Finding Myself as a Subject

I found your site by searching on words I thought would give me valid art photography connections and it seems I found the right site, since that is your goal too. I have taken photos all my life but have no training. I am now interested in getting help to become a serious photographer. I have never been a part of a forum and am not exactly sure how it all works, so please bear with me.

I recently took some unclothed pictures with a Sony videocamera, which I then used to snap still photos, cropping and adding in filters to obscure the subject in different ways. One picture I started to obscure details on but thought better of it because I thought it looked better simply as is. That is the one I would like to submit for your evaluation and comment. It is totally amateur work, my first try at this, so I would like an honest critique and suggestions of where to go from here. I need a good quality camera too but it is so complicated trying to narrow down the choice.

If you can help me with any of this, I would appreciate it. How do I submit the picture? Is this challenge still open? Once the picture is out there, can anyone on the web access it or is it protected somehow? Thanks for any info you can give me.

Ms O'Reilly, Ms Goertz Mr. Coplans, et alia

Dear Ms. O'Reilly,

I am very much interested in what you say about your recent photographs, stills from a video camera.

I should very much like to see a huge lot of them, of any or all subjects.

The very good, very strong New York painter Deborah Goertz works this way: from her video camera "Journal" -- photographed every day w/ a camcorder -- she, like you, chooses individual moments to "still", if that's the word. At this point these still images become to her paintings what the drawing is to traditional painters' paintings: the sketch. From these sketches she makes some of the most honest, skillful, intelligent, passionate and moving small paintings exhibited in New York over the past few years.

The great and recently deceased John Coplans' figure studies of his own unclothed body started as video images too. In his studio,Coplans would strike a pose against a white backdrop paper while his assistant photographed him -- or televised him? -- with a video camera mounted on the lens board of Coplans' 4x5 view camera and connected to Coplans' computer. Coplans, watching the camcorder's image on the computer monitor, would instruct the assistant as to how close to his body the camera should be, where in relation to his body the picture's edges should fall, etc. When the monitor's image was as Coplans wished it the assistant froze the image on the monitor and, looking back and forth between the monitor and the ground glass, adjusted the camera so that the ground glass's image matched that of the camcorder. Then the assistant made the exposure.

Coplans' pictures are, of course, now univerrsally recognized throughout the art world as immortal work.

So you, Ms. O'Reilly, are keeping good company. Your instinct, intuition, impulses, creative imagination seem to be working along very advanced and proven-to-be-very-fruitful lines. As one chronically fascinated by the new and the intuitive in still photography, painting and drawing, I should be very thankful to you if you would send me a CD of all your camcorder-to-still-image pictures. You can find my address etc at my website

www.benlifson.com

Best of luck to you.

yrs

Ben Lifson

Hi Ellen,

Welcome to OPF! We're glad you arrived. Our interest is in the creation of impressive images that ask to be revisited and that have a certain uniqueness that gives them value.

We really don't mind what camera is used, although that might limit the size to which the image might be printed where detail is paramount as opposed to shape, light and texture, tone and hue.

Once something is on this website, anyone can copy it but then they would be stealing and if they made money out of it, like the case with a MFR who purloined someones image from the WWW, they end up having to apy the photographer far more than simple licensing would entail.

You need to have another site where your image is hosted. That's your own gallery say on pBase or Smugmug for example, then you link the image in question to your post here.

So you need to get the web address of the image. That will appear in the top of a new browser window if you simply drag the image from your website to a new browser window in Safari, Internet Explorer or other Web Browser you are using.

Then you just insert that url address between in your post and voila, it will appear here!

Asher

Amateur

Asher, I fear I may be premature becoming involved in this! I do not have a website but have been trying to learn how to create one. There is too much I am not understanding at this point that is just natural to those who have been computer savvy for years. I'll continue to learn from this site, but will not attempt any submissions until I have educated myself a bit more.

Thanks so much for your help and comments.

I wish I had read your reply before I replied to Asher! I am amazed at your compliments and comments. Even encouraged, maybe? I started doing this when I could not get my regular film camera to snap the exact shot I wanted. So what I do is videotape everything, then I watch it and when the right moment comes up, I will pause it. If I have captured the EXACT moment I was looking for, I then snap the picture and it is saved to a memory card. I thought this would be a good way to take photos of myself too, so that is what I did and was amazed at how well they turned out. The videocamera pictures are a bit grainy in low light, but I did not want clarity, but softness. I was also going for not the whole picture, but cropped parts that were thought provoking. I loaded the stills into my photo program to apply filters, crop, etc. I have them saved to a CD now, but am not sure about sending them to a stranger! I also have numerous photos of other things taken that way. I could send you a sampling of those, but I need some kind of security. What can you offer?

Asher, I could not access your last message in the forum. I followed the e-mail link, logged in and it just kept saying I was not logged in. I will follow your suggestions though. Thank you.

Ellen O'Reilly said:

Asher, I could not access your last message in the forum. I followed the e-mail link, logged in and it just kept saying I was not logged in. I will follow your suggestions though. Thank you.

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If you can post the message above, then you are logged in! The email address I gave is for your mail program!

We'll sort it out~!

Asher

Ms O'Reilly and Security

Dear Ms. O'Reilly,

If by "security". you are asking "What guarantee can Ben Lifson give you that he won't steal your pictures and pass them off as his own? Or sell them for his own profit?" my answer is

My word of honor and my reputation.

