Posts Tagged ‘red’
I won a gold Austin ADDYs award!
Well, ok, I helped win an ADDY to be more precise. A gold one, at that! A few months back, I got contacted by John Livingston via flickr. He’s art director for nFusion here in Austin. It’s a local advertising and marketing firm. John happened across a photo I took a year ago on a photowalk.
I didn’t think much about the photo at the time. It was a red bike with a sign on it discussing what it was worth to someone with AIDS. I sat down on the ground, framed, clicked, and moved on. Fast forward to December ’08. John contacts me, tells me about his involvement in the campaign and that he wants to use my photo as part of the submission to the 2009 Austin ADDYs Award.
Sure, why not? At worst, nothing came of it. At best, I get a bit of recognition out of it. For a photo that I didn’t expect much out of after taking it, what could I lose? So, after a bit of discussion, I licensed it to them for use in their submission.
Today I received this email.
Travis,
Hey this is John Livingston from nFusion. I thought you might like to know that the picture you contributed was part of a gold award-winning campaign at the 2009 Austin ADDY awards. I just wanted to thank you for allowing us to use your great photograph.
Here’s a link to the brochure they made with the winners. Look for your name on page 19 under the Red Bike Campaign:
http://www.austinaddys.com/2009austinADDYsWinnerBook.pdf
Unfortunately they didn’t feature your picture of the bikes in the book, but your image was used in our entry.So now you can say you won an Austin ADDY ward. Nice job!
-John
And, sure enough, I downloaded the PDF and found an attribution.
Woot! It’s not much, but what the heck. A bit of exposure for something I likely wouldn’t have done anything more than keep in my flickr stream. I think that’s a fair exchange for the amount of effort put into the photo.
So yeah, I’m happy claiming I helped win a gold Austin ADDYs Award.
Steampunk is the new black
I’ve long been fascinated by science fiction and cyberpunk literature. When the steampunk movement started becoming more prevalent, I started paying attention to what people were doing with it. It’s amazing what lengths people will go to re-create something in brass and steel, just to get the right look, the right feel for an object whether it’s clothing or geekiness.
Red expressed interest in having her new steampunk outfit recorded on film. We were going to do it the last time she was in town, but by the time we got around to it, the day was faltering and it was quite a drive to the scene I had wanted to put her into. I knew of a great set of train tracks that always had some railcars parked on it. They would have been perfect had the drive not been so long. We opted to do the shoot another day.
When I got into the studio, I found the building rife with corrugated steel and darkness: perfect for something steampunk-ish. I let her know and we arranged to do a shoot last Saturday (the 25th), making sure to have her bring the outfit in this time. Along with it, she brought an excellent point of detail: a 9mm steel, brass, and pearl Taurus PT 92. If that handgun didn’t scream steampunk, I’m not sure what would.
We ended up with quite a good photos out of it, including my favorite (the first one) and one of her favorites (the last one). I definitely need to do more steampunk photos. It’s an aged beauty that just sort of … speaks to me. I had an amazing amount of fun doing this one.
This has been one of the more “staged” shoots really. I spent a little bit of time trying to figure out what I wanted form this one and trying to place her into the environment so she blended a bit. Back to that whole idea of taking photographs versus making photographs. I’ve watched some of the things that Chase Jarvis does in his ninja shoot, for example, and I’m picking up on the idea that I like coming up with concepts (even if I think I still suck horribly at it … I’m getting better!) instead of just taking a model and posing her half a dozen ways.
The light is getting much easier to manipulate each time I do this. I’m starting to experiment a bit more with adding one, two, or even three more lights just to see what happens. For this shoot, I played around with the gridspot I built for my speedlights. I’m not sure about the effect yet. I mostly used it to get the gun metal to pop a bit more without overly spilling light onto Red. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
But when it did, I think it worked reasonably well. And that’s all I can ask for. Lots of failures in this shoot. And that’s really what I wanted.