Two months of intensive work with both my terrific photo editor, Paula Gillen of Gillen Edits and, best of all, working with my new gallerist (Announcement soon. A good one in Los Angeles and I am honored to have the representation by someone whose eye I trust so much!), to define my work and create several new promotions for it, both for the gallery and for fine art publication as well as museum and other exhibition.
Hard. Revealing. Understanding collaboration - not just an edit but working and adjusting for goals and allowing views I respect to incorporate and change my own work. Again, not unlike the world of publishing BUT, a different art form and I should have expected a different emotion and artistic approach. Thus, lessons thought to be learned needed to be taken in again.
What this is presently all about? MagCloud. Discussed before but being worked seriously now. A magazine, built from "cloud" computing, i.e. totally via the internet where design is uploaded but a real "hands-on" magazine is published in a POD (print-on-demand) format, available by subscription or just an individual online order. Many are creating their own issues here. And I as well, although not so much for subscription but as a series of promotional tools, helping others to better understand, especially with the Chinatowns, the large body of prints from this 9 year+project.
The work was intensive enough to create an entire book, both from edit and design. However for my purposes, the magazine format is better. It can remain current, capable of change in an ongoing project such as this. It provides the capability to informally "publish" the work at different stages of photography and sequencing, permitting others to take a peek into the process as well as making my own formatting and choice of powerful images all the tighter. There is opportunity to have others "guest edit" the same body of work, a concept most intriguing for the Chinatowns.
Here's the cover image of the first issue, brilliantly suggested by Paula:
And then in the midst, as always, other projects. What fun for a photographer to use another photographer! In this case, I asked Martin Cox, both a commercial and fine art photographer, and a fellow member of the Los Angeles League of Photographers (LALOP. See the LALOPBLOGSPOT I write there!) to do a commercial photo shoot for me: To photograph the interiors of a small co-op owned by my family for purposes of marketing it as a rental.
I had fun being the assistant for the day and, while Martin's work is absolutely wonderful and showed this basically unfurnished unit to its greatest advantage - the realtor loves the pics! - the day of the shoot was incredibly overcast. Even though the gray days by the beach are filled with romance and emotion, for a marketing brochure, blue is better. So I worked in post-production to drop in some sky, pics taken by me from that same unit on sunnier days.
Having done so, I loved this YOUTube video from Tim Grey whose daily photographic tips are quite wonderful to receive each morning. Wish I had seen it BEFORE I did my work!
Here's one of Martin's nice clean shots with a little more blue and clarity from another day:
