Glyphs of Time :: a blog by jarvis grant

July 29, 2016

Farewell Exaniner.com

Filed under: Education,Media,Observations,Photography — Tags: , , — Jarvo @ 1:05 pm

 

Examiner-Icon1Examiner.com gave me the freedom to write about almost anything. I enjoyed writing, about  Photoshop, giving commentary about the photographic arts and its related technologies. I also enjoyed being a member of the photography industry news press corp.  As an educator, it was a wonderful platform. I soon found out finding a similar platform wouldn’t be easy. Many of these online news outlets focused on photo gear like new cameras, lens, and other photo toys. All that’s well and good, but my interests are in technology that’s not based on instrumentation alone but on process. I’m still researching the options and how to adapt to them.

So until I can find such a platform, I’ll have to do it the old fashion way, build it myself. Over these past two weeks I’ve thought about the options I have. My Examiner.com articles are a useful educational resource. So first I need to create an archive for them. I have Word docs of all of them along with images and video links. I also downloaded all of them as PDFs because many of them have the final editorial edits. Right now I’m thinking of republishing them in a separate WordPress site. I’ll see how that goes. I forgot about my subscriber list so I’ll have to build that again too.

I will keep you informed and will solicit your comments and feedback. Many thanks for your continuing support.

Jarvis Grant - Washington DC Photoshop Examiner - Tech Gear. | E

Well, so long Examiner.com! Can’t wait to see what will happen next.

 

 
Share

June 26, 2016

A Little Good News!

Last week a received an email from curator Zoma Wallace of the DC Commission of the Arts and Humanities Art Bank that one of my photographs had been selected to be part of the Commission’s new Washingtonia Collection. It’s always great to sell a piece of artwork. This is especially true now. I’ve had my share of challenges over the past couple of years. So, having the work be chosen as part of a major art collection is a great boost to the ego at just the right time.

The piece the city will purchase is actually part of my Citizens We project. The photograph, Cinderella of Lanier Heights, is a photograph captured at dusk in my Adams Morgan neighborhood in Northwest Washington, DC. I was photographing the firehouse when a woman in a long and fluffy dress walk into the frame. I’m always drawn to scenes right before the landscape drops into the darkness of night.

So many thanks again to the DC Commission of the arts and Humanities and its panelist for selecting my image.

This image is used in the Citizens We book sponsored by the Humanities Council of Washington, DC

This image, Cinderella of Lanier Heights, is part of my Citizens We book and exhibition project sponsored by the Humanities Council of Washington, DC, and now part of the DC Commission of the Arts Washingtonia Collection.

 
Share

June 19, 2016

New Website Update – New Start

Filed under: Design,Folio — Tags: , , , , , — Jarvo @ 1:00 am

Well it’s been a year or so since my last post. During that time I’ve been focusing on my Examiner.com articles and taking care of my family. The family thing has been huge and challenging.  The Examiner.com thing has been quite rewarding in terms of educational visibility. Yet, the thing that has really been interesting is the update and renewal of my website. I am ashamed to say it, but I haven’t updated my website in six years! That’s really bad. However, as I embark on new artistic adventures I needed my website to reflect all that I am currently doing. While the site was strong enough to show my talent,, Those images and accompanying text had very little to do with what I had been working on during that six year period.

I’m still in the process on updating the site. Working for the site to reflect my move from Jarvis Grant Photographer to Jarvis Grant Creative Strategist. Seems odd, yet makes perfect sense to me. I’ve always mashed up skill set to solve problems. Everything is a design problem. Yes, yes it is!

Jarvis Grant Imaging.

jgwebpage1

 
Share

March 5, 2014

New Year, New Exhibition

Jarvis Grant at Museum Studies Workshop

Printing photographs in the Museum Studies workshop space at the Ellington School of the Arts Photo Credit: Marta Reid Stewart

Well, the new year of 2014 started out with a lot happening. One of the major projects I had was to build on the work in my Dream Chamber series. Last year finished with a bang as I completed the first phase of my portrait project, Citizens We. That project began fairly smoothly, and then it seemed to come to a standstill. Then at the end of the summer, funding came through. Now I’m thinking the process will get going but instead a couple of major obstacles began to pop up. Yet, in the end the project took on a new direction and ended very well, with a new outlook and possibilities. Man, what a ride that was.

