Liberal Media

"Those who still doubt the press needs fresh, preferably conservative, blood, should consider these numbers: In 1999, 12 percent of journalists said fairness and balance were a big problem for the media. Now, in the Pew survey, only 5 percent say so--this, after further proof of liberal dominance and noisy debates about liberal bias. And in 1999, 11 percent said ethics and standards were a major concern. But after high-visibility scandals involving fabricated stories and controversies about plagiarism, only 5 percent agree today. The case for ideological realignment of the media is closed."

Liberal Media Evidence, 5/28/2004
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/143lkblo.asp?pg=1

I've been debating how I am going to get any helpful critique advice atleast on the concept of my work in this class. When I first began exploring this topic, all I saw was a divide between what I continued to see in the Media and what I passed every day when driving around. The media continues to try to convince us that the world is crumbling and we will all be living on the streets tomorrow, however there is a new BB&T branch that just opened on Staples Mill, investors are stepping in and buying up troubled property in huge numbers with new construction going up in Short Pump, and the price of gas is back to $2 a gallon with SUV's still on the lots of the expensive real estate along Broad street.

However during my critique, all I could here on the content was more of the media's side. I didn't think of it as a political topic until they started bringing up what they think as the reason's for the current economic slowdown. The class refered to "the last 8 years" and "yadda yadda failed politics". Without getting into it too much, the current slowdown is obviously caused by banks being forced to hand out high risk loans to unqualified candidates. The government began forcing the banks to do this during the Carter administration with the "Community Reinvestment Act", which was dramatically stepped up during the Clinton administration. The loans that are failing today are failing because the Arm payments are beginning to increase. Meaning they were written 5-10 years ago. Either during the Clinton years or in the first few years of the Bush Administration. Bottom line this is not some new problem that came about from some failed policy in the last 8 years. Either way it is interesting how political I see my prints after the critique.

Michael Kenna

Biography

British, b. 1953

Michael Kenna was born in Widnes, England in 1953. As one of 5 children born to a working class Irish-Catholic family, he initially aspired to enter the priesthood but his passion for the arts led him to The Banbury School of Art where he studied painting and then photography. Later he attended The London College of Printing and began working as a photographer and artist. He moved to San Francisco in 1977 where he was astounded by the number of galleries the city housed which allowed artists to showcase and sell their work. San Francisco has remained his home ever since.

Michael Kenna's work has often been described as enigmatic, graceful and hauntingly beautiful much like the Japanese landscape. Kenna first visited Japan in 1987 for a one-person exhibition and was utterly seduced by the country's terrain. Over the years he has traveled throughout almost the entire country constantly taking photographs. From these many treks the book Japan, featuring 95 of these photographs, was conceived.

The simplicity and clarity of Kenna's Japan alludes to rather than describes his subject allowing the viewer to have a completely unique and tailored interpretation. He has described this body of work as, "more like a haiku rather than a prose"; his work being like photographs written in short poem form. Kenna's photographs are often made at dawn or in the dark hours of night with exposures up to 10 hours. Kenna has said "you can't always see what's otherwise noticeable during the day… with long exposures you can photograph what the human eye is incapable to seeing".

Michael Kenna's prints have been shown in numerous exhibitions throughout the world with permanent collections in the Bibliotheque, Paris; The Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Kenna has also done a great deal of commercial work for such clients as Volvo, Rolls Royce, Audi, Sprint, Dom Perignon and The Spanish Tourist Board. Japan is one of 18 books of Kenna's photography to have been published to date.

Interview

Gallery



Website

Bailout Bill

"In times past, national debt typically was run up by borrowing money from private lenders and spent on goods and services. The tendency was to absorb loanable funds and bid up interest rates on the one hand, while spending led to inflationary price increases for goods and services. But the present giveaway is different. Instead of money being borrowed or spent, interest-yielding bonds are simply being printed and turned over to the banks and other financial institutions. The hope is that they will lend out more credit (which will become more debt on the part of their customers), lowering interest rates while the money is used to bid up asset prices ­ real estate, stocks and bonds. Little commodity price inflation is expected from this behavior."

Parsing Mr. Paulson’s Bailout Speech: The Unprecedented Giveaway of Financial Wealth
www.globalresearch.ca October 18, 2008

This printing of money in an attempt to fix a problem that was created by a socialistic government forcing the banks to make high risk loans has been very interesting to watch. Now that the government is actually buying voting shares worth of stock in the largest banks and we are moving toward a centralized government controlled socialist banking model, it will create even less diversity and competition in the market which should have an equally interesting affect on the market that I trade. The media's perception in thinking this will fix the problem and trying to persuade the public that these measures will stop the downturn has been overwhelming. I hope to capture some of that.

Tony Sweet

After 20 years as a professional jazz artist, Tony changed careers and directed his creative juices towards nature photography. The improvisational, spontaneous, and abstract nature of jazz are also integral elements of nature photography.

Tony's work is published on calendars, post cards, posters, annual reports, greeting cards, catalogs, and electronic mediums. His fine art prints are exhibited in private and corporate collections throughout the United States, and he is represented by The Getty Picture Agency.

