Just Thoughts

School work

So I promised I’d post some more schoolwork, here ya go:

Photography Class

Today for photography we were shown a few old photos from famous photographers (black and white). With those inspirations in mind we were send out into the city to shoot interesting compositions and sights. Here are my results not edited or manipulated except grayscaling them:

(it says ‘Day and Night Free’ in dutch)

Ad Class

For Ad class we get either half our pitches or week pitches. Here’s two.

For this one the briefing was to get your name out there as a brand. I decided to got he guerilla route. I’m a voice, an opinion and I want people to be aware of it. So my concept was a Bryan Certified campaign where you’ll find a Bryan Certified sticker on products I dig, creative products such as DVDs, CDs, Books, Magazines maybe even bus posters or billboards.



The other side of the campaign is “… that blow your mind are Bryan Certified”. The one you see is a movie theatre chair where there are blood (brain?) splatters on the head rest and on the chair it would say “Movies that Blow your Mind are Bryan Certified”. This could be expanded to interactive mirror posters above urinals in concert venues where it would read the tagline “Music that Blows your Mind is Bryan Certified”.

——

Briefing was to make a magazine or paper ad for Spam Energy Drink, et voila.
Comment on this one was that it might work better as a tv ad and not as a print.

As always I love to hear some criticism! My twitter is @justbryan, let me know!

Free Lensing

It sounds like an extreme sport or some sort of freelancing but it’s what I’ve been talking about for the last two posts (not counting the concert journal);

Photos taken with the lens detached from the camera but held in place and moved around to focus. This also lets extra light in sometimes causing light leaks and giving a vintage look and feel.

Also:
* Gives extra bokeh by shrinking the area in focus (apeture is 0)
* Allows for super macro shots
* Delicious light leaks
* Tilt-shift effects

Since the last time I spoke to you about this I’ve actually been able to master, well not really master but figure it out. So I was able to shoot some tilted plane photos without needing the use of photoshop. In the next few days I’ll try to really master it, but I’ll probably need a better lens to do that anyways. Here are the first, real manual tilting results from yours truly:

Them Crooked Vultures

If you follow me on twitter you probably already saw me bragging all day yesterday.
But for you that don’t follow me or for you that had no idea what the fuck I was talking about:

Maybe you’ve heard of them or maybe you haven’t but Them Crooked Vultures is a new band. The lineup consists of Dave Grohl on drums (leadsinger of the Foo Fighters and drummer of Nirvana), John Paul Jones on bass (Bassist of Led Zeppelin) and Josh Homme on guitar and lead (leadman of Queens of the Stone Age).

The only thong that we know of them is that they have been recording in the studio and they are really making an album together. And then there’s only a 14 second teaser on youtube but beyond that nobody has heard any material from them yet.

But non the less, when word started spreading that the mystery concert that was planned on wednesday night in the Melkweg in Amsterdam was by Them Crooked Vultures, the line for the presale on tuesday, that would start at 6pm, became massive:

I only discovered about this gig at 5.55pm on tuesday, being 30 minutes away from amsterdam and there already being such a line as you see above. So I figured I was shit out of luck.

Then wednesday morning I’m eating my breakfast, catching up on rss when I get a call from my buddy shouting at me I need to get my ass over to amsterdam cause there were still tickets left that were gonna go on sale at 3.30pm. I’ve never gotten dressed so quickly, 2.30 I was on my way to amsterdam and at 3.15 I was about the 80th person in line for the last tickets, and I got one, wristband on ticket in my hand!

The concert was A-MA-ZING. Dave Grohl drumming for 80 straight minutes is magical on its own, and then you add rock gods like Josh Homme and John Paul Jones to the equation you have one of the best concerts.

Phenominal experience.

I leave you with some more material that popped up on youtube since then and some twitter reactions from other people that were there:

Just got back from Them Crooked Vultures concert in Melkweg. Just brilliant. Awesome songs played by amazing musicians. Stunned!
- Ronald Says

I may have just witnessed the greatest concert of the greatest band of all time. Them Crooked Vultures in Amsterdam #Melkweg #tcv
- xaccie

Them Crooked Vultures rocked the house! They sound like QOTSA but more melodic and instrumental trips. Grohl and Homme together is power.
- fedordelange

Tilted planes

Yesterday I posted about tilt photography and a fake one I tried to create since I don’t own a tilt shift lens (since those costs $1000+).

Today I started working on a second fake tilt and I am a hundred times more pleased with the end result of this one. There is a shallower depth of field so the effect comes across better, plus I also played around with the color tones which also enhances the effect in my opinion.

I read some things on manual tilting btw. People apperently have been able to get the same effect by “slightly removing the lens from the body and tilting it”, only when I try to do this it just becomes very dark and noisy.

Any advice/tips on manual tilting or comments on my photo are more then welcome, reply to my twitter, @justbryan.

Tilt photography

End result (click for high res)

Besides the cliched “miniature effect” you get bombarded with when you look up tilt shift photography, there are a lot of other cool effects you can get with a tilt shift lense.

One of my favorites is just simply tilting the focus plane. You have to imagine that normally the plane of focus is parralel to the image sensor in the camera, so you could visualize a thin wall in front of the camera that you can move back and forth, and that wall is where the focus lies. Now with a tilt shift lense you can tilt and shift that wall so that you can not only change its position forward and backward but also rotate it and litterally tilt and shift it.

What I tried to do here is make it appear that the focus plane is not running from side to side but from the front left corner to the back a bit more on the right side. I managed this by taking 6 photos, each time moving the focus plane backward by a bit.

Then I went into photoshop and erased parts out of the photos to reveal certain areas in focus and others out of focus, thus getting the wanted effect of the tilted focus plane.

Here are some real tilt shift photos, not photoshopped, and not done by me: