Monday, June 28, 2010

A little of the environment..

Okay, okay. I'll hold off on the portraits a little- I did take photos other than those, after all.. The first of these is where I stayed!



I'm trying to think of when I last grilled like this. Oh, wait.. never.















Sunday, June 27, 2010

Portraits..portraits..portraits!











I'm aware this last one is kind of out of place considering the age, but I just love it- and the simple story behind it. I was walking with the kids through the community taking pictures when I came across this man sitting down. I asked if I could take his photo and he got up and began to walk away (towards his house). I was scared I'd offended him but the kids all started looking at me saying pee-peh, peep-A.  I was confused and looked back up to see this man standing in his doorway- he had gone to get a pipe to pose for a picture.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Dominican Republic: A few more before bedtime












Most of these are self-explanatory, I think. Look at them long enough and you should understand what I mean.
But, I'll take a moment to explain the middle picture in my previous post. The young man holding the "baseball" became a good friend of mine in a village. He and his friend taught me a game called "top", a very fitting name, I think, considering you used a stick for a bat and a baseball which comes from a lid that is popped off the top of a water jug. It is pitched in a way that you'd throw a frisbee (seen in the picture below). If the top is stopped before it quits rolling across the ground, the batter is "out", but if the top falls over and stops rolling, the batter gets a point.

Friday, June 11, 2010

Photography

is a good medium to use whenever blogging because it may take a little while to set up a shot and get the right one, but it makes it easy to blog for 2 reasons: 1) It's already digital so the gap between the camera and getting the pictures on the blog is tiny, and 2) It's quick. The project that I am working on uploading currently is a time-lapse of about 11 hours worth of work. It started out with a couple of sketches:

This is just playing with styles of line and trying to decide which one I would like best for a tree.

Once again, playing with line and color. I have never used pastels in my life and that was the medium I chose to use for this project, so I was trying to see how they worked.

..ignore the weird phoenix thing.. lol. The important thing about this page is the color study. I was seeing how colors respond to each other. As you can see, not very well.. :/

Anyway, onward to the video.... I think it turned out decently well. My lighting got messed up and I had to shift the camera several times because it was next to my bedroom door, a flaw in my thought process, I must say.
Skip to the end if you just want to see the final product, though it's only about 40 seconds long..



Tree Pastel time-lapse from Joshua Gale on Vimeo.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Late nights

are becoming way more familiar to me than ever before, but that's okay. :)  I was starting to work on some of the shots that we got at the pit (such as the one I let you peak at on last night's post), but I really just wasn't feeling like working on it. There are several sequences of shots that I'm going to eventually post on here frame by frame, but it takes a lot of effort, there are about 60 or so images.
So, I decided to have just a little more fun with my shutter and remote (to take pictures)- I'm really just playing with all the controls on my camera and trying to get used to them. For instance, many wonder, as did I, what the ISO is on a camera. Like, what it Really does. Skip the scientific blahh, it allows your camera to take in more light at once which is useful on several different levels, such as shooting in the dark. Here's my example:


Yes, among many other random things, we have a big metal cock in our house (insert immature pun here). The lights were on in the kitchen behind me but were off in the living room, where the cock is, so it was actually really dark, which, btw, we should quickly define as the lack of light (kind of like in math we solve everything in the terms of a certain variable, such as x, it sometimes helps to think about this the same way. We are dealing with AMOUNTS of light, dark is lacking light, a shadow is an area where there is little to no light and a highlight is an area where there is an extensive amount of reflected light. Something I have think about whenever looking at a scene. If you draw, you can relate the concept of light and dark to positive and negative space- light being positive and dark being negative, think about it.) ANYway, the point to this is that I set a low ISO on the first image, around 200, a mid ISO on the second one, around 1000, and a slightly higher one to the third, around 1400. Please note that some cameras can go up to 6000+, I just decided to not exhaust the point by going that high. Lesson learned. For me, anyway.

Road-side Self-Portrait

This is Highway 49, where I live, at the end of my driveway. I decided to be extremely cliche and take some pictures of vehicles. I got a lot of really awesome shots and it was difficult for me to choose a couple to show on here, but check em out:


When the shutter is left open, it captures light and it requires a certain length of time of an object staying still in order to catch it in the frame Unless it is lit up by some kind of light. In the example above, I left open the shutter and the head lights of the car and everything that the lights lit up got caught, but the vehicle itself did not, hence a streak from the headlights- the same thing with the next couple of pictures. The stars are awesome in this, though.


The whirl of lights is fun. :P

A nice explosion of light from an 18-wheeler. (about the only thing they're good for, besides hauling things and making me angry in traffic)
..this post ended up being kind of long, but whatever, if anyone is even reading this, maybe you learned something? lol.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Awesomest Nieces and Nephews Ever.

Ahgg.. I was going to do a different post, but Photoshop decided to freak out on me a little bit, so I guess I'll save it for another night. Instead I'll focus on a little portraiture of my nieces and nephews, please note that these were done on a typical day with no fixed lighting or dress rehearsals, maybe I'll do one of those later. :) Any volunteers? ha.

In no particular order....
Ava

The prop in her hand (and mouth) is an Awesome blue. I love it.


Alex

I chose this one out of several because I feel like he is so full of character in this picture. It sums him up perfectly (you know, minus the spit up and wet diapers..)  =]


Samuel (whom apparently doesn't like his picture to be taken)

I caught him smiling whenever he first walked inside; take That recent development of camera-shyness! By the way, this was the Only picture I was able to get of him. Once again, this camera captures blues Very well.


Emma

Also a one shot go. At this point, she was busy bossing around her younger cousins on the play mat. The shades of maroon, dark reds, and browns are amazing. Another portrait that I feel suits her very well.

Okay okay. I promised in my first post this to be a blog of varied mediums, and I promise it will be. Hopefully later this week I can get some sketches or charcoal pieces up. I've just been enjoying my camera so much!



A quick preview of tomorrow night's post (which was supposed be tonight's but got messed up):


Happy June 7th! ..for some reason..

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Days like these...

Are good ones.
Just ask Mr. Frog.


or this flower.
=)

I was able to spend some time in Irwinton, my home home, today. Considering the fact that I love rain, it was truly a good one, but what made it even better is that it's the first day that I've been able to spend some time with my camera when it wasn't after 2am! I'm not used to taking photos that don't need to be edited (such as the flower), but I must admit, it's kind of nice. :)  Below is a photo of a turtle that I stumbled upon (almost literally) before ducking cover inside from the rain. It's an edited and unedited version, hence the "Before" and "After". If I may put my on critique in for just a moment, and I feel that to be appropriate, there aspects of each part that I like more and less. There is a lot more editing that Could have been done, but, for once, I decided to pull back and let it feel a little more natural.


Okay, okay. Today was a good day, like I said, so it deserves enough for 2 posts, but I'll just condense them into one. The next, and last, 2 pictures were done with my brother Daniel. He and my other brother, Matt, wanted me to do this earlier today but we decided on doing it at a later date. Well, after the pouring rain, Daniel and I decided what better time than now? He blew bubbles, we adjusted the lighting and the shutter was left open for an extended period. Simple as that.


And this,


Of course, bubbles broadcast the full color spectrum which makes it look like confetti! Happy Birthday, June 5th and 6th people!

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Testing..1..2..

Can anybody hear me?

When all else fails,

JUMP!
(click images to view full and larger versions)
I decided to try my first mini photoshoot tonight. And since I'm mostly using the auto feature on my camera and am not the greatest with it yet, I decided to shoot my manikin first to save me some embarrassment. :)

Mostly, I was experimenting with focus. I, of course, edited the next 2 some for a little fun.

Can you feel the drama?  lol.

Fear?

One of my favorite and biggest challenges as an artist is to give life to something lifeless, or to make something normal and everyday develop character and uniqueness, and even more-so, which is hard to do with something as simple as a manikin, tell a story. Allow the viewer be able to write their own narrative based simply on what is seen in one frame. When I taught digital photography to middle school students for an after school program, one of my favorite projects had to do with this. I asked each of them to take these types of pictures of various objects, such as leaves, rocks and trees. It was amazing some of the shots they took with the cheapest cameras that you had to replace the batteries in every 30 minutes.. Composition naturally falls into place. I will work on this as time goes on and I get more acquainted with my camera. Hmm.. I should name him.. or her (my camera, I mean).

Friday, June 4, 2010

It's here!

To my surprise, my Nikon d90 came in the mail today along with a lens I purchased. Of course, I was not able to play with it at all till I got off work (around 2 am) so there was not much experimentation. In fact, most of the time spent was trying to change the language from some sort of Japanese to English (I assume whoever shipped it out thought it would be funny to change the language settings on it...and it was).
BUT, I did take a couple of pictures.. Including this cup. :)


Nothing too spectacular.. yet.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Art as a..

means of entertainment, product of dromena, stint of advertisement, product of a utilitarian society, source of happiness, joy, and pleasure, display of worship, way of inspiration and depiction of empathy, jaw-dropping commentary on society, way of silent and in-your-face petition and protest, measurable and visual explanation of history. Art as an experience or as an object, a product of civilization and of boredom that shows undeniable proof of human development and is used for some as a profession and for others as a simple past-time or hobby.

This blog is something something that I have been considering doing for quite a while but never actually put into motion. The original idea was to call it 365 days of art where I do my best to come up with part of or a completion of 1 single piece of artwork everyday of the year (or as close to it as possible). The longer that I lingered on the idea, I realized that it would almost become just another commitment that I probably would not be able to meet, eventually taking the joy out of what I'd like to do and probably becoming a disappointment to myself for not completing it. SO, what I AM going to do, is commit myself to this blog for a year, attempt to but not commit to posting something daily. The goal and expectation of this blog is to track my progress as an artist, student, and maybe as an entrepreneur of various facets for what seems to be, and should be, a year full of (hopefully good) change. I will begin my senior year in August where I will have to start working on art that will eventually be exhibited in the Spring, continue as a manager at Papa John's (it's okay, you can laugh), run towards Home with my Savior, and look at plans for the future such as a job and/or graduate school (yeah... that's a doozie..).

Most of all, this will be a place of art, and, in particular, MY art in various forms that may encompass any number of those things listed in the first paragraph. I may decide to type some random thing that's been on my mind out like a typical blog, but mostly it will be photos that I have taken/edited, or drawings, or an attempt at a song, or it could be ANYthing. This is MY place to explore. =]

So, there's nothing else really to say but, "Welcome to the mind of Josh Gale" ..hopefully it makes sense!