Glyphs of Time :: a blog by jarvis grant

August 5, 2013

New Works and Exhibit

Green Leaf Purple Petal

Green Leaf & Purple Petals, ©Jarvis Grant

Well it certainly has been awhile since my last post. Not to make too many excuses, but I have been pretty busy and I’ll update you about those activities in future posts.

What I’d like to inform you all about now is simply some blatant PR on my part. A colleague and friend, Lew Berry, invited me to participate in an exhibition he was curating at the Friendship Heights Village Center Art Gallery. This is a group show of painters, printmakers, and photographers. I’ve been doing a lot of photography with my phone over the past year, and this was a perfect opportunity to assemble some of this work. It also offered me the chance to make prints from these files. While the camera is 5 megapixels, its sensor is rather small. So it was a challenge making files that look as vibrate as the they appear on the computer’s monitor

This exhibit also afforded me the opportunity to work with a couple of two technologies, MailChimp and a new feature with my portfolio service, Foliolink.  I’ve been working with MailChimp for a couple of years now, and it’s a great email service. I use it to help my clients get the word out about their activities and events. Most of the time they’ll use a “dirty email List”. A dirty list is one with  old email addresses or emails not associated with a person’s name. I had exported my LinkedIn contact into MailChimp, which a very slick feature. All of my email addresses were clean, but I needed to segment these names into categories. The paid membership allows you to do this, but I have the basic free membership, so I had to do this manually. A bit of a drag, but it’s done.

With Foliolink they introduced a new feature, Promo Pages. A Promo Page is like a mini web site you use to promote current projects. I thought this would be a perfect time to announce my exhibit with my social networks. In fact, I’ve embedded  it in this post.  To see it in a scale-able browser window, click here.

So check out my new work. I’m still adding images as I write this. Idf you are in the DMV (District, Maryland, Virginia) area, please stop by the exhibit. Here’s how to get there.

 
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February 7, 2013

The 2013 Mobile Photography Awards and Me

Sunflower #7

Sunflower from the atrium courtyard, National Museum of American Art, ©Jarvis Grant, 2012

In the summer of 2012 I found a new venue of expression, phone camera. As stated in my last blog post, I had always been a camera snob. One reason was I saw so much poor camera phones photography. I have owned phones that had cameras, but never used them beyond visual note taking. When I upgraded to my EVO 4G LTE, with its 8 megapixel camera, the need to investigate its possibilities was very strong.

When I first began using the device, I always had my Panasonic LX-3 with me, and I would “shoot behind” anything I did with the EVO with the LX-3. The Panasonic images were always better in my mind. When reviewing the photos, the reason I felt the LX-3 pictures were better was because I put more into them. So, to really see that the phone’s camera could do, I must not take the LX-3 with me anymore, which forced me to only use the EVO. That was scary at first but necessary if I wanted to learn how to use the new device.

This was good, but I found myself fiddling with the device a lot. My daughter told me about Instagram, and I installed the app. In fact Instagram was the first app I actually installed on the phone, which in itself opened up a whole new word in mobile computing. But that’s another story. Okay, so what Instagram provided was fiddle free photography. While shooting with a square frame took some getting used to again, it was a lot faster than shooting with a twin lens reflex. Then there was the idea of processing the image with Instagram’s filters. They were limited for sure, and I found myself still reviewing the pictures and processing them once I got home. Then one day as I was riding the bus, I was thinking about a couple of images I’d just taken. I took out the phone and began experimenting with the images. It was then I realized I could capture an image, process it and publish it, all while I was out and about. Wow, “mobile photography”! Okay I get it.

Yet, mobile photography was also offering something more. Something I had not felt since my days as an art student and new photographer. Freedom! I regained the freedom to shoot whatever I wanted too and felt like shooting.  As a seasoned photographer I do lot of analytics while making photographs. I was finding that with the phone and all its limitations, I was much lighter, with fewer calculations, rules, and perceived obligations running through my head. When I looked up two months after installing Instagram I had hundreds of new images, with a couple of hundred posted on Instagram. For me, that was very different.

With my newly found mobile photography enthusiasm, I began writing about it in my Examiner.com column, which is the reason for the long gap between blog posts. Plus I entered a few images in the Mobile Photography Awards competition I saw on the Digital Photography Review website. Well last week I discovered in a Tweet from Jack Hollingsworth (@photojack) that the winners of the Mobile Photography Awards had been posted on their website. So I went right over to see if I placed. Well the images I thought were strong in their respective categories were not there. Bummer! When I got to Plants/Flowers category,and saw the stunning first prize wining entry  by Patrick Shourds, I thought, “Oh man, these look great, oh well”! But in the Honorable Mentions group was my entry, Purple Tears, and I was shocked and surprised. Plus I felt pretty damn good.

Here are the other images I entered into competition plus the link to the Mobile Photography Award winners page.

Slideshow:
Fullscreen:

 

 
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