those skills. I think I probably would have figured out most of it eventually, but it would have taken a hell of a lot longer than 4 years. Learning to write a marketing plan or do your taxes as a freelancer is a little easier to pick up on your own. brad industry fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Mar 24, 2010 |
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Mar 24, 2010 18:44
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That's what I need to find, the non-BFA route to building the frame work for getting my ideas across, accepting others ideas, and knowing when my execution has succeeded for failed. Is a part time job at an art gallery the answer here, or is that just going to teach me how to unload lithos on suckers?
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Mar 24, 2010 20:13
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Pick up some books on composition and use of color in photos to start off if you want to 'get it.' I think understanding and using the principles of how these things apply to a photo is more important, but it has restrained me to a grin when I would have otherwise burst out laughing hearing some people talk at galleries. High art is a concept that's completely lost on me and just seems like arbitrary bullshit in my eyes, but knowing basic principles in art and applying them to the camera helped me immensely. Even if you find the art world a bit silly, it can teach you things a technical course can't. I guess I don't 'get it' at all, but I know how to pick up useful knowledge from it. TheFuglyStik fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Mar 24, 2010 |
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Mar 24, 2010 20:55
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I have spent the last year making a decided effort to grow as an artist. Like the man said it's hard on your own. I spend a lot of time looking at other peoples work and thinking about it, reading books on art and art history. I think the first step is to learn to not get pissed off when someone critiques some thing you really like and doesn't agree with you. That and to realize that just because you made something that looks pretty it doesn't mean that it has any deeper meaning or relevance.
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Mar 24, 2010 21:20
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8th-samurai posted:That and to realize that just because you made something that looks pretty it doesn't mean that it has any deeper meaning or relevance. So long as you don't go so deep that you forget that art doesn't need to have a deeper meaning or relevance to be good art. Some things are just made to be pretty.
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Mar 24, 2010 21:27
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orange lime posted:So long as you don't go so deep that you forget that art doesn't need to have a deeper meaning or relevance to be good art. Some things are just made to be pretty. I just meant that don't assign deeper meanings to something pretty after the fact just to give it relevance.Some people feel that they need to justify themselves or their work in that way. Pretty things are important but if that was your intention then leave it at that. Gary Winogrand used to say that he photographed things just to see what they looked like as a photographs. It's your intentions that are important.
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Mar 24, 2010 21:40
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I think school in general is important, and you should finish a 4 year degree in anything you want. The pure mechanical nature of business or art can be learned or worked into. But schooling gives you the framework to test out those mechanicals and figure out poo poo for yourself.
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Mar 24, 2010 22:03
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Photography cheat sheets if you want them.TheFuglyStik posted:Pick up some books on composition and use of color in photos to start off if you want to 'get it.'
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Mar 24, 2010 22:36
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For a more low investment option in terms of time and money I can recommend "The Photographer's Eye" by Michael Freeman. I haven't gotten really deep into it yet, but it does a great job of expanding my vocabulary and I'm already more confident in being able to articulate what I like about images and why. It's even good at giving you tools of how to understand a photograph might be good even though it doesn't appeal to you personally. What I really like is that he'll basically take the same picture in about 5-6 different ways in terms of crop and subject placement and explain what is good about each one. He does it very educationally - it's never "this is wrong, and this is right" Photography is such a weird field in that you have a marriage between technology and art, and typically people who specialize in either branch tend not to be very good at the former. I mean it's great that people can find something they enjoy doing within photography - even if it's being a dick obsessed with ISOs and megapixels, or if it's someone taking cliché 365 projects on flickr with a point and shoot. I'd really like to go further with my photography and I think in the past six months I've made a great improvement in not just my own pictures but how I view others. I'm a little wary of going to school for photography at this point, because I feel like I've mastered the technical aspects - and I think I do a good enough job aggressively developing and experimenting with different parts of the field rather than just taking the same kinds of pictures again and again. That kind of went off on a bit of a tangent, but yeah - I recommend The Photographer's Eye. It's a good companion to Understanding Exposure.
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Mar 24, 2010 22:41
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While people are in recommending mode, how about good photography blogs?
