Moving

I'm moving up in the world.

Well, in the blogging world at least.

I've switched over to WordPress and I now host it on my website.

jimmytothejohnston.com/blog

This will officially become the land that time forgot now.

So, come to the light.

I caved.

Follow me on twitter.
http://twitter.com/thehjj
I'm officially a nerd.

In camera?!

We must have different definitions of what "in camera" means.

First of all, let me define for you what I feel is "in camera".
If I take a photo, and I try to pass it off as "in camera", that means to me that what you see in the image is exactly, or pretty damn close to what the sensor in my camera saw. Now with that being said, sometimes I will make minor color adjustments (white balance, saturation etc) and maybe even some minor retouching of skin. Basically, just cleaning the image up. Same way you would if were shooting film and spotting and etching prints. Nothing major. The image is still 95% what my sensor saw.

How do I NOT define in camera?
Heavily retouched. OBVIOUSLY heavily retouched. Major skin retouching, major color adjustments, little whispy things all over the place, people with glows around them. That is not "in camera".

If you're wondering, I just saw some photos that were trying to be passed off as "in camera", but they were everything but. I understand why this person would THINK that this was "in camera" ... all of the elements were photographed at the same time, and not composited in photoshop. But once you reach a certain lever of retouch, it falls far outside of "in camera".

Trying to pass that off as "in camera" is misleading. It's called integrity.

I love behind the scenes photos. I don't know why. I just do. You typically only see then end result of a photo, but you rarely see what goes into it. I love to see other peoples set ups, studio spaces, everything. It's interesting to me. So, I always try to back up and take a few photos of my working set. I say try because sometimes I forget or sometimes I may be using some secret ninja lighting that I don't want to share with the world. Chances are that I forgot.

The beginning of the end. For real.

Week one of my last quarter has begun.
It's going to be busy.
I'm really excited about the work I'm going to be doing.
I'll post a few little goodies on here as I produce them.

What a small little man you are

Don't waste your time and energy worrying about what others are doing. Especially if that someone is a douche bag.
Do the best that you can possibly do.
There is no better way to say FU to those people than by doing well.
So, do well.


TV On The Radio - Dancing Choose

he's a WHAT? he's a WHAT?
he's a newspaper man
and he gets his best ideas
from a newspaper stand;
from his boots to his pants
to his comments and his rants
he knows that any little article will do!

Ideas, ideas, ideas!!!

I haz them.

I had my last panel review ever on Tuesday. It went well. Very well. I left there with a feeling of finally heading strong in the right direction. Next quarter is going to be a really long road, and a short time to get there (we're gonna do what they say can't be done yeah yeah smokey and the bandit). The feedback given to my work was really insightful and helpful. Sure, there are always technical things that I could be better at ... I know this, the people on panel know this. They talked a little bit about the technical things, but mostly about making a better photo ... in the sense of a more meaningful photo.

I'm encouraged. I'm motivated. I'm ready to produce the best work that I possibly can. I had so many random ideas for photo shoots just floating around in my head, it was hard to make sense of them ... so I wrote them all down. Wrote down the concept, possible models, production needs, locations, everything that I could think of associated with the shoot. I now have a list of about 12 shoots that I want to do next quarter. That will equate to about one shoot per week. If I can pull everything off, and to the level that I'm hoping to achieve, my portfolio will completely transform next quarter.