Web Portraits Zurich

The Yellow T-Shirt DJ portrait of Lukas was explored on Flickr, reaching position #62 on Friday, July 2, 2010. Excellente!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/americanpeyote/4750248656/

The uncut image from the Lukas studio shoot are up. We focused on pairing some strong colors with Lukas shot on a near neutral white background, offering excellent room for future post-processing.

I was out and about with my camera shooting light trails of cars with long shutter speeds the other night to create some more textures to mix with images of Mathias.

With this image I was looking at add some movement to the feeling of the scene. This was accomplished (in my mind) with some shutter dragging in Winterthur bahnhof.

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Part of the concept for Mathias was "counter-culture" and while I was thinking it would be cool to add a 50's nuclear explosion in the background, a mix of Zurich street graffiti seemed the proper choice.

The background is a composite of three separate graffiti walls, mainly shot between the Zurich HB and Hardbrucke, the image was shot in the studio with a 28mm lens and the rest happened in Photoshop.

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While vacationing in Detroit over the Christmas break I met up with some cool photographers via Flickr who took me Urban Exploring in the old Packard car plant. The inside of the place is sort of like you would imagine from a bombed out city. I shot a background there of the interior halls and wanted to work this into a portrait.

Combining the Packard plant with Mathias seemed perfect to get the grungy atmosphere of the urban environment into his portrait concept. We could have shot something similar in Winterthur at the Sulzer Areal, but it's been too cold to really think about location shooting.

Last week seemed to include many things to do, I did the portrait shoot with Mathias on Tuesday, there was the Protestlove shoot on Wed. and then there was my day job to do things for. However, now I've taken time to start editing through the images of Mathias and begun playing with some post-processing ideas in Photoshop.

In this first image I wanted to work on expressing the grungy look, bring out some hard features of Mathias and blend him into a fitting environment. He's sporting his Captain Ape jacket, and it goes incredibly well with his glasses. Somehow a dark industrial feeling is needed here so I blended in a background from the Sulzer Areal in Winterthur. Over the next few weeks I'll work on more pictures from Mathias, presenting 5-8 final images.

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The first Web Portraits Zurich shoot was done on a fine Tuesday night in Winterthur. Mathias dropped by and I set up a few lights, a few beers were opened and after a few flashes and shutter clicks we had the first shots. We did three different looks by changing up the lighting setup and wardrobe. The portrait styles included even and sort of dark lighting, which should work in well with the post-processing we had in mind:

Not too sterile
Not too bright

I plan on compositing in TV wall in some of the images to complete the overall concept of the Mathias portrait, sort of counter-culutre, a little grungy but for now I thought I'd post some of the first images uncut.

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Friday night Mathias and I sat down at Cafe Spheres across from the Technopark to brainstorm and get a concept direction for his Web Portrait. I took along a sketchbook to take notes as we talked for later reflection. To tell the end first, it was an excellent meeting...coffee, free-flow of ideas, the stuff that brainstorm dreams are made of.

The goal of our talk was to throw ideas around, see what we like for the main idea for the shoot and make sure I don't show up with a suit of Medieval armor when he imagined being photographed in a business suit. A portrait is a delicate thing, you are not making an image of a person, but rather taking an image of an idea. The person is the idea, and their physical body a changing representation of only the outer shell. The key is to meld the elements of the person with the shadows of the outer shell.

Half the time I was sort of interviewing Mathias, half the time he was talking out aloud about his ambitions and elements of his personality, which is exactly what should be going on during such a meeting.
What I found out is:

Mathias is totally down with doing a cool concept portrait, and we'll do a nice clean one as well (like Jill Greenberg/Platon) just in case the cool concept fails (but it won't). Among the various questions, I asked things like,

What movie do you see yourself in, or identify with?
What type of imagery do you like from music and album covers?
How do you want to see yourself?

I learned that Mathias identifies with the Punk rock movement, doesn't own a pair of Doc Martens, likes the dark and grungy tones in my photography, is interested in the skinhead culture, counter-culture, often sees things in a political context, likes the imagery of Sonic Youth and Morrissey, is interested in the connection between Pop and Art, wants an image that isn't too sterile, and also not too bright.

Most importantly I found out that Mathias is interested in taking elements from himself (the person) and melding that the concept of the shoot (the idea). This was awesome to hear as it's the way I go about developing portrait shoot concepts.

At the moment I see Mathias standing in front of some old TVs looking a bit like Ian from Joy Division, the background is gray, layered with a bit of industrial grunge. On the TV's are images of static and protest. He sports an awesome pair of framed glasses.

