How to Make a Photobook. Kind of.

Some pretty bad advice from Blake Andrews on how to make a photo book:

[click the image to enlarge]

First Week of the Semester...

This is a photo I recently Instagrammed of the whiteboard in my classroom:

I love this time in the semester...

Chuck Close on Inspiration

Found this great Chuck Close quote recently on Facebook (I may have shared part of this quote before):

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.

- Chuck Close

There Are Always Two People in Every Picture

Photojojo has been producing free photo-related downloadable photos/quotes over the last few months. Here are 3 Ansel Adams quotes that caught my attention:

Magic

You can’t make a great musician or a great photographer if the magic isn’t there.

-Eve Arnold

Can You Use That Image?

Visual.ly just posted a helpful flowchart regarding your rights to use an image. I haven't fact-checked all of this (in fact, I think the sidebar that says "...it is generally considered acceptable to redistribute an image that was originally intended to be publicly viewed by the creator" isn't totally correct by US law), but it's a decent insight into copyright law.

by TheVisualCommunicationGuy.

CLICK HERE to see it larger on Visual.ly.

Spring at 4 a.m.

I went out with my camera the day before Spring began to make some photos in a nearby park. More snow had fallen overnight to add to the tremendous amount of snow we'd gotten over the winter, and I was compelled to make a sarcastically beautiful photo as if to say "Come on Winter... SPRING is supposed to be here tomorrow!" I made that photo just after 4 a.m. with a 30 second exposure in the darkness.

Then I continued to step out early to make photos once a week throughout all of Spring. Below are 15 photos from sometime during the 4 o'clock hour during Spring of 2014.

[click each image to enlarge]

Snowfall in Merriam Park.


Minnehaha Falls.


Under the Franklin Ave Bridge.


The Cathedral of St. Paul.


Mickey's Diner.


Under the High Bridge.


At the Ford Lock and Dam.


Witches Hat Tower in Prospect Park.


Grain Elevators.


Entrance to Swede Hollow Park.


Driftwood on Raspberry Island.


Downtown St. Paul from a Rail Bridge.


Bike Trail and Mississippi River in South St. Paul.


Under the Stone Arch Bridge.


High Water at Harriet Island.

Har har...