Pushing Pixels

The view from the dock at Charles house on Mosquito Creek, near Bennetts Point, SC.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to spend some time on the coast at one of my favorite places in the world, my friend Charles’ river house on Fenwick Island.  The best thing about Fenwick is that it is private, and with the exception of about 5 houses which are all owned by members of the Baldwin family, it is completely un-spoiled by the meddling of man.  Wild, un-touched, and completely cut off, this is the perfect place for me to get back in touch with my personal vision, explore, and have an adventure fishing off-shore, and have deep philosophical discussions with others much wiser than I.

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Tags: beauty, boat, carolina, coast, creek, dock, marsh, natural, nature, palmetto, photography, print, river, shilouette, sunset, travel, tree, water.

My first fine art photography show Symbology, installed in the black box theatre at the Columbia Music Festival association.

As I sat on the porch where I currently live, listening to the water fall in the Koi pond, and trying to catch up on growing email inbox this morning, I ran across a facebook message from a few weeks ago that new friend and fellow artist Anastasia Chernoff sent, after visiting my photo show, the subject of that message was “The after-show glow…”  In her message she equated the emotions of putting your first show together, to giving birth to a baby (something I’ll never know about), and went on to say “…the opening night was all so beautifully surreal. An incredible high that, to this day, STILL resonates within me when I think about it.”  That last statement is something I can now completely understand though.  Now that I look back on the whole experience of my show which closed at the conclusion of the 2009 Artista Vista three weeks ago, it STILL resonates within me, and I’m sure it will continue to, for the rest of my life.  While my entire life has been a complete whirlwind for the past 3 months, filled with the stresses of work, travel, putting on my first show, and trying to buy my first home, I sit here this morning feeling the calmest, and certainly the most content I’ve been in the past 8 months, all thanks to the wonderful friends, and family who now share my life with me.

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Tags: art, artist, gallery, photograph, photographer, photography, picture, show, video.

Over the past few months, many things in my life have gone through significant changes. The road I am on today, is not the one I thought I would be on two years ago in some instances, or even four months ago in others. While the realization of necessary change has been a hard pill to swallow for me, I have come to realize many things about who I am, the world around me, and how I see those things.

I have also recently come to understand that the right things find you at the right time, when you need them the most. Those things you find can be as simple as a sunset, or as complicated as a book, that teaches you not to take things for granted, and reminds you to always follow your dreams. If those things found you any sooner they wouldn’t impact you in the way they do when you really need them. This reaization held true when I saw a link to a YouTube video of Apple Founder, Steve Jobs 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, on my friend’s twitter feed this morning. I have always been a fan of Steve Jobs and his visionary thinking, and this speech is no exception.

This video holds special significance to me, since I also graduated from college in the same year. While I could sit here, and pine away at the idea of hearing this speech, or one equally as deep and motivational at my own graduation from Western Kentucky University, four years ago, I don’t think it would have impacted me seeing it now has. Seeing this speech is a reminder to me, never to loose the idealism, and passion for what I have worked so hard to achieve. So “Stay hungry, stay foolish…”

Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005

Tags: apple, commencement, death, failure, inspiration, jobs, life, realization, rejection, speech, stanford, steve, video.

9/27/07 - Columbia, S.C., Local alternative rock band Closer, rehearses for their upcoming performance at the Five Points End of Construction Celebration on Friday, October 5, 2007. The group which has been together off and on for almost eight years consists of David Reed, (vocals, guitar), David Baker, (bass), and Nathan Reed, (drums). © 2008 Brett Flashnick/All Rights Reserved

After reading the story The Day the Music Died in The State today, about how Richaland County just shut down all of the bands that practice at the Sumter Street Storage sheds, I really can’t help but wonder what can be done to help make this area more friendly to the creative community.  The Sumter Street Storage facility was not only a safe haven for up and coming musicians to practice over the past 20 years, but it was a source of creativity for my own visual art as well.  I made the above image of the alt. rock band Closer as the practiced inside of their rented shed in late 2007.  I cringe to think of all the tax money that the Columbia Talent Management project just spent on a survey about how to attract the creative class to the area, when the answer is simple.  Prove that you are there to support them!  Most creatives didn’t get into their respective fields to get rich, or famous, they probably didn’t even choose it at all, it chose them.  We create because there isn’t anything else we could envision doing, or because creating fills a deeper part of our souls and fulfills our lives, and the lives of those who are inspired by what we create, be it music, art, poetry, etc…  The easiest thing you can do to help out is show them that they have your support.  I know this was a ruling made by the county fire marshall, but what now?  Now is the time for Columbia to step up and provide, or just even allow a place like Sumter Street Storage to operate.

Tags: alternative, arts, band, blue, Columbia, creative, facility, music, ordinance, photograph, photography, photojournalism, practice, rock, SC, south carolina.

On Friday, September 26, 2008, the United States Senate passed their version of the Orphan Works legislation by hotline. A hotline is an informal term for a request to members of the Senate to agree to allow a bill or resolution to be approved by the Senate without debate or amendment (for more information on hotline process read this article by Sen. Tom Colburn).