During my last photo session for Citizens We I photographed a neighbor of mine , Daisy Hannah. I used her portrait on the back cover of the book. She had questioned about why I made a black & white image. I gave her a response, but I felt she would like a color version of her image. So I revisited her photographs. Just for fun I decided to work on another shot from our session. I really didn’t do anything with the new image. Pretty straight forward stuff, but then she wanted a set of all the images from the photo shot.  So instead of giving her a set of small JPEG image files, I compiled a PDF slideshow. I thought that would be more useful to her.

When I was done, I thought I’d design a nice artsy cover for the slideshow. Nik Software had just updated the Nik Collection with a new filter, Analog Efex Pro. So, I thought I would do a quick “One Click WOW” while playing with that new filter. It was fun, but I wondered “What would that color image of Daisy look like with a little more work?” During the process I came up with some interesting stuff. But in the end, I thought the image needed more “mystery”. That’s my way of telling myself to start over. In doing so I concentrated on the essentials, Light & Color. Things were going well, but I still needed that mysterious element. I thought of the Dream Chamber images. Do I put a Moon or clouds in the room with Daisy? That didn’t seem right. I wanted an incongruous, yet simple, Earth element. And then, it came to me, Water.

That image was just what I needed to push that series pass the sky elements I had been using. I began to see what the other images of the series could look like. I had an exhibit coming up and I showed the curator Eric Walton, those images in my Bēhance portfolio, and he choose four, for the exhibit, Life Through a Lens, at the Walton Gallery in Petersburg, VA. I really find it amazing that Citizens We portrait project has fed the Dream Chamber series. It should be a fascinating year of image making.

Slideshow:
Fullscreen:

 

 
Share

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.

 
Share

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:

 

 
Share

May 1, 2012

Composites: Selections, mask and more!

Filed under: Design,Education,Observations,Photoshop — Tags: , , , , — Jarvo @ 4:18 pm
Full Screen Shot

Selections are Alpha Channels that are used in creating Mask. Here is the main figure used in my composite, "Isis". ©Jarvis Grant 2012

Knowing how to make a selection in Photoshop is an artist’s secret weapon. It’s the most important tool/technique that one should master as early as possible. With that said, there is no single “best” ways to create a selection. Everyone has a couple of go to favorites. New students usually start with what Scott Kelby coins as the “Tragic Wand”. Once you understand that there’s more tragic than magic  in that wand, you start to look for options. For many it’s using the Path Tool, which I personally hate! For others it can be the Color Range command. The folks at Adobe know that power and the pain of creating selections and have been developing the Refine Edge command into its on Panel in Photoshop since version CS4. Back in the day, those “marching ants” were at the heart of composting images for designers and illustrators. Yet today there can be more to making a composite than selections.

I’m thinking and writing about this topic because last week I put together  an article on Examiner.com on Saving Selections in JPEG Files. When ever I do an article I first collect the images I’ll use for the article. Then I’ll go through what ever process I’ll be writing about to get the steps clear in my head. First, I wanted to choose an image that I could make a very simple selection with. I had a partial silhouette shot in the studio that would work fine. Went through th steps and made a few screen shots. I was done. The only thing needed now was a new background for the figure to illustrate the new image composite. No big deal, two layers and that will be that. I had a few NASA wallpapers from the Hubble Telescope web site I felt would make a quick and dirty yet fairly interesting image. In fact it turned out to be interesting enough that I seemed to be on a roll! So much so that I began to think about this blog post.

The Layer Panel for Isis

What started just to be two layers turned out to be a few more. ©Jarvis Grant 2012

What started as a simple story with two layers began to grow. Once the main story was invented, I needed to enhance the “mood” of the piece. To achieve this I began to use Blending Modes. The interesting thing was that I was still just using the the main images of the figure and her new background. Using Layer Masks, dupes of the background were now being place on top of the figure, with elements being hidden or accentuated. Portions of the figure were selected and moved to their own layer and painted with Layer Styles. I also had a little help from Flaming Pear and Dover Publications. Well my point here is to not really go into detail of how the new image was made, but to speak to the fact that when “building” a composite it takes more than just ‘marching ants”.

While the final image is a fantasy, as a photographer, I still need elements of reality to bring it altogether. What is the direct and ambient light doing? Along with a healthy dose of trial and error. For example the NASA image though stunning, had a few visual holes into once the two images were placed together. I didn’t want to select stars from the background, because it only had a few, and I waned a little more variety. I found a few “space and star” brushes on the Internet. Through some that “trial & error”, I placed my new “stars” on their on layers and used Gradient Overlay Layer Styles, set to radial mode to give my stars that refraction of color that telescope give to photographs.

