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An Amazing Night of Art

// January 18th, 2012 // View Comments // Uncategorized, featured

For lovers of history, artifacts, sculptures, coins, and various others forms of art, the Long Night of Museums is full of golden opportunities. This amazing art event spans for about 400 sq kilometers. The strip of artistic exhibitions is between the Waterplant Friedrichshagen museum and the Local History Reinickendorf. About 100 different museums will offer free visits to visitors. The museums are offering visitor access to their unique museum collections and featured exhibitions. This unforgettable event is hosted twice a year in the capital city of Berlin, Germany. The next event takes place during the months of January/February 2012. This amazing night of art not only features a variety of exhibitions, but it also features recitals, performances by well known celebrities, theatrical performances, and much more. This event is a highly anticipated night of enjoyment for local people and visitors from all over the world.

Free Stock Photo - Illuminate

© PhotographerPaul Prescott

Where and When:

The Long Night of Museums is a biannual event that will be held in Berlin on January 28, 2012. The participating museums will remain open from 6 in the evening until 2 in the morning for visitors. All visitors will receive a significant discount since the tickets will be priced at an equivalent to that of a single visit. Tickets, directions, and bus routes are available online. The tours through these museums offer an excellent ethical and artistic evening of enjoyment to visitors. Though the time span for the complete tour is 8 hours, you will probably want far more time than that in order to enjoy each museum’s exhibition to your heart’s content. There are many collections and exhibitions to see, so choose wisely. Each museum has an enthralling display and its own unique permanent collection.

An Occasion for Art Enthusiasts

There is nothing more frustrating for an art enthusiast than to be surrounded by inspiration and not have the chance to take it all in.  Each visitor can get the best out of this event by learning about each and every museum exhibition and making a list of the ones they want to visit.  Visitors can also chalk out a suitable route that will allow them enjoy each of the museums on the list. The museums in Berlin are based on various themes and topics. Some of the museums depict a particular culture, while others may depict a particular period in history. The museums that deserve special mention include the Natural Museum of History, the New Synagogue at the Jewish Center, and the National Gallery. The Long Night of Museums is held in remembrance of the demolition of the Berlin wall. This amazing evening signifies artistic unity.

Enjoy the Night Out

There are also venues that show movies, hold concerts, and present dancing shows. There will be buses carrying passengers between the museums. Your ticket gives you free access to local transportation. So whether your passion is of sculptures, history, artifacts, coins, or other forms of art, be sure to take advantage of this amazing night of art. For more information visit Berlin’s site dedicated to the event.

This is the first blog post from one of our new bloggers, Kathleen Delaney. Kathleen had her first literary work published in 1990. Since then, she has been published in various publications and blogs. Delaney won a Georgia writing contest for 3 years in a row, between the years of 2001-2003. After 2.5 years of study, she graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in 2003. Delaney is finishing a Science Fiction novel for young adults, and she is writing and illustrating several children’s books. She writes fiction and non-fiction on a regular basis, and she stays busy with creative projects through her freelance business, Mimosa Creations.

East meets West on canvas – Yang Na

// January 11th, 2012 // View Comments // b-inspired, featured

DAY DREAM 150*160cm Oil on canvas2008As the West focuses ever more intently on doing business with rising superpower China, attention is also turning to Chinese art. It would be unfair to call China ‘emerging’ artists, since the nation’s practitioners have been creating highly sophisticated art for a lot longer than Europe.

But it must be admitted that when we think of British art, images by – or possibly of – Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin will probably spring to mind, while when asked to think of Chinese art, our mind’s eye will conjure up a Ming vase. In fact, China has been busy creating contemporary art for a several decades, although it is only in the past ten years that Europe and the US has started to focus on such works.

In the work of Chinese contemporary artist Yang Na, who works in oil on canvas, we see how the long, deep history of finely tuned classical Chinese art - in which artisans painted and shaded in tiny, realistic detail – is being fused with concepts of consumerism and capitalism.

Na’s pieces are hype- real and contain touches of tradition in the classical fish scale patterns, or the depiction of pearls.  But she uses realistic shading to create cosmic, surreal and disturbing pieces that suggest sexualised children. The traditional divide between the East and West is slowly dissolving, and not least in art. Yang Na’s work is reflective of French artist Miss Van’s sloe-eyed women, and of contemporary US artist Mark Ryden’s disillusioned and cynical children. As East and West meet, Chinese art is becoming not only about Chinese culture, but about ours as well.

HIBERNATION IN THE COIN PUPA 160*150cm Oil on canvas 2008

Post by Paper Boat Creative, one of our new bloggers and a creative agency on the Exchange. If you’d like the chance to work with great agencies and artists for your commercial projects, then brief now!

Wet Plate Photography – still popular

// July 25th, 2011 // View Comments // b-inspired, featured

Despite the many advancements in photography there are photographers who are using techniques over a century old in their photography today. I’m referring to wet plate photography here, where the a glass plate is covered with thin film of collodion and then treated with silver nitrate. The process is incredibly complicated and difficult, especially when compared to modern day DSLRs. But it is popular among some photographers, including Dan Carillo, a Seattle based artist and photographer. But why?

Well it gives you absolutely huge negatives meaning that you can produce large prints of enormous quality. The flip side is that the exposure times for the each photograph are often quite long, up to a minute often, as the plates have a very low ISO (this is the speed at which the film or plate reacts to light). Standard film has an ISO of 400, with 100 considered quite slow; Carillo’s plates have an ISO of 1. The benefits of this is that it gives you such fine grain prints that they’re hardly noticeable. There’s an excellent video showing Carillo in his studio and his working methods here.

