NOTICE

All material in this blog falls under the laws of Copyright. Each Artist represented retains their own copyright to their images.Reproduction without their written consent forbidden by law.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Featured Artist...Bob Hudak

I thought we would end this year here, where I live, South Florida, with images best shown by our      current "Featured Artist" Bob Hudak. His views are classic photography, large format and yes film.      
Self taught, he leaves his former life as pilot flying air taxis, throughout Florida and the Bahamas where he develops his taste for the landscapes he sees.                                                                                 
                                                                                                                        




Bob takes his influence from one of the      greats, Edward Weston   and makes black&white photography his choice of expression.
"The photographs shown here were produced from negatives made with large format cameras. Originally, because of its relatively small size, the 4 x 5 inch view camera was my camera of choice. However, with my increasing interest in the contact printing processes and my aversion to making enlarged negatives, the 5 x 7, 8 x 10 and (soon) larger formats more likely will get the nod. However, the use of these relatively small camera sizes, in comparison to 8 x 10 inch and larger cameras, does offer a wider range of flexibility when it comes to printing. With certain subjects these negatives can be printed as contact prints or when needed as with a large landscape the 5 x7 inch negative can produce 16 x 20 inch prints of outstanding quality.
"




Since 1984, he has worked for various publications on travel adding commercial work in Architecture, Aerials, and Yacht photography and supplying stock agencies with his images. Florida becomes his choice for his work.

"My reasoning behind the Florida trips was that while the West in general and more specifically Montana does have a lot to offer the photographer working in the landscape I do not live there, and while I have returned many times it has been mostly with a fly rod to fish on the Madison, Yellowstone and numerous other rivers and streams around the state. To do something productive with a camera would require repeated visits to easily accessible, visually interesting areas; in short, I felt I needed to stay closer to home base.

The Florida that I grew up in, that is to say, South Florida in the late sixties, seventies and early eighties is, unfortunately, gone. Today’s post Disney version of Florida bears little resemblance to that period of time before the floodgates were opened and the mass influx of new residents hit my part of the state. The booming population and the infrastructure needed to support it, guaranteed that the lakes and woods used by myself and my friends as our escape from the real world would soon be filled in, paved over and lost forever under a sea of concrete and asphalt, never to be seen again except in memory."



His love of the outdoors continues to draw his attention adding to an over 16 year project dedicated to personal vision and viewpoint.
"As a photographer working with a landscape that now exists only as a fraction of the place you once knew, the challenge is to bring an awareness to the land through your photographs without resorting to sentiment in the hope of protecting what little we still have left, knowing that loosing this, it too is gone forever.
With these photographs my hope is to engage the viewer in a way that conveys not only a love of the land but also acknowledges the presence of something spiritual. Not spiritual in a biblical meaning, but something deeper, more to do with the belief that there is this unseen force in the universe larger than ourselves we can’t understand and that science and religion can’t explain. More than once it has been suggested to me that my photographs of the Florida landscape have been subconsciously my attempt to bring back the Florida that was, and in doing so recapture my youth and that, which disappeared with it. I’ve never had an intelligent reply to that comment; however if these images succeed at all then maybe what I’ve been doing for the past eighteen years hasn’t been a search for what I’ve lost of myself, but rather a search for the manifested Gods that are to be found within these lands."
For more of his work

Monday, December 20, 2010

Merry Christmas to all

Wishing all a very Merry Christmas... and a healthy, happy and successful New Year..

Monday, December 13, 2010

Featured Artist...Yvette Worboys


It's always good to see what is happening around
the world in photography. Some come from "Across the Pond" but Yvette Worboys hails from " Down Under, " Sydney Australia to be exact. Her graphic design background shows in her work "ghosts"

   
Yvette is a professional photographer and has been working within the industry since 2002. Yvette began her creative career as a graphic designer and she combines both her love of design and photography within her work. After completing her studies in 2003 Yvette began working in the domestic portrait market while continuing to pursuer her love of fine art photography. She has been a successful exhibiting artist in Australia being selected for various shows including the prized Olive Cotton Award for portraiture.






 Yvette is currently working on a body of work using color and shapes as the main focus of the images. This body of work will hopefully be exhibited in Sydney Australia in 2011. She uses a vast array of equipment from the iPhone 4 Hipstamatic camera, Lomography cameras such as Holga, Canon 35mm film and digital cameras and a Bron 6 x 6 film camera. Her post production process involves mainly Photoshop however Lightroom is used for batch processing and selecting of images.

 Yvette wishes to capture not just the person or place she is photographing but also the stories behind them, as evident in herCommunity exhibition, a study on the northern NSW town of Mullumbimby, Australia. This exhibition told the stories of the town from the local’s perspective. This exhibition was held in Sydney and then travelled to Mullumbimby.
Her work below right is from "Surrealist"

More of her work can be seen here 

Monday, December 6, 2010

Featured Artist...Stuart McCall

This week we receive work through the eyes of Stuart McCall, a Vancouver, BC based photographer, who shows us his panoramic scenes of the deserts of Nevada and northern Mexico.
He began his career as a commercial photographer in 1982. Since then, his images have been published widely, featured in  Time Magazine, Fortune Magazine, Saturday Night, Photography Monthly, Boston Globe, Times of London, as well as in books by National Geographic and Douglas & McIntyre. His work has been recognized by Communication Arts, the Lotus Awards, and International Photography awards.


"The desert has fascinated me for some time.  It is a place where the climate and environment are quite incompatible with human survival.  Scarcity of water, and extremes of heat and cold are typical…  Yet people have been inhabiting and trying to make a living in deserts since time immemorial. Many come, but few stay on.   The extremes of climate have the ability to preserve traces of past activity in a remarkable way that is not so much the case in wetter or more moderate climate.  Structures, roads, footpaths, machinery, fences, and garbage heaps tend to linger on in an unnatural way, far beyond what their creators anticipated.  I have for the past several years developed a keen interest in remains left behind and eventually becoming a part of the landscape.  The deserts of western North America are wonderful places to study this." 

He completed his series of desert scenes in 2010, using small digital equipment as series of overlapping frames,combined in post-production,creating a seamless panoramic image that really shows it better effect here .  He has been experimenting with this technique for a couple of years and found the possibility of extremely high image quality with the convenience of small format appealing.

"The desert has fascinated me for some time.  It is a place where the climate and environment are quite incompatible with human survival.  Scarcity of water, and extremes of heat and cold are typical…  Yet people have been inhabiting and trying to make a living in deserts since time immemorial. Many come, but few stay on.   The extremes of climate have the ability to preserve traces of past activity in a remarkable way that is not so much the case in wetter or more moderate climate.  Structures, roads, footpaths, machinery, fences, and garbage heaps tend to linger on in an unnatural way, far beyond what their creators anticipated.  I have for the past several years developed a keen interest in remains left behind and eventually becoming a part of the landscape.  The deserts of western North America are wonderful places to study this." 

Stuart has several projects which have been in various exhibitions . Hos work continues to evolve with his current approach.

" The notion of a planet absent of human beings has been of interest for some time, and has been cause for expression in my work.  While many imagine a future where man and nature will return to a state of equilibrium, my current work considers a world where nature is gradually reversing the effects of a brief encounter with humanity."
More of his work can be seen  here