Currently the House version of The Orphan Works Act of 2008 bill, H.R. 5889, is in the House Judiciary Committee, and while it is not as damaging as the Senate version S.2913, either version of the bill would cause catastrophic harm to creative communities which depend on protections of their intellectual property, provided under current Copyright law.

According to the Orphan Works Act of 2008, an “orphan work” is defined as any copyrighted work whose author is unable to be located by an infringer who claims they have performed a “reasonably diligent search” (however it in no way gives any parameters as to what a reasonably diligent search is. In a departure from existing copyright law and business practice, the U.S. Copyright Office has proposed that Congress grant such infringers freedom to ignore the rights of the author and use the work for any purpose, including commercial usage.  

This proposal goes far beyond current concepts of fair use.  It is written so broadly that it will expose new works to infringement, even where the author is alive, in business, and licensing the work.  The bill would substantially limit the copyright holder’s ability to recover financially or protect the work, even if the work was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office prior to infringement.  The bill also has a disproportionate impact on visual artists such as photographers, because it is common for an artist’s, work to be published without credit lines or because credit lines can be removed electronically removed by others in our current, electronic age, where many of these images wind up on the internet.

The Orphan Works Act would force artists to risk their lives’ work to subsidize the start-up ventures of private, profit making registries, using untested image recognition technology and untried business models. These models would inevitably favor the aggregation of images into corporate databases over the licensing of copyrights by the lone artists who create the art.  The most common scenario of orphaning in visual art is the unmarked image. There is only one way to identify the artist belonging to an unmarked image. That would be to match the art against an image-recognition database where the art resides with intact authorship information. These databases would become one-stop shopping centers for infringers to search for royalty-free art. Any images not found in the registries could be considered orphans.  There is no limit to the number of these registries nor the prices they would charge artists for the coerced registration of their work.

In the end, the artist would bear the financial burden of paying for digitizing and depositing the digitized copy with the commercial registries.  Almost all visual artists such as painters, illustrators and photographers are self employed. The number of works created by the average visual artist far exceeds the volume of the most prolific creators of literary, musical and cinematographic works. The cost and time-consumption to individual artists of registering tens of thousands of visual works, at even a low fee, would be prohibitive; therefore countless working artists would find existing works orphaned from the moment they create them.  The Copyright Office has stated explicitly that failure of the artist to meet this burden of registration would result in their work automatically becoming an orphan and subject to legal infringement.

I don’t feel that there are words strong enough to tell you how important it is to personally contact your Representative in the United States House, and ask them to stand against this piece of legislation.  However if you don’t have enough time to call or write them personally please visit http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/issues/alert/?alertid=11980321 or  http://www.petitiononline.com/Stop2913/petition.html or http://www.house.gov/.

If you would like to find out more information please visit http://owoh.org/.

Tags: artist, copyright, house, important, legislation, orphan, protection, senate, works.

There are certain parts of any job that you love, and others that you dread. I always have a pit in my stomach when I have to photograph funeral proceedings for someone that was taken from loved ones all too soon. Its a delicate balance between telling a story about what this person meant, and being respectful towards a grieving family, and sometimes that line is hard to find.

On Wednesday I photographed the funeral of Helen Hill, a documentary film maker from New Orleans, La., who was murdered in her home just six days earlier. What most people know by now is that Hill, a talented film maker, who has become an example of the escalating violence in “The Big Easy,” was one of six people murdered in a 24-hour period in hurricane ravaged city, which she loved. But what has been left out of the network news reports, and what I learned throughout the day, is that she was a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, and a friend to almost anyone she met.

As the Hill’s casket was carried into St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, I caught a glimpse of her 2-year-old son Francis Pop, in the arms of his father and Hill’s husband, Dr. Paul Gailiunas, who was also shot in the same incident in which Helen was killed. As they walked past me, I had to put the camera to my eye in order to avoid making eye contact. However as they passed where I was standing to enter the church, Francis’ eyes locked with my lens, and I couldn’t look away. There was something so innocent about his gaze in my direction, which wasn’t the typical stare of disgust that I am used to receiving as I photograph a funeral. As he continued to stare, I framed the image, of him looking over his fathers shoulder, and took a picture. His father turned to kiss him on the head, another picture, and another, and another, and so on. The few moments the two were standing on the steps of the church seemed to last an eternity.

As I walked up the stairs to enter the balcony of the church my mind jumped back in time, to three hours earlier, where a crowd gathered outside of a small independent theatre, before the funeral. Friends and family lined the block as they waited to enter the dark screening room for a viewing of Hill’s short films, as the governor of South Carolina was being sworn in across the street. As the the services began Hill’s brother, Jacob D. Hill IV spoke to a the crowd now gathered inside of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church on Bull St., saying “I think she’s laughing seeing all her pacifist, left-leaning activist friends gathering across the street from where a Republican governor is being sworn in with F16s flying overhead.” More stories from friends, and family followed, all describing the same compassionate, fun loving, artistic person, that I began to wish I had the chance to meet.

