The last month or so has seen some great new projects start to take shape. I’ve already blogged about Faded & Blurred and how thrilled we are with the reception 2.0 has received. Not just from users either. We’ve been lucky enough to bring some great new partners and sponsors into the mix, which is fantastic. Also on the F&B front, we’ve got some great content going up on the site. Photographer Spotlight, gear reviews and in the next week or so, we’ll be adding some great interviews into the mix.
With F&B 2.0 up and running, I’ve been laying the groundwork to get back to my art. As many of you know I took a break for a while, but am now finding that new images and ideas are working their way into the light. New artwork is coming soon.
Finally, Nikki and I have been building on some of the discussions that the three of us started about what a Faded & Blurred studio might look like. Not a studio as a space per se (though that’s part of it), but rather a studio as more of a creative agency, of which the Faded & Blurred website is a product. So, we came up with the name Blurry Street Studios. First, as an obvious tie in to Faded & Blurred, but also as a more subtle nod to 19th century photo compositor, William Notman, whose own studio was located at Number 17 Bleury Street in Montreal. The goal is for Blurry Street to become a boutique media studio, providing design solutions for web, print and mobile platforms. We’re just in the planning stages now, but are very excited at the potential…stay tuned.

Well, after months of development and noodling, we pushed Faded & Blurred 2.0 live yesterday. It’s been a really wonderful process building this site. Though this site is for the users, the actual building of it was sort of a personal challenge. This site is built on a Joomla backend, and up until a couple months ago, I didn’t really even know what Joomla was. I knew of it, but had never really looked into it. When I was researching how to add a social networking component to the new version of F&B, I read through several web development blogs, many of which sung the praises of using Joomla. Looking into it, I found that it seemed to fit our needs moving forward. It’s modular, scalable and has a fantastic worldwide development community that are often more than willing to answer questions, even provide code snippets. I talked it over with Frank and Nikki, who asked if I knew Joomla. “No”, I responded “but I will.” I think they were a little hesitant, but they said go for it. So we started pouring over sites like Model Mayhem, Supershoots, DP Review and even Facebook and MySpace, trying to come up with a list of features that we wanted to integrate into F&B 2. At the same time, I began researching Joomla. I started reading books, blog posts and forum discussions, trying to wrap my head around Joomla’s rather different way of doing things. Monday, all of it came together and we released 2.0 into the wild. It’s a huge improvement over our initial site, offering discussion forums, social networking and bookmarking, twitter integration and a lot more. Also, we’ve made a commitment to trying to make F&B more of a destination site for photographers and image makers. We’ve got features, reviews, and some great interviews lined up with some of the most creative and interesting people we can find. We don’t know exactly where it’s going, but hey, part of the fun is just hanging on and enjoying the ride.

See for yourself at: http://fadedandblurred.com

A very cool show opened last night at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in LA. Curated by Kent Williams, The Human Eclectic explores the question “What is becoming of the ‘us’ – the ‘each of us’?”

From the show:
Maybe it’s our detachment from the reality of mass human destruction, or the invited dehumanization of our existence through computers and online interactions. It could be our growing desensitization to cruelty, to violence and to suffering through the television invasion. Whatever it is, it appears we have stopped celebrating, or even acknowledging, the very thing that defines our entire race – our humanity. We are offering it up, as though sacrificially, to the machines we create and worship.

Because of this almost inevitable crisis of self, we find it important again, maybe now more than ever in the history of art making, to cling to our most basic possession – the human form. Call it a quiet revolution – the lone artist embracing the representation of man again – slowly and deliberately turning himself back around to look at himself again. Through the idiosyncratic self, the artists in this show collectively identify the masses: the every man, the other men, the always woman and the sometimes child – their existences, their truths, their triumphs and their failures. These artists remind us that we, the family of man, must not allow ourselves to disappear.

The show runs through November 7, and features work by a number of artists, including: Peter Liashkov, Barron Storey, Jon J Muth, Kent Williams, Aaron Smith, Dean Karr, Mari Inukai, Chris Anthony, Jennifer Poon, Jason Shawn Alexander, Kevin Llewellyn, Sara Escamilla.

Gallery Info

Merry Karnowsky Gallery
170 South La Brea Avenue
(in the Art 170 Building),
Los Angeles, California 90036
323.933.4408
Contact person: Merry Karnowsky
E-mail:
mkgallery@att.net
Website:
http://www.mkgallery.com
Gallery hours:
Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6pm

I know I still owe you a class update for Photoshop for Photographers, which I’ll try to get done today, but I wanted to post a quick congratulations to my friend and fellow Tri Instructor, Frank Wisneski, for taking the top honors in our Chinatown group on Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk. Frank now moves on to the national judging, where Scott Kelby will choose the winner of the grand prize, valued at somewhere near $11,000. The grand prize includes a Nikon D700, which Frank will undoubtedly give to me since he shoots Canon. You can see the winning shot on Frank’s Flickr Page. Honestly, I’m so excited for Frank’s win. In addition to being a great shooter, Frank is a top-shelf instructor at Tri. If you’d like to find out why, join us on our first “Faded & Blurred” photo walk in Venice, CA on the 29th of August. Also, look for a special announcement soon both here and on Frank’s Blog about a great new project.