This was a simple artistic exercise that also used another secret artistic ingredient, Fun! In having a little fun I learned a few tricks and techniques that will turn up later in future work. Or maybe not! What started out as one thing with one purpose grew into something else. It also shows that even through working with a computer can seem overly technical, in the end, Photoshop is just another tool for artist to use and flow with.

A Dream of Isis

The final composite (so far!), of "A Dream of Isis" ©Jarvis Grant 2012

 
Share

March 2, 2012

Red Tail Commander: Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Jr.

Lucasfilm's Red Tail Movie Poster

Lucasfilm's Red Tail Movie Poster. ©2011 Lucasfilm

There has been quite a bit of hoopla about the George Lucas movie, Red Tails. Much of the “controversy” is the idea of a white guy telling a black man’s story. The odd thing is that it has taken sixty nine years for somebody to tell the story of the Tuskegee Airmen in a major way. There is so much to recount about these guys, that it will take more than one telling to get it all out in a meaningful way. Actually, there are so many untold stories and myths about World War II and the participation of African Americans that have yet to told. But ya know, there’s something about the heroic romanticism of fighter pilots that is just hard to beat!

When I was a kid in high school, I was really into WWII aviation. I knew all the planes of the major players and of both theaters. The idea of  “living in fame or going down in flame” was  still exciting to a young man who knew nothing about the meaning of Life. But, hey I loved it. I also didn’t realize that I “never” saw one black face  in all the pictures  in the books I read  nor the movies I saw. With movies in particular, I never saw a heroic black man portrayed. Well that’s not totally true. I did see one in the Humphrey Bogart movie Sahara, Sergeant Major Tambul  played by Rex Ingram. Check it out.

When I graduated from Howard University in 1974, and was set on the path of “On Going Life Learning”, I ran into my first instance of the Tuskegee Airmen. My first thoughts were, “Man, why didn’t I know about these guys?!” Then I remembered, , “Oh yeah, that’s right, they were Black!” Out of sight and out of mind. Well I won’t dwell on that aspect of Americana, but I did find out about Benjamin O. Davis, Jr and his dad, Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., the first African American general in the US Army. The junior General Davis was the commander of the first all-black air unit, the 99th Pursuit Squadron. His service was stellar as a military commander, civil right activist, and statesman. The latter two aspects more covertly. Check out the link to learn more.

Okay, now it’s 1992 and Howard University is honoring the Tuskegee Airman with a special art exhibit and reception, honoring General Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. So I’m thinking, one of my newly found heroes is coming to the building were I work! Really!? I got to get a real photograph. Not a snapshot, I mean a real portrait. Ya know, one of the things I learned as a Professor of Art at Howard University, is that if you want to really get something done, don’t ask permission to do it! Just do it. Okay, so on the day of the reception I setup an impromptu studio in the Art Gallery’s storage space, and waited for Gen. Davis. Man, I was really nervous. Now, I’ve photographed many famous people, but this was a personal hero, and an unauthorized event. I was pretty scared! The moment came when the General walk into the Gallery, low key and laid back. I approached him and asked for the opportunity of a quick shot and he agreed.  As I snapped away with my Hasselblad, I ran on hoping to impress with my knowledge of WWII aviation and the Airmen. He seemed to be amused by this “kid”. What a moment!

General Davis was a warm and  very charming guy. I can’t remember what I must have said when he fell into his warrior moment. I got it and present it now. Right after this exposure, he went back to his smiling charming self. Yet in that moment, I could hear the roar of those American North American P-51’s and  German Messerschmitt Bf 109’s and at the war’s end the Messerschmitt Me 262, the first combat jet aircraft.  Just think about it, those Black pilots flying and kicking ass in their prop (propeller) P-51’s against jets. Man oh man, those cats could really fly!

Well, here’s the shot of Gen. Benjamin Otis Davis Jr.. Thanks General for opening yet another door of opportunity, and being a hero on so many fronts. A real Ace!

Portrait of General Benjamin O. Davis retired

Portrait of the Commander of the "Red Tails", Benjamin O. Davis , Jr. ©Jarvis Grant

 
Share