Trying to save Polaroid

Check out this article on trying to save Polaroid in the NY Times

Banner Images

Does anyone want to take over as the blogs banner czar?

More Blink 182 madness

I had to cut short my vacation by four days to get back to LA for this. Now look, I'm awkwardly memorialized in the background on MTV News. Mark asked me to document Blink's first night back playing together. They played a secret show that only a handful of people knew about. It was all insanely surreal and you can see some of the photos HERE on his blog.

Senior Show

Hey everyone!!! Awesome show last Thursday! I had a blast and I took tons of photos with my lil point ans shoot, but unfortunately my parental units don't have wireless hooked up yet so as soon as I get a chance I'll post photos of the Photo Grammy's and the entire night. Again thanks for a great semester, for those of you that graduated, well congrats!!! As for the rest of you...well I shall see you in Senior in the Fall. Have a good one!

http://www.wacom.com/intuos/medium.php I know Im a geek, watch the video on the right middle of the page. :)

Mark Hoppus Video

Ok, so most of you know what I was working on in LA before my trip home to Montana. If not you should go HERE to check out the behind the scenes footage of my shoot with Mark Hoppus from Blink 182. At the end I look like I rode home with my head out the sunroof. It's worth checking out just for that dazed look.

Forever Families - Stories of Adoption

Hello everyone! I don't know if anyone is checking this, but I finally got my multimedia show I created for my adoption portrait project uploaded to Youtube. Check it out if you have a few minutes and let me know what you think. Thanks, and enjoy the summer! Leslie

Art Sale!

I wanted to send a HUGE thank you to everyone who donated their work to the Benefit Art Sale and everyone who attended!! It was an enormous success! Everyone was so generous with their donations and the attendees were so thrilled to be able to purchase work at affordable prices that Anna at Tart has decided to leave the sale open for another week! Thanks again to everyone for their support!

Senior Show

Nik is sweet

I recently bought Nik Sharpener 3.0 and am amazed at the results coming out of it. It is a plugin for photoshop that includes RAW and output sharpening in a great interface that allows amazing control over the effects. You can sharpen smaller details, line sharpen, or selectively sharpen quck and easy. This thing makes PixelGenius look like it was made by Fisher Price, check it out... Sharpener 3.0 , i am yet to try out there noise reduction or B+W conversion plugins but i have heard good things

Websites for Photographers

For all my fellow graduating seniors and any photo students looking to market your work, here are my highest recommendations for getting a website up and running. All of these companies allow you to add images and manage the content of your own site.

• Visual Server
• LiveBooks EDU/LiveBooks
• BluDomain

• Visual Server samples: Chris Anderson | Leslie McDaniel | Brittany Nelson
• LiveBooks samples: Cali Frankovic | Ryan Krueger | Jay Maidment (non-MSU)
• Bludomain sample: Megan Thompson

Or if you still want to manage your content but are willing to learn a more in-depth system:

• Wordpress

Senior Show

Thanks for a great time last night. It was a swell time. I was really proud to see all your fantastic work hanging on the walls. The shows just keep getting better. All I heard were glowing reviews. Congrats.

Art Sale

A friendly reminder that the Art Sale is tomorrow! 5 - 8 p.m. in the Emerson down the hall from the grill. Featuring free booze, food, funk music, and a silent auction of work from Ian van Coller, Chris Anderson, Steve Jackson, Megan Thompson and more! I've got an empty gallery filled with work from students, faculty, and local artists priced to sell. Stop by, sample some of Anna's magic punch, and pick up some prints!

I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Salt Lake City and about to drive to Montana. I'll see you all tomorrow at the show! Good luck getting ready. I'm so stoked to see everyone's new work!

New Work

I recently took a trip to Utah/Colorado to photograph some biking. I thought I would share a few of my favorites.

Congrats

Congrats to all you graduating seniors. I will miss you all. Don't forget to stay in touch. and keep posting.

soulcrusher is not a soft drink

Fair thee all well...

Two and a half messages from Checkout!

First message from checkout:  with the impending graduation of a crew made (mostly) of seniors, photo checkout needs student workers for the next academic year!  Interested?  Either click here for the information & application PDF, or visit photo checkout to pick up a printed copy.  Applications received by the end of this week (Friday, May 8th, 5 pm) will be given preference.  

Second message from checkout:  You know those mostly empty showcases in the upstairs hallway of the VCB building, by the instructor offices?  I'm looking to fill those with your work!  I know finals season is a busy time, but I've extended the deadline, so if you have some work you'd like to display, either click here for the information PDF, or visit photo checkout to pick up a printed copy.  

The half message from checkout is that I received an order from Freestyle, and I now have quite a few empty boxes available for people to take home and adopt.  Are you moving soon?  Do you need cardboard to get ready for an ambitious Halloween project?  Perhaps you have a litter of kittens that need a nice towel-lined place to sleep.  Come take a box!  You can have a bunch of styrofoam packing peanuts too, but those are optional, and not recommended for kitten use.  

Senior show awards/prizes

As everyone in critique today knows, the senior class itself has already voted for our favorite project out of our classmates. We will announce that winner at the senior show on Thursday!

But for those of you who were not eligible to vote today, your chance will come! We are doing two more serious awards: Teacher's Choice (PHOTO faculty!) and Audience's Choice (everyone else who hasn't already voted!)

Each of these three big awards come with a pretty awesome prize, so please remember to vote for your favorite project! We will tally and announce the winners of all three awards around 9:00, or whenever things begin to slow down, so seniors...stick around!

SO, keep an eye out for the voting boxes, and be sure to spread the word. Hope to see you all there!

Playing with nasty chemicals

I spent some time Saturday experimenting with mordancage and 8x10 negatives. Here's one of them, the rest are on my blog.

Film Scans with Gratuitous Dust

So I'm wondering, what does everyone think about leaving dust and hairs on film scans? I was thinking about how a lot of us like to leave part or all of the film frame in scans as a conspicuous nod towards process, and in a way dust is part of the process so in some sense why not leave it?

Making your CD for Senior

Don't forget your CD of images and artist statement for critique on Monday. According to the syllabus: "Images must be resized to 3000 pixels (10 inches at 300ppi) on the longest dimension and saved as level 10 JPEGs." Here's an easy way to do this, without having to resize and save each image one by one.

1. Create an action in Photoshop for the listed dimensions, editing the horizontal dimension
2. Create a second action, but edit the vertical dimension to the specified size.
3. After these two actions are created, open Bridge, navigate to your folder of final images (ideally the JPEGs you printed from), select all the horizontal images, and select Tools > Photoshop > Image Processor.
4. In the image processor window, choose where to save the new images (saving in same location is easiest). Check the box to save as JPEG. Warning: if you forget to check this box, you risk overwriting your full size images. Type in '10' for the Quality box.
5. At the bottom, check the "Run Action" box, select your action for which orientation of images you selected in Bridge, either horizontals or verticals.
6. Click on the run button, and your images will automatically be saved for the CD. Make some coffee, take jog, or put on some music, as this processing can take several minutes.
7. Don't forget to repeat steps 3-6 for your vertical images.

When the image processor is done, a folder called "JPEG" will be created containing the resized images.