Lately I’ve been creating Prezi training presentations for DirecTV to train their customer service agents on the various upgrades they can offer customers. This has been a great opportunity to delve into the world of Prezi creation and get much better at it. I’ve always worked a lot in presentation design, but I have a renewed passion for it with more updated design methods such as Prezi. It’s fun to take something new and find all the ways to make it work.
So I’ve been having way too much fun using Instagram, as mentioned in an earlier post. It’s a great visual social networking tool. It’s especially useful if you’re in the early stages of leaning the art of photography as it can open up a world of feedback to help you along. I’m really jealous of kids today, though they will never know the wonderment of working in a darkroom seeing images come to life through chemical interactions.
Using Instagram reinforces my love of iPhoneography, that’s for sure!
This is a few months old, as you can tell by the abundance of snow in the video, but I thought it was worth posting here. I finally got around to experimenting with shooting and editing video on my iPhone. It’s a pretty cool process, I’m not sure why I haven’t done any of this before now. My dog Jack absolutely loves snow and plastic flower pots. This film documents that love, or tries to anyway.
I’ve been getting more and more addicted to Instagram. Something that I was warned about before I started, I should have listened. Actually, I did listen. That was kind of a selling point for me. I wish you could customize the settings and combine them differently, but even still, it’s pretty fun to be limited and work to make the best decision based on what’s best for each image. I love that having an iPhone means that I always have a decent camera with me, always. And I love that I can do a wide range of post-processing while I’m out and about, not having to wait until I’m at my desk. I also love that this, for me, serves as constant inspiration for making photographic artwork.
My username on Instagram is: carllondon, follow me! Here’s a sampling of the photos I’ve uploaded.
This is probably the ultimate library in all existence. The Vatican Library contains over 2 million pieces, some dating back thousands of years. I’ve read about wonderful libraries that are hidden in monasteries around the world, but this tops them all I’m sure. According to the piece, only one person is allowed to check out anything at this library – The Pope.
Thanks to CBS News and 60 Minutes for doing this story. Here’s the accompanying video.
I’ve decided to start a blog series on what inspires me in this world. What follows is my first go at this. I see this being slightly different in subsequent posts than what’s below, but this is where we begin.
When I began my art career, I was working in the two mediums of painting and photography. I love the process of both of these. Painting with oils gives you a lot of time to work to make the paint say what you want it to. It’s very much similar to working in a darkroom exposing the image onto paper. Dodging, burning working the image in every spot to make it just so. Even the action of changing pixels on the computer is the same. (The best  – absolute best – part of working digitally is that I no longer have to contend with dust. Ever!)
To this end, I have always sought ways to combine the actions of painting and photographing. For my university exit show I produced a body of work in which I had made my own negatives and taken portraits. I thickly coated emulsion on old, cleared negative sheets and made long exposure portraits. It was a fun process, but quite expensive and time consuming. The results were great. It was the first time I felt that I had accomplished my goal of integrating photography and painting. In that, it was a success and I was happy about it. I’ve put an example of this work at the bottom of this article.
One of my two most favorite painters is Gerhard Richter. He has no real peer in his work. Though he has greatly inspired later generations. To me, his soft paintings are the visual equivalent to my favorite type of music, shoegazer. His work combines the soft dreamy with the loose fuzziness. I realise that these are vague terms and aren’t necessarily applicable to every piece. This is just an analysis of how my brain interprets what I see, hear and feel and how that translates into what I do with that information artistically. I think this all relates to my larger fascination with German Expressionism and Romanticism at large. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the same. It’s a very beautiful ugliness.
This does not necessarily translate into the art I produce, but it’s at the heart of what drives me to produce art. I would say that, of all the work in my catalogue, it best relates to Notions of Eden and the aforementioned portrait series.