Tony conducts his Visual Artistry photography workshops throughout the continental United States. Tony's articles and images are featured in Shutterbug and Rangefinder magazines, and is a contributor to Nikonnet.com. He is a staff writer for Nikon World magazine.

He has authored three books on the art of photography: Fine Art Nature Photography ('02), Fine Art Flower Photography ('05), and Fine Art Nature Photography: Water, Ice, Fog ('07). A fourth book in the Fine Art Photography series is due to be released in January of 2009.

Tony maintains an active speaking schedule, addressing professional photography organizations, universities, seminars, and teaching workshops, is an instructor on betterphoto.com, and a member of the Baltimore chapter of ASMP.


- Interview with Tony Sweet Outbackphoto.com

He is not represented by a gallery, he sells mostly online and through stock sites.

- Tony Sweet

Media Fear Tactics

"It would be interesting if the standards of Truth in Advertising were applied to television news as they sometimes are to television commercials. In that unlikely situation, TV news writers would be required to use phrases and words that convey accurate information – as opposed to the phrases and words they use today."


Media Fear Tactics
Gavin De Becker 2007 Gavindebecker.com

I think alot of todays hype that would lead us to believe everyone is living on the streets with a worthless 401k comes from the media. My work compares what we actually see in every day life to what the media tells us is going on around us as well as the actual numbers that back both up.

William Neill

"William Neill, a resident of the Yosemite National Park area since 1977, is a landscape photographer concerned with conveying the deep, spiritual beauty he sees and feels in Nature. Neill's award-winning photography has been widely published in books, magazines, calendars, posters, and his limited-edition prints have been collected and exhibited in museums and galleries nationally, including the Museum of Fine Art Boston, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Vernon Collection, and The Polaroid Collection. Neill received a BA degree in Environmental Conservation at the University of Colorado. In 1995, Neill received the Sierra Club's Ansel Adams Award for conservation photography. Neill is a member of Canon USA’s elite Explorers Of Light and Print Masters."


PHOTOGRAPHER'S STATEMENT
The reason I photograph is to experience the beauty of Nature, of wild places. I explore the essential elements of rock and tree, of cloud and rushing water to discover the magic and mystery of the landscape. My search for beauty is romantic and idealistic. It is the spirit of the land I seek-be it in a small piece of urban wildness or in vast wilderness. Rachel Carson, in her book The Sense of Wonder, writes, "Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."

Photography is a quiet, intensely meditative activity for me. Minor White, the Zen-influenced photographer, stated, "Be still with yourself, until the object of your attention affirms your presence." When the light and the subject inspire me, I am compelled to compose an image. The images that I enjoy making the most are those that rely on emotional response and perception rather than the spectacle of the scene. I enjoy isolating the details of a scene, often to the point of abstraction. By creating photographs where the content or orientation is not obvious, an intimate and enigmatic feeling can come through. I would rather make an image that asks a question than answers one, one that intrigues and arouses curiosity in the viewer.

Photographing wild landscapes, depicting an image of pristine beauty, absent of the intrusions of man, is a dangerous proposition bordering on creating a false mythology. Yet wild places do still exist. What little is left will be lost if we don't develop a new and enlightened stewardship of our earth where Nature and Man are not considered separately. Barry Lopez writes, "Wild landscapes are necessary to our being. We require them as we require air and water. But we need, at the same time, to create a landscape in which wilderness makes deep and eminent sense as part of the whole, a landscape in which wilderness is not an orphan." Perhaps the only way the world will change is for people to go through some kind of a profound aesthetic experience that makes us aware that we are personally accountable for our actions and how we affect the environment.

I can only hope that my photographs convey an enduring sense of wonder, a deep appreciation of the magic, beauty, and mystery of the natural world.



2006 doubleexposure.com interview


Galleries


www.williamneill.com

High Dynamic Range

It's not 1 word, but I have really been enjoying it.

" One of the problems of films and even more of digital sensors is their capacity to reproduce scenes with high contrast. This is characterized by blowned high-lights and/or completely dark shadows, whereas in the field, the eye discern much more tonalities. Sensors have indeed a limited dynamic range (a capacity to record variations of luminosity), inherent in technology employed. It is thus necessary in such scenes to choose between an exposure preserving high-lights, or an exposure preserving shadows. There are however solutions, but which impose certain constraints in term of shooting. We will try here to understand HDR photography and its usability."

Nicolas Genette, on August 21, 2007 NicolasGenette.com

Exploring HDR has been an interesting leap because it has breached the gap of what I felt was missing in Digital photography from film. It is very similar to the Zone System for film. An HDR image can be composed of multiple images or 1 image. When composing and HDR from a single RAW image, the similarities are more apparent. It defines the .RAW format as the closest thing we can get to a digital negative. If you shoot to correctly expose the shadows, the RAW image will contain the information to also pull out the highlights. The RAW can be used to produce multiple images at -2 -1 EV +1 +2 for example, and it can do this much better if it was shot as the +2, because the camera knows what the image looked like at 1/60 if the sensor was exposed for 1/30.