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Mar 24, 2010 22:51
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squidflakes posted:That's what I need to find, the non-BFA route to building the frame work for getting my ideas across, accepting others ideas, and knowing when my execution has succeeded for failed. I think whatever specific steps you take is a personal decision, I don't know if working at an art gallery would help you out or not. Maybe it will, or maybe it will point you in a different direction that does work. I have been out of school for a while now and I have some friends I still call up for moral support - the #1 thing we talk about, besides bitching about clients, is how do you structure your life in a way that pushes you farther along in your career and work? Whatever you need to do to become a better photographer or business person or artist has to become part of your daily practice. What environment is conducive to making work and pushing it farther? You have to build your own support system. (ie. a small personal example: one of the reasons I agreed to moderate this forum was because it forces me to practice talking about photo related things with people who don't have the same art background that I do, which is a valuable skill that I need.) TheFuglyStik posted:High art is a concept that's completely lost on me and just seems like arbitrary bullshit in my eyes Everyone has this attitude when start to become interested in art. The only way you will ever understand "high art" is to study art history. If you remove anything from the context it exists in it will become arbitrary bullshit, whether we are talking about Picasso, why the Civil War happened, or why the chair I'm sitting in looks the way it does. Nothing happens in a vacuum. quote:So long as you don't go so deep that you forget that art doesn't need to have a deeper meaning or relevance to be good art. Some things are just made to be pretty. Making pretty things for the sake of making pretty things is decorating. There are an endless list of valid reasons to make art, not all of them have to be about the hyper-realness of the postmodern world or some deep comment on the human condition. You can make a photograph of something to see what it looks like as a photograph. If you did that every single day you would probably have more to say about what it "means" and why you are doing it than that one sentence though. The reason Gary Winogrand can so succinctly sum up why he makes images is because he spent his entire life thinking about it. I recommend this book In the Making. Not photography specific, but it basically dissects the practical, conceptual, and commercial considerations that go into being an artist, using different artists' careers as examples.
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Mar 24, 2010 22:51
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Is getting an MFA worthless if you already have a BFA? At what point to you reach diminishing returns with art education?
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Mar 24, 2010 23:34
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JaundiceDave posted:Is getting an MFA worthless if you already have a BFA? At what point to you reach diminishing returns with art education? Do you want to teach?
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Mar 25, 2010 02:47
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JaundiceDave posted:Is getting an MFA worthless if you already have a BFA? At what point to you reach diminishing returns with art education? Unless you want to teach it's impossible to say either way, depends on your work and where you're at with it. I considered it, but the benefit vs. amount of debt I would have gone into wasn't worth it for what I'm doing. If I had gone in a more fine art/gallery direction rather than commercial I probably would have though.
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Mar 25, 2010 03:53
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I think the important message here is very clear if you take a couple steps back. If you can afford the education, it has clear benefits. If you want to jump right in and start chasing the dream, no one will stop you- but unless your roomates are bored art college professors, you're not going to pick up the needed info faster. For me, in a completely different field of work, it's very simple. It's 10 years of hard work before you really get well established in your career, at which point some of the formal stuff early on really starts to kick in and pay off. There's no magic bullet, and frankly people surround themselves with people of similar credentials. If you aspire to a group with numerous credentials, you're eventually going to need them. If you want to go do your own thing and don't care about the system, then you have your answer there. To put in my 2 cents worth- I always had a love for photography from my first 120 camera to my first 35mm in college. I never took the art track, but years and years later I have a job that affords me some time to play with cheaper gear. I still drool over digital backs, brand new 8x10 cameras, but I have the time and the resources to experiment at my own pace. I'll likely die with a brick of negatives the world won't care about, but I'm ok with that.
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Mar 25, 2010 04:01
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I have a question: film sensitivity seems to be sometimes described in degrees, for instance on Leica M body ISO dials ( image ), or in some film descriptions ( link ). What is this degrees measurement derived from?
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Mar 25, 2010 05:44
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I have a friend who shoots with a lot of manual cameras/old film stuff and if he doesn't any kind of light meter he says on a sunny day you set the camera to f/16 and shoot at 1/ISO speed. Does this sound right?
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Mar 25, 2010 06:05
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Fists Up posted:I have a friend who shoots with a lot of manual cameras/old film stuff and if he doesn't any kind of light meter he says on a sunny day you set the camera to f/16 and shoot at 1/ISO speed. Does this sound right? That's called Sunny 16 rule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunny_16_rule It's a good approximation if you don't have a lightmeter.
