Photographers You Should Know About - Loretta Lux

Loretta Lux

One of my favorite fine art photographers has to be Loretta Lux. Her photographs of children, in odd outfits, and in sometimes odder environments, make for some really beatifully eerie images. And things are usually intentionally just a bit 'off' to make things even more surreal (note the slightly enlarged heads in many of the images, or the fact that many of the children appear to be 'snatched up' from Eastern Europe during World War II). And though these images rely heavily on Photoshop, as they are admittedly pieced together in post-production which often takes up to 2 months per image, Lux takes on a much more 'painterly' approach when creating her photographs. 

Born in Dresden, Germany in 1969, Lux early on was influenced by Old Master paintings from artists like Rubens and Velåzquez. In the 90's, she studied to be a painter for a bit, but was not into the 'messy' aspect of painting, so she took many of the influences and ideas she loved about painting, and applied them to her photography. And what's even more amazing is, it wasn't until 1996 that she picked up a camera for the first time, basically knowing nothing about photography. Her large prints now sell for nearly $20,000. (See kids, if that's not something to be inspired about, I don't know what is!)....

If you haven't checked out her first book, which is titled 'Loretta Lux' (and published by Aperture), I do suggest you find a copy, make yourself a nice cup of tea, and slowly feed your brain, page by page, with her beautiful images. Her use of color, light, models and minimalism absolutely makes me weak in the knees.

all images © loretta lux. 

Online, you can check out more of her work, by visiting   

http://www.lorettalux.com

Sunday Morning Sunrise....Sandy River Delta park

This morning, my son came into the bedroom at 4:30 complaining he was having a really bad nightmare about some bad guys robbing us. Just to be safe, I checked out the house. Fortunately, it looked like there was just as much crap in the house as yesterday...perhaps, somehow even a little more???


Anyways, Harry managed to fall back asleep in our bed, but I wasn't quite so lucky. So, I got up and headed out with the camera. I shot these at the mouth of the Columbia River Gorge in a beautiful open area called Sandy River Delta park. It's one of my favorite spots to walk on their trails, or ride the bikes. It's also one of my favorite places to shoot models, portraits, or just some scenery. There wasn't a model around and awake at 5:15 this morning, so I opted to shoot what was readily available. There was a beautiful mist hanging in the valley, which quickly started to burn-off just as the sun started to come up.

All of these were shot on a Canon 5D. Mostly between f/11 and f/16 at 1/125, for those of you who are keeping score at home. 

Swim Meet

My son Harry, who is 6, had his second-ever swim meet in Portland yesterday. I loved the pool...it is Wilson Pool, an outdoor pool with a baby pool, frog slide, and big blue slide adjacent to the lap pool. I didn't bring my camera along with me (fairly typical!), but I did have the iPhone with me. So I snapped a few pre-meet photos. These were all processed in-phone (which sounds really funny...most would say all done in-camera...Anyways, what I mean is there was no post-cropping or Photoshop used ....Effects were done just using Shake it Photo and/or Tilt Shift Generator apps available for the iPhone.)  In some cases I have two versions, one without the Polaroid effect, and one with, just to show the differences the Polaroid app makes to the images. It's very cool. Do check it out if you have an iPhone.....

assignment: readymade magazine

These images were shot last year for ReadyMade Magazine. This was an article on Jessica Ress, founder of Angel Face Botanicals here in Portland, Oregon. Most of these images never made it to print, so I wanted to share some more stuff from the shoot here.
She's a great girl, who makes some great products -- from salt scrubs to aromatherapy. Hey, even I smelled good after that shoot, which is a telling sign...

Anyways, we had a great afternoon shooting. We shot in all available light (and a even some available wind!) At one point, a giant gust came up and knocked over the Matthews LowBoys and sandbags that were holding up the drop. Thankfully, dear Jessica was upwind of the destruction....

Here is her website: http://www.angelfacebotanicals.com/catalog/
and her blog: http://angelfacebotanicals.blogspot.com/

go check out her amazing products....!

photos: doug hoeschler
h/mu: kimberly hoeschler

iPhone, why can't I just use you on real photoshoots?

Iphones are obviously all the rage lately. And I have to admit, I love taking pictures with mine, even though it's about 3 generations old now, and can't shoot video. But I don't care. I love the ease of the thing and I love the low-fi quality of it all. Sort of Polaroid for the new generation...
I sometimes just use the regular old camera feature, but I also have a few photo apps in my arsenal, that I use quite regularly.
Here is what I use: Shake it Photo (gives a very authentic 'polaroid' feel to your images, complete with a border), Tilt Shift Generator (for bokeh and selective focus techniques), and Toy Camera (for more vintagey feeling images), for the most part. (I'm interested in downloading some new stuff but need to update the software on my iphone first, before I can do that.)

Anyways, look for more of this stuff to come soon...I promise there will be lots more!