However, the main benefit of Wet Plate Photography is that it gives you results like no other area of photography. Carillo is able to focus you’re attention exactly where he wants it and his Wet Plate Collodion Seattle Artist Portrait Project is well worth looking at. Portraits are have a dream like quality whilst landscapes contain a stunning amount of detail. Though the process is time consuming and easy to get wrong the effort is clearly worth it, as Carillo says ‘there’s always something unique about them’.

It’s a woman’s world – our favourite five female photographers

// March 17th, 2011 // View Comments // Uncategorized, b-inspired, featured

Earlier this week it was announced that an exhibition of photographs by Homai Vyarawalla’s, India’s first female photographer, was going to take place. When Ms. Vyarawalla first started out she had to submit her photos under her husbands name because of the prejudices against her gender, prejudices which are still very present today against female photographers in India. It is an obvious shame and one that India will hopefully come to regret; the photos by Ms. Vyarawalla are excellent. The news got me thinking, as I had not heard of Ms. Vyarawalla until this, that now would be an excellent time to share my favourite female photographers:

Anna Atkins 1799 – 1871
Atkins was primarily a botanist but due to her correspondence with Fox Talbot, the inventor of photography, she learnt of photograms, where objects are placed on light sensitive paper and exposed to the sun in order to record their imprint. In 1843 Atkins published Part I of British Algae, pre-dating Talbot’s own book Pencil of Nature by almost a year, and established photography as a medium for scientific illustration. Sadly she received little recognition until recently.

Gertrude Käsebier 1852–1934
In the late 1890′s Käsebier visited Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, whilst at the show she took several pictures of the Native Americans within the show, she would soon become sympathetic of their plight. The substantial body of photographs she would of those Native Americans from the show would be perhaps her most famous images. She was one of the first women to be elected to the famous Linked Ring and the Newark (Ohio) Photographic Journal declared her to be “the foremost professional photographer in the United States”.

Frances Benjamin Johnston

Johnston is perhaps most famous for her portraits of celebrities of the time, she was the last person to take a portrait of US President William McKinley before his assassination. The breadth of her work is astonishing though, she travelled widely taking pictures of all aspects of society and her photographs of buildings falling into disrepair and decay are an invaluable resource to architects. She was pioneer of the so called ‘New Woman’ and was a constant advocate for the female in photography.

Dorothea Lange 1895 – 1965
Lange is the photographer behind one of the most famous photographs of the twentieth century. This is Migrant Mother, one of a series of photographs she took of depression era America, where a mother gazes out into the middle distance whilst her children hide their faces behind her. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography. After the bombing of Pearl Harbour she gave this up to document the internment of Japanese Americans. Her images, including those of Japanese American children being forced to swear allegiance to America before being interned, were so critical of America that the army impounded them.

Margaret Bourke-White 1904 – 1971
Bourke-White has an impressive list of firsts to her name; she was the first female photojournalist for Life, she was the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of the Soviet Union and the first female war-correspondent. This last one also made her the first female permitted to work in a war zone. She was an astonishing woman and my favourite photographer. Whether she was photographing a steel mill or the front line of a war she managed to take pictures that captured the essence of her subject. Her list of accomplishments is too long to describe here unfortunately.

These are only brief biographies and I haven’t been able to go into the depth that I would like, but I hope they give a glimpse into the rich contribution that they gave us. I have obviously only been able to include five, there is a huge list on Wikipedia I recommend you  check out.

The title photograph is of Frances Benjamin Johnston in a self portrait occasionally titled ‘New Woman’.  Homai Vyarawalla’s exhibition opens at the Sir Cowasji Jehangir Public Hall in April.

Throw away your DSLR

// March 10th, 2011 // View Comments // Uncategorized

These days every tourist and his dog has the latest enormous DSLR; but do you really need one when you’ve got a perfectly good camera in your pocket?

The cameras that come built into your phone are increasingly more proficient and camera phones score several points over the more traditional digital camera in some key areas. They are much smaller and more portable. They’re already attached to your phone which most people take with them everywhere, and they’re incredibly easy to use. Some suffer from incredibly poor shutter lag, but on the whole most are quite good. They are surprisingly good in low light situations, such as the pub. In those situations where a digital camera would be impractical a camera phone can a great asset. If you start waving any kind of camera around on the street people can react surprisingly badly, especially the authorities,(if you don’t know your rights click here). But camera phones are much more discreet and people are used to seeing them in the street. You can even buy camera accessories for your phone like this 500mm lens.

But will camera phones eventually become the camera of choice across the board? Well, again we must divide the consumers up into those who are professionals and those who aren’t. It seems that as camera phones become more advanced that they will replace the digital camera for the latter group. But for those who are professionals, or who even just have a passion for photography, a camera phone won’t cut the mustard. I know that there are several professional photographers who use the iPhone, most famously David Guttenfelder. But aside from the issue of photojournalism and filters, the picture quality is appalling.

The main disadvantage facing the camera phone is that because of all the other features that have to be packed in there you can’t put a large sensor in there. A typical DSLR will have a sensor that’s 36mm by 24mm; a camera phone will use a sensor in the realm of 1/4” to 2/3”. If you’d like a nice colourful picture of what this means click here. I hesitate to get too technical, mainly because I’m not very technical, but suffice to say that the crux of digital cameras is the sensor. It doesn’t matter how many mega-pixels you cram in or how big your ISO range if you don’t have a decent sensor. As long with people wanting to use their phones for things like making calls as well as taking pictures camera phones won’t be able to go toe to toe with the big boys for quality any time soon. So maybe don’t throw away your DSLR just yet.

Picture taken by William van Wyngaarden on a iPhone 3G modified using Instagram.