Busy, Busy, Busy

Yesterday was great, but today was even better.

Yesterday, I got the courage to walk into this church, Unity Church, here in Santa Barbara and ask them if I could have permission to photograph the building's exterior. I needed something to shoot for my assignment this week in school, so I wanted to shoot what I love: architecture.

Now this church isn't like any normal church, especially around here in Santa Barbara. It doesn't have shingles, it isn't white/cream stucco. This church is made of brick, steel, and glass. Majority of it is brick which you can see in the picture below. I got there around 10:30am, shot till around 12:30pm, then went back around 3:30 and left around 4:30pm. My shoot in the later morning was much better in terms of lighting than the early afternoon time. Shadows were casted by trees on the structure and its many facades. I was intrigued by this church's linearity with strong horizontal and vertical lines. There was not one curve on this building, and that is what I love the most.

The two photos above are just one of many images I shot. This is the one I chose for my assignment. The black and white image is the actual assignment. Personally I like the image in b/w than in color.

Some of you might think its pretty boring to have a building with no curves, but I am a modernist and squares and rectangles are what I love. So I photographed it, before Sunday because of the service, and because the photograph's deadline is this Monday. HA!

On another note! Yesterday I got an email from a teacher of mine, stating that Hristo Shindov is shooting up in Santa Ynez/Solvang a Hristo rea, and needs 2-3 assistants to help out at the shoot. I have no clue why, but I decided I'd actually check my Brooks student email, and low and behold there was my teacher's forwarded email to us from. I thought about it for about 10 minutes thinking about if I could do it schedule wise, and if I could do it assistant wise. Well, I was the first one to contact him immediately and am 1 of the 3 people assisting him. Check out his website: Hristo Shindov. His work is really good and legit. Great compositing, and his lighting and technique are something I've never seen before, especially someone that has graduated from Brooks Institute.

We'll see how that goes on Tuesday at 8am O_O!

Rawhide

This is my first blog.

My first blog post.

Not my first time thinking about creating a blog.

I'm into architectural photography.

My influence is Julius Shulman.

I have an infatuation for good design.

Mid-century modern architecture is my ideal style of architecture.

Hopefully I'll stick with this blog longer than I hope to, which is as long as I continue being a photographer.

This is just an example of which font I should use. A case study if you will of the really crappy fonts that blogger.com has. But I think for my personality, and the style and type of photography I shoot, Verdana is the way to go. In school, Brooks Institute, I'm learning about typography and the many ways to be creative with it. The book, "Designing With Type," is an amazing book, that illustrates and describes a quick history of TYPE, and also teaches you how to become more design orientated with the typography you use.

After reading the entire book, I had learned so much! I'm about to dive in it for a 2nd time just so I can comprehend what I'd learned.

Since this is an introduction I might as well say that sometimes, depending on what it is, I get infatuated with it. Little things. Good typography in this case. I'd never really studied type which made this book extremely interesting. I finished it in 2 days, one day at home, and the other why relaxing throughout the airports of Seattle and Portland (unfortunately not on Charles and Ray Eames public seating

In advertisement, even though I'm not going into it since I'm geared 100% towards architecture as a professional career, uses typography a lot. Most individuals don't really think about it. Most just READ it, scan it, see it. Others, and I'm starting to get to this point, study it. Study the font type, either sans serif, serif, script, or some other wacky custom font. Study what I'd just learned is the tracking, kerning, and leading of the type. Tracking: word-spaceing. Kerning: individual letter spacing. Leading: linespacing. Each has its own functionality, and each can "make or break" a sentence, paragraph, or single word phrase in an advertisement.

There is so much that goes behind a photograph with copy, its unbelievable. I'd never recognized it, you might have never recognized it, but I hope since I'm mentioning it right now you'll start some of these aspects of the typography all around us. Every where we look its there. On the Coca Cola can in front of me, on the Maker's Mark bottle on my shelf, what you're reading every time you search the internet, read a newspaper, read a magazine, look at your text message, read an e-mail message. ITS EVERYWHERE! And us as photographers really can't escape it, either we know it and do it ourselves or we have a graphic designer/art director do it all for us. Its in our profession and its here to stay.

I don't know how good of a first post this was, but I don't care. I'll be doing many posts such as this and posting my photography as well, not only as an architecture shooter, but also some photos I do for assignments in class.

I'll also be at times posting what I'm listening to at the moment I'm typing the post, so you can get a glimpse of who I am through my music selection.

Peace.