Attached is the mind map I made up for Mathias, something I do for every photo shoot now. It's an easy way to view and arrange elements of a portrait shoot, mixing concepts with the shooting requirements.
The next step is finalizing the concept and doing the shoot.

I put together a sample Brainstorm Wave on Google. For this I took an urban ninja shot I did earlier, and wrote up an example brainstorm. I think this should work out well for brainstorming purposes. We have the ability to start a Wave for each portrait project, people can link to concept sketches or portraits they like (to show as examples). I'm now able to upload images and files direclty to the Wave, which is really awesome. I think this will be fantastic for creative brainstorming. I added an image gallery on the Magazine with screen shots from the example Ninja Wave including with and without images.

I've started a new wave for Mathias, as he has volunteered to be the first to have his portrait taken - which is Awesome! Contact me on Wave and I'll add you to the discussion, if you don't have a Wave ID, send me a message and I'll add you.

Googel Wave: doktorboltzmann@googlewave.com

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I put together an intro presentation to publicize the Web Portrait idea and embed around the web (on the project magazine). Another one is coming soon explaining the organization framework, and ideas on handling the creative process. At the moment I'm looking into using Google Wave as the main brain storming tool, then the process would look like this:

Someone agrees to have their portrait taken
We setup a Google Wave
People can contribute their ideas, add sketches, upload example pictures, etc.
We take the creative inspiration from the Wave and use that as the basis for the portrait
We shoot the portrait

I've setup a sample Wave on Google, contact me and I'll add you to it to check out, if someone has any ideas for setting up something similar, send them to me and we can find the best solution. Ideally we would keep everything contained within Amazee, but I think that if the Wall is used for this purpose, it will quickly become cluttered and difficult to follow.

The only problem with Wave is that it's still very Beta, and might not be fully ready to handle what we need it to do.

My Google Wave name is: doktorboltzmann@googlewave.com
If you're on Google Wave send me you name or leave comment, and if not, I'll add you with one of my invites (until I run out).

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Now that the seed has been planted the logical question is, "What comes next?"

These types of projects can easily be initiated and then forgotten. So momentum and the building of ideas and interest is key. Web Portraits Zurich is off go a fantastic start so far, and my aim is to build on the initial interest and roll out the next phase: Explaining the Portrait concept and project flow.

At the moment I'm in the process of producing a couple of videos, which both present and explain the Web Portraits concept and organization. I figure this is the most effective way to give people an idea of what to expect. The videos can then be embedded in webpages, viewed here on the project magazine, and used to inspire the creative minds of the participants.

First, I'll go more in-depth on my personal motivations behind the project right now. Why Web Portraits, Why organized on Amazee? After all, to just do some portraits of the web people in Zurich, I could have just contacted people and shot the portraits and than would be it. But with Amazee I see some inspiration to experiment with Creative Production.

If you shoot a portrait it might all be done by the photographer, setting up lighting, choosing a location, organizing things and then doing the shoot. In my experience the process of creating a portraits involves a few steps (or non at all):

Concept Creation
Production Design
Shooting
Post-Processing
Distribution

What I'd like to do here is give people the opportunity to participate in the "process" of creating these portraits. Why? Because I've found that exercising your creative tendencies outside of your normal interests (or jobs) makes you a better, more flexible thinker and enables you to improve your ability to view the world in different ways, and that improves your ability to come up with new solutions for different problems in life.

We could do this in a simply way, setup a few flashes, take the portraits, and distribute them as a magazine or on Flickr, but I envision something more interesting. I would like us to create images which strongly reflect both the personalities and the technological/startup attributes of the participants. We can shoot in my home studio, on location around Zurich, we can do environmental portraits in offices, people can stand on computer monitors, the possibilities are truly endless. The question is how to fit these elements to each person.

For example, Amazee is a social grassroots project website, how should this philosophy be integrated into a portrait of say, Gregory or Dania (part of the Amazee team)?

Guzuu.com is a startup featuring handmade products, enabling a direct connection between the producer and the buyer. How would we go about photographing Lukas, the guy who runs Guzuu?

How would one go about shooting Mike Bite, the aspiring entrepreneur who runs mikebite.com?

And once we have these portraits, what then? There are many ways to distribute visual images. In print (a book from Lulu.com) on the web (vie the Amazee Flickr page), as an online magazine (Issuu.com) or is there another new exciting way?

I don't have all the answers, but together I think we can create something unique.

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