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Mar 25, 2010 06:21
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psylent posted:Photography cheat sheets if you want them. "Mastering Digital Color Photography" was a surprisingly great resource for me, even if it is from Lark. It really did a great job of explaining how color theory can be applied to composition, and specifically to post-processing digital files. I was really expecting the Rockwellian "push saturation to eye rape colorful" line, but it really surprised me. brad industry posted:Everyone has this attitude when start to become interested in art. The only way you will ever understand "high art" is to study art history. If you remove anything from the context it exists in it will become arbitrary bullshit, whether we are talking about Picasso, why the Civil War happened, or why the chair I'm sitting in looks the way it does. Nothing happens in a vacuum. I've got a strong interest in art history and even went so far as to take on a few more credits than I needed for my BA just to cram in more classes about it. It's more the whole gallery scene and the behavior that goes on in such places that really strikes me as over the top. I clearly recall seeing a canvas in the Hull House (I think, but the art museum near the Natural History Museum just across the river) in Chicago painted a flat drab green, and wondering why the hell this got into a museum. Even after learning to appreciate art for what it is and how specific periods/artists contributed to the art world, I still can't figure out that loving canvas that just got coated with an army green rattle can. Same with the string of Christmas lights strung around a shopping cart. Dada I can understand, but any meaning I try to pull out of either of these specific pieces would just be conjecture pulled fresh out of my rear end. TheFuglyStik fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Mar 25, 2010 |
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Mar 25, 2010 06:48
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TheFuglyStik posted:I've got a strong interest in art history and even went so far as to take on a few more credits than I needed for my BA just to cram in more classes about it. It's more the whole gallery scene and the behavior that goes on in such places that really strikes me as over the top. I clearly recall seeing a canvas in the Hull House (I think, but the art museum near the Natural History Museum just across the river) in Chicago painted a flat drab green, and wondering why the hell this got into a museum. Even after learning to appreciate art for what it is and how specific periods/artists contributed to the art world, I still can't figure out that loving canvas that just got coated with an army green rattle can. Same with the string of Christmas lights strung around a shopping cart. Dada I can understand, but any meaning I try to pull out of either of these specific pieces would just be conjecture pulled fresh out of my rear end. That's my biggest gripe with galleries though- they get to pick what goes up and then there are some who will just eat it up as "art" no matter what. Although the gallery's intention may be good such as making the viewer think, or something along those lines, people are dumb and will take it at face value that if it's hanging on the wall then it must be art.
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Mar 25, 2010 13:39
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brad industry posted:Unless you want to teach it's impossible to say either way, depends on your work and where you're at with it. I considered it, but the benefit vs. amount of debt I would have gone into wasn't worth it for what I'm doing. If I had gone in a more fine art/gallery direction rather than commercial I probably would have though. Could you expand on this a bit? I've been thinking some more formal education in photography would benefit me, but I already have two BA's (haven't studied much art outside of the photography-related reading I'm doing now though). I was looking at the BFA (photography) and MFA (visual arts) programs at a university and there were definitely some holes in my knowledge the BFA would be useful in filling, but I don't really feel like a third undergraduate degree is the way to go. OTOH, I'm concerned that my lack of a decent art background/gaps in photo knowledge would put me out of my depth in an MFA, or that I would have missed out on a good deal of practical knowledge from the BFA. I'm not super-interested in teaching (although it does have some appeal to me), I'm looking more to develop my professional skills and vocabulary, and become a more well-rounded photographer overall. These are programs overseas and tuition isn't very high; I'm also approaching the idea as a way of further developing my foreign language skills, which would be a good fallback for other work if photography didn't pan out.
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Mar 25, 2010 19:12
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I wanted to take one of my universities photography courses on lighting, but it has like three pre-requisites, and one of them requires you're in the fine arts college, and passed your portfolio review. Oh well, I was kind of hoping on taking a few classes while I finish up.
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Mar 25, 2010 19:50
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Shmoogy posted:I wanted to take one of my universities photography courses on lighting, but it has like three pre-requisites, and one of them requires you're in the fine arts college, and passed your portfolio review. You should be able to talk to the professor and explain the situation and have him write a letter saying that he will accept you being in the class without the prerequisites. I had to do a similar thing (but for a math class) so i wouldn't fall behind. I failed a course that was prerequisite for 3 others, i just talked to the professors of the 3 classes and they all wrote me letters saying I could do it
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Mar 25, 2010 20:48
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There are five companies pushing their presumably "unlimited space/bandwidth but not so unlimited CPU power" web services in SA Mart. I'm moving away from smugmug and hosting my own site, just need something basic that will also handle perl. Does anyone use these to host their personal websites? Any experience with downtime?
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Mar 25, 2010 23:16
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Interrupting Moss posted:There are five companies pushing their presumably "unlimited space/bandwidth but not so unlimited CPU power" web services in SA Mart. I'm moving away from smugmug and hosting my own site, just need something basic that will also handle perl. I've found a rather cheap but reliable VPS provider at prgmr.com. I've got a gallery3 site running on it without issue. They give you a pretty barebones VM but after the initial setup it's breezy.
