Glyphs of Time :: a blog by jarvis grant

July 25, 2011

2011 Black and White Spider Awards

Filed under: Folio,Museum,Observations,Photography — Tags: , , , — Jarvo @ 10:47 pm

From time to time I Google my name to see what the attempts I’m making with SEO are panning out. Last Friday I decided to check the “Images’ tab just to see what images were coming up. Well, to my surprise I discovered I was nominated for The Black & White Spider Awards. One image was in the Photojournalism Category and the other was for Nature. To be honest, I had forgotten I’d even entered this competition. I do remember that back in May that there was an online Awards Ceremony, but since I hadn’t received any kind of notification, I just looked at it  as an “Oh well, maybe next year” moment. Yet,  I thought I did submit some pretty strong work

Although I didn’t place, it was a great ego booster. While I had two photographs chosen for the exhibit, Sacred Reflections at the Driskell Center on the campus of the University of Maryland, it’s always good to get recognition from your peers about your work. So here are the images I was nominated for, The Amusement Prisoner and A Bed of Leaves.

The Amusement Prisoner

"The Amusement Prisoner", nominated in the Professional Photojournalist Category. ©Jarvis Grant

 The Amusement Prisoner was shot on black & white medium format film. I’ve always loved the moody aspect of this image. The scanned negative was brought into Photoshop to do a little tonal mapping for  making new prints on an Epson 4000 printer.

Bed of Leaves

"A Bed of Leaves", nominated in the Professional Nature Category. ©Jarvis Grant

A Bed of Leaves is part of an ongoing series of botanical subject made in the city. It doesn’t make any difference what city as I always have a camera with me. This was a digital RGB file converted to monochrome. Even when I use Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro, I still go through some type of “Layer Voodoo” to control the depth of tones and space in the image.

I working with some new images now. Well, I should say I’m editing existing work into series now. Getting ready for the fall and winter season’s photo competitions. I’m working hard not to wait until a day or even a week before deadlines to do this work. It’s part of my New Year’s resolution of making  me my most important client. These nominations really help to keep me on point in that regard. Case in point, when I was uploading images for this competition, in true fashion, I waited until the very last minute to upload my stuff, and was locked out of the competitions system after the first two uploads! So I think there’s an important lesson there!

All photographs, ©Jarvis Grant

 
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July 16, 2011

Scared Reflections: An Exhibition

Filed under: Art History,Gallery,Museum,Observations,Photography — Tags: , , , , , — Jarvo @ 11:00 pm
Sacred Reflections Announcement
Sacred Reflections at the Driskell Center, University of Maryland

A couple of months ago, I heard a call to artist for the exhibit Sacred Reflection. The theme of this exhibit in the words of its curator Tonya Jordan, “… is inspired by religious and spiritual traditions of the African American community in Prince George’s County (Maryland) and the African Diaspora.” This exhibition features many of the ‘iconic imagery, spiritual verse and biblical references of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Africa’s derived religious practices, and themes metaphysical and esoteric. My works are in that last group, the “metaphysical and esoteric”. While I do believe that the Black Church is an significant element of the African American community, I also believe that the spirituality of an individual transcends the religious dictates of organized religion.

When I saw this call for entry, I thought of several images that I thought would work. Two were already framed and ready to go. These days I’ve got to think of the economics of exhibition photographs. Then there were a couple of images that have been swimming in my head for a while. This call was just the thing to help me flush out them out. Now I usually don’t think in terms of producing work just for a particular exhibit, but since this exhibit was going to be in the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, I felt it was a great opportunity and venue. Now, I’m not going to get into the technical aspects of these photographs. I’m simply going to present them. In the near future I’ll get into pre and post production of how I created them.

What I found of great interest is that over the course of several years I found myself using the same model, Ava Sheffield. Ava is a great model because she gets into the atmosphere of what I want the subject in the photograph to convey. This makes the image more believable, like an actress on stage. The earlier works were 100 Words and An Ocean’s Song. 100 Words was shot for the cover of the book 100 Words of Wisdom, by Niambi Jarvis. The photograph for An Ocean’s Song was from the same shooting session.  The latest work, Sojourner: The Awakened Dream and The Sojourner’s Quest, comes from the idea of the power of dreams. Or more the power that is found within the dreamer.  Normally I need to live with the work before I start thing of titles for it. At first I was thinking about the subject of the images as a sojourner or temporary resident. While this is very true, after the work was up in the exhibit I began thinking more of the locations she was occupying. So, after this exhibition this series of images will go by the theme title of Dream Chambers instead of The Sojourner. Of these four images I submitted, Tonya selected 100 Words and the Sojourner’s Quest. They always choose 100 Words!  My personal favorite from the submissions was, The Awakened Dream. This reminds me of something my friend and mentor Ed Love once told me. “When you give people the opportunity of choice, they’ll always choose the one you don’t want them to!” Oh well.

Sacred Reflections will be on view at the Driskell Center until August 5, 2011. If you are in the Washington, DC metro area, please stop by and experience this wonderful exhibit.