Please look at my website.

If your work is good, what I'm offering is, in fact, and for what it's worth, the endorsement of a person who has achieved what I have achieved in the world of photography and art.


But I'll give you another kind of guarantee, right here in front of everyone on Open Photography Forums.

It is as follows.

If I find your work has merit but needs development, I will not suggest that I become your mentor, nor will I become your mentor if you ask me yourself. If I act otherwise I expose myself to the charge of having set you up in order to inveigle you study under me, for my profit. I can't even recommend a mentor to you lest I expose myself to the charge of having set you up in order to pass you on to a friend, for his or her profit.

Also, but only with your permission, if my judgment of your work is mixed I will publish my praise of it here, on this website but send the negative judgments only to you, privately, lest receiving negative criticism in public embarrass and/or discourage you at so early a stage in your photography and in your participation on this site.

Judging from what you've written so far, I have a hunch that I will have many positive things to say about your work. You write, i.e. you talk like the real thing, an artist.

yrs

Ben Lifson

Mr. Lifson, I did visit your website, which is what I should have done before responding, and was very impressed. I asked the security question because I am new to this and was not familiar with you. Thanks for taking the time to explain it to me. It's funny that you should use the word "mentor" since that was what I had in mind when I began researching photography information a few days ago. But I understand what you are saying and am not asking for it from you. I've reviewed the information on your site and it is very interesting. Let me get back to you in a few days as I have a heavy schedule right now. Thanks again for being so helpful! Ellen O'Reilly

Asher - Thank you for your help and advisement also. I think this site will be just what I was looking for. I will accept all the help I can get! It's a complicated and wide range career that I seek!

And then Ellen vanished…
like in a slow motion movie…

Ellen, are you still there, picking around?

Human Form Photography

I finally return. I'm so computer ignorant about forums and how to use them technically that it has taken a long time to return. Since my last post I have taken a basic photography course which took up all of my time. Then, I have continued to work on my own on my video shots of the human form. I got a new camera which has taken me forever to learn and once I got it down, I had problems with the memory sticks. However, I am still in love with this subject and photography. So I am going to a consultation tomorrow at the Art Institue of Houston to see if I can enroll there and go for my degree in this field. I need serious technical help, but artisitically, I feel very confident with my instincts, my artful eye and with the work I am doing on my own. It just needs to be fine tuned and it's always nice to have credentials. I did not continue to pursue help on this forum as I was advised that that was not the way to go for what I wanted to accomplish. So I took off in a different direction, reading books, going to school, doing my own research. Looking back, I see now that my very first ever pictures that I took in this manner needed a lot of work, and I have improved dramatically. So that's where I am at this point. I had forgotten my password so had to jump through a few hoops to be able to post here again. If you want to see some of my work, I finally figured out how to setup my own webpage on Smug Mug. It was so simple. I have a file titled Portfolio which contains some of my better, but not perfect, photos of all different things. I will soon get together into a collection my most recent photos of the human form and upload them to a file on that website. Once I do that, I'll contact this site with a link. Thanks for wondering about me! My website is www.checkmeout.smugmug.com.

Nicolas Claris said:

And then Ellen vanished…
like in a slow motion movie…

Ellen, are you still there, picking around?

Click to expand...

If you are still around, I have added a post to update what happened to me! You were so poetic with your comment, I had to answer! Albeit, over a year later. Ellen

Ellen O'Reilly said:

If you are still around, I have added a post to update what happened to me! You were so poetic with your comment, I had to answer! Albeit, over a year later. Ellen

Click to expand...

Bonjour Ellen!
La poésie est l'essence de la vie…
Of course I'm still sailing around. Will read your post…

I went to Smug Mug and copied the link but still can't get it pasted to the forum. You said to drag the picture to another browser but I don't even know how to do that. I'm hopeless technically.

Ellen O'Reilly said:

I went to Smug Mug and copied the link but still can't get it pasted to the forum. You said to drag the picture to another browser but I don't even know how to do that. I'm hopeless technically.

Click to expand...

Just PM me with the link and any picture number and I'll have a go!

I'll be away for a while

In the interim since my last message, I decided to go back to school (the Art Institute) to get a bachelor of fine arts degree in photography. In addition to my normal life activities, it has kept me extremely busy. I'll be taking computer courses as part of the requirement, so maybe after I get that training, I will be better able to navigate this site and also, I may have better photos to display as well.

Until then, Happy Holidays!

Ellen

Ellen O'Reilly said:

In the interim since my last message, I decided to go back to school (the Art Institute) to get a bachelor of fine arts degree in photography. In addition to my normal life activities, it has kept me extremely busy. I'll be taking computer courses as part of the requirement, so maybe after I get that training, I will be better able to navigate this site and also, I may have better photos to display as well.

Until then, Happy Holidays!

Ellen

Click to expand...

Hi Ellen,

It's dangerous to take that training without photographing every weekend at least even if you only spent 20 minutes. We cannot afford to let time go by like that without putting our fingerprints on it.

I think you must do this to feed your creative spirit. Take a page in our "Riskit" forum, (it's a perfect fit for you), and have your own "Blog" there and then add a picture a week or on whatever schedule you decide. As you progress in studies, you'll have a passport to protect you in your own creative world because you can only be a stranger for a long while in theirs. You had the gift to see things in a personal and unique way. That is worth nurturing, as without such care, it's life is gone forever.

Kind wishes,

Asher