As the service ended, Hill’s friends and family spilled onto the street, still wiping tears from their eyes, comforting each other, but all seemed to be overcome with athe spirit of compassion, in the memory of someone they loved dearly. As the crowd began to break up for the procession to the cemetery, Christine Gump, a friend of Helen’s, who flew to Columbia, from Los Angeles, removed the jacket, that was covering her left arm where a brightly “chicken embryo” tattoo had been freshly inked into her skin. “Eight of us went and got these on Sunday… We wanted to do it to remember her,” Gump said.

As I walked back to my car, physically and emotionally drained, I couldn’t help but feel happiness, because even though I never had the chance to meet Helen, her spirit, which lives on in her friends and family gave me a brief, and fleeting glimpse into how wonderful of a person she really was. Even posthumously, Helen touched my life.

Helen Hill Memorial Website
b.rox:Life in the Flood Zone
Videos of Helen Hill on You Tube
NPR Commentary by David Koen

Tags: film maker, helen hill, memorial, new orleans.

For the past three weeks I have been following home school families associated with the Forest Acres Christian Educators association, as they prepare for their first annual Fall Heritage Ball. To the students this was more than just a regular fall dance. Since they are home schooled this is the closest that many of them would get to attending a formal dance that resembled a prom. For the parents the evening marked one more victory in their quest to provide an education for their children… on their terms.

After months of planning, shopping, and rehearsing the formal dances like the Virginia Reel, Postie’s Jig, and several Waltzes, the night finally arrived. However unlike most proms the was no blaring hip-hop music, no gyrating bodies, and no skimpy dresses that left little to the imagination. As one parent stated, “if its not for sale, don’t advertise it. As the sounds of a traditional waltz made their way out of the stereo, fathers danced with daughters, brothers danced with sisters, and friends danced with each other.

This story has been a nice change of pace for me, and its also been a fun opportunity to learn more about a part of the community that I didn’t know much about. Even though I’m sure we have a lot of differences in ideals, morals, and religion, these families were absolutely wonderful to me. They allowed me complete access to anything I wanted, and thanked me for being there every time I showed up. It is stories and experiences like this, that recharge my batteries for photojournalism, if only I could do more of them.

Tags: home, prayer, project, prom, school, story.

High school sports… bad light, coaches who could care less, officials that give you a hard time, and parents who seem to do nothing but complain, for all the difficulties… every now and then a nice fram slips through the shutter.

Tags: championship, high, indoor, net, prep, school, set, sport, volleyball.

Lately I’ve been taking my job a little to seriously, and it is becoming something I do to have an income, instead of something I love to do. But then again lately I’ve been taking life a little to seriously. I suppose that is the curse of making something that you love to do your career. In some ways its inevitable to just take something lightly as you get older, because you begin to realize that you need to be able to make a car payment, rent, insurance, food, etc… But when you worry about all of that stuff you tend to forget why you really started doing this in the first place. Perhaps its just time to stop taking everything so seriously, and start having fun again. Maybe then things will just fall into place. Who knows how everything will work out in the long run, and if we did know that… what would be the fun in living life. Its time to get up off of the couch and go explore the world, have some fun, and see what happens. Its time to take the point and shoot out, like I did at the beach the other day, because its more about the journey than the resullts. In that moment when I wasn’t thinking about shutter speeds, f-stops, and iso, so I get to remember the sunrise, instead of how I photographed the sunrise. I think the line from the movie is “Don’t take life to seriously, you’ll never get out alive.”

Peace

Tags: atlantic, beach, carolina, collage, east, folly, photo, stitch, sunrise, travel.

Last night I got to shoot an event that I never thought I would see, my alma mater (WKU) taking on the University of South Carolina in the first round of the NIT. It was a completely surreal experience. I don’t think I can count the number of times I’ve covered WKU at Diddle Arena in Bowling Green, Ky. as a student, and USC at the Carolina Coliseum or their new home the Colonial Center, as a freelancer.

On one hand I have spent my entire life growing up around the Gamecocks, and on the other I have spent the last four years of my life, eating, sleeping (or lack thereof) and breathing the photojournalism program at WKU. So needless to say both schools are very near and dear to me.

The first two things I saw when walking on to the court made me do a double take, first the all too familiar red towel, and second a very good friend of mine from WKU, Tyler Pelan, whom I hadn’t seen in over a year.

It was nights like last night that make me thankful that I am able to be a photographer, because of the relationships we have with each other, the love we all share for making photos, and the ability to be in the situation where you don’t have to pick a team you are pulling for because you have to stay “neutral” to document the assignment.

Aside from all of of the business stuff I am finally shooting again. Enclosed are two of my favorite shots from the game.

Tags: action, basketball, carolina, Gamecocks, hilltoppers, NIT, photography, sports, western kentucky, wku.