Slideshow:
Fullscreen:

 
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July 10, 2011

A Gigapixel Portrait

Filed under: Art History,Digital Tech,Media,Museum,Photography,Video — Tags: , , , , — Jarvo @ 8:53 pm

When I first started this project it was to create a 360 degree panorama of an art installation at the Hillyer Art Space in Washington, DC. The work, Ass Against the Wall is the work of artist Martha Jackson Jarvis. The piece was inspired by her trip earlier that year to Tajikistan, a mountainous landlocked country in Central Asia, as an Art & Cultural Ambassador.  This was also the first time I use my Gigapan EPIC for an assignment. The original idea was to create a 360 degree pano for a QuickTime VR movie. However the final image/movie was huge! Even when I reduced the pixel count by 50% it was still pretty big, but it wouldn’t choke a user’s system. This is what I came up with. Click & drag inside the frame to view the movie panorama.

 

The thing about 360 panos is that they’re 360 degrees! So as the Gigapan did it’s thing we were in the final images. I wasn’t sure if it had finished, so when I leaned forward to check its progress, my movement was recorded. One thing that I did discover was that Martha was watching the camera’s movement with great interest. So much so that the camera captured her as if posing for a portrait. It looked pretty good, so I now thought of the image as an environmental portrait. We decided to make a poster for her artist talk at the gallery.

Ass Against the Wall Exhibit Poster

Well neither the QTVR movie or the poster really show the detail of this gigapixel portrait. Even the poster had to be scaled down so it could be printed on a 36 inch by 17 in sheet of paper. After I had submitted the landscapes mentioned in my previous post, Revisiting the Gigapan, I decided to upload the original 360 panorama (cropping me out!) to show it in its full glory, so to speak. Interesting thing about this “final” image is that when I was processing it, I still cut it back by 50%, so it’s still not the true full gigapixel image. Use a navigation tool to pan & zoom through the image below. You can also use your mouse wheel as well as click & drag to pan through the pano.

 
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July 9, 2011

Revisiting the Gigapan

Filed under: Digital Tech,Gallery,Observations,Photography,Photoshop — Tags: , , , , , — Jarvo @ 9:26 pm

A few weeks ago I pulled out my Gigapan EPIC. This is a device developed by Gigapan Systems which allows the creation of large scale gigapixel panoramas. That’s right Gigapixel panoramic images. It does so by stitching together single multi shot megapixel images. I explained this in more detail in my blog post, The Gigapan Pano Portrait. The reason for this renewed interest in my Gigapan EPIC was a project, Nearby Nature Gigablitz, sponsored in part by the Fine Outreach for Science program and  their partners at Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab. The project asked people who were members of Gigapan.org to make panos of nature that was near where they lived and worked. Since I live in walking distance to the Rock Creek National Park, went down there and setup near the edge of Rock Creek and its Bike Path.

As I shot the “still life” of the landscape I hadn’t any real problem, other than remembering the regiment of using the equipment with my Panasonic LX3. This is my “carry-with-me” camera. The LX3 is a ten megapixel point & shoot with a very nice 24mm wide 2.5x optical zoom LEICA DC F2.0 lens.  So like I said no problems, no worries. But, when I decided to have the Bike/Runner’s Path in the scene, that when I started to have some issues. Since I was by myself, I did the best I could in scouting up and down the path trying to look out for bikers & runners. I was trying to avoid traffic because the Gigapan shoots a series of aligned images that are stitched together. As much as I tried, I always got someone in the scene! Then while swatting away all manner of little flying bugs and sweat, I decided just to shoot very small panos of the Path itself, and figure it all out later.

When I got back and processed the images, converting the RAW files to TIFFs. I first worked in the more classic landscape images. Gigapaners have a tendency to create these great big panoramic images with lots of detail. Creating a very interesting image because you can zoom in and see minute details found with in the scene. That’s what happens when you have a five gigapixel image. My approach was to produce an interesting photograph first.  Light, color, composition, and what Jay Maisel calls “Gesture” are more important than the curious details I’m not even aware at the time of capture. Here are two examples from that shoot. Use the navigation controls to pan and zoom inside of the images. You can also use your mouse wheel to zoom, click & drag to pan.

Okay, now that Bike Path shot. Well I did it! I was able to create a panorama that had a clean clear path in it. To my surprise, I didn’t really like it. I mean it was a good image, but I started to think, maybe having a human element would actually be good. Since I had several “sub-sets”  of the panorama, I began to look at them. To my surprise, there were a couple of good shots in there. I had used a fairly fast shutter speed of 1/400 so the runners & bikers were all frozen in stop action. I had a couple of shots with a guy in a red shirt. With all of the lush green in the images that little spot of red was a great color contrast. Once I had the full “empty path” pano completed, I placed the single frame with the runner in the scene. His tonality was a bit off, so I adjusted his frame to match, but the runner himself, was too dark. So I made another tonal adjustment. He looked great but his frame was now off. To address with issue, I made a  Layer Mask and erased everything in the scene but him. In the words of chef Emeril Lagasse, BAM! It was done. Here’s that panorama.

One of the things I learned from this episode with my Gigapan EPIC is that you can’t let the equipment dictate your creative vision. Now don’t get me wrong, equipment dictates a lot of stuff during a shot. But it’s not the master. I guess all of those little bugs swarming around me (along with the high humidity & temp) helped to break the equipments pull on me. So that during all that the landscape itself had an opportunity to talk with me. Alter all that’s what the whole thing was really about anyway. Capturing a sense of place.

 
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