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Mar 26, 2010 00:24
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Hop Pocket posted:I've found a rather cheap but reliable VPS provider at prgmr.com. I've got a gallery3 site running on it without issue. They give you a pretty barebones VM but after the initial setup it's breezy.
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Mar 26, 2010 01:16
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Interrupting Moss posted:There are five companies pushing their presumably "unlimited space/bandwidth but not so unlimited CPU power" web services in SA Mart. I'm moving away from smugmug and hosting my own site, just need something basic that will also handle perl. I would skip the ~goon hosting~ I was with one for a while, and it was nothing but problems. I have an unlimited account with Hostgator that I pay like $8/mo for, and I've never had any downtime in the year I've been with them. I do use it too, I run a pretty popular forum with it, and sees a good amount of load.
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Mar 26, 2010 15:50
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Interrupting Moss posted:There are five companies pushing their presumably "unlimited space/bandwidth but not so unlimited CPU power" web services in SA Mart. I'm moving away from smugmug and hosting my own site, just need something basic that will also handle perl. I assume that any budget hosting is a server in someones basement/dorm room run by a single guy. Now this is fine for my personal blog, I don't care if that goes down for a week because it doesn't have anything important on it and doesn't affect my image. If I were to do something professional then I would get a $20/mo VPS from Slicehost or RootBSD or prgmr, no question.
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Mar 26, 2010 16:12
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Im also with hostgator. There's a thread up in SAmart with a good signup coupon.
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Mar 26, 2010 16:15
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SmirkingJack posted:I assume that any budget hosting is a server in someones basement/dorm room run by a single guy. Now this is fine for my personal blog, I don't care if that goes down for a week because it doesn't have anything important on it and doesn't affect my image. If I were to do something professional then I would get a $20/mo VPS from Slicehost or RootBSD or prgmr, no question. Exactly, if you're hosting lolcats images, then goon hosting is fine. If you have any sort of uptime requirement though, go with a real host. As far as I could tell the goon hosting I was with was run by two people who had a couple servers in a datacenter, and that was it.
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Mar 26, 2010 16:22
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Host Gator doesn't sound like a company I want to do business with. prgmr does, but I don't have that level of Unix experience. I have the site ready to go, I just need to upload it and set name servers, etc. e: it sounds like I would have to set up apache and the like if I used prgmr. It's been nearly ten years since I touched any of that, and if I were to need a large amount of control it would be to implement credit card payments and the like, but that's far in the future and I would pay someone to do that. JAY ZERO SUM GAME fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Mar 26, 2010 |
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Mar 26, 2010 17:56
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Does anyone have a recommendation for a good Mac-based Lightroom/Flickr export/workflow manager? I'd like to be able to dump small groups of shots to my Flickr Pro account from Lightroom.
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Mar 26, 2010 18:22
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Interrupting Moss posted:Host Gator doesn't sound like a company I want to do business with. prgmr does, but I don't have that level of Unix experience. I have the site ready to go, I just need to upload it and set name servers, etc. Maybe Media Temple is more up your alley. I've heard nothing but good things. http://mediatemple.net
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Mar 26, 2010 18:56
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hybr1d posted:Does anyone have a recommendation for a good Mac-based Lightroom/Flickr export/workflow manager? I'd like to be able to dump small groups of shots to my Flickr Pro account from Lightroom. Not that it matters right this second but Lightroom 3 integrates that feature.
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Mar 26, 2010 19:04
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benisntfunny posted:Not that it matters right this second but Lightroom 3 integrates that feature. That works for me- I'm guessing with Aperture 3 recently released and LR3's beta getting refreshed we're closer to a general release. Aside from usual beta stuff, how stable is it? I'd be willing to jump in on a beta unless I'm putting my catalog at risk or something crazy like that.
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Mar 26, 2010 20:17
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Let me just say, designing even the simplest website with no prior knowledge of html/css/flash or any coding is destroying my brain. 4 days and this is what I have, 4 loving days. https://www.christopherineson.com When it finally does get finished i WILL be proud.
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Mar 26, 2010 20:29
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fronkpies posted:Let me just say, designing even the simplest website with no prior knowledge of html/css/flash or any coding is destroying my brain. I don't mean to belittle what you've done so far but have you considered other ways of forms of portfolio hosting such as Wordpress, Smugmug and so on? I've got just enough coding knowledge to tweak Wordpress for my site and I completely sympathise about it destroying our brains. I once spent an entire day trying to figure out why putting a hyperlink in a photo's description breaks the template formatting (though it's fine if the hyperlink is the first word  )There's bound to be an easier for you to build your site and keep the style that you appear to be aiming for.
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Mar 26, 2010 21:37
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