website

So during my winter break I have been doing a lot of work to my website, none of which has been uploaded to my server, because instead of doing it piece by piece and doing it that way, I want the big update to be one huge, well super-huge update. I have changed my layout 5 times this break, only to go back to the original 3 days later. My goal is to have a super simple and elegant website. Although I do find web designing to be quite fun, I run into a lot of issues along the way. My biggest issue being forgetting how to do something, and realizing that I forgot my dreamweaver book up at school, so I watch tutorials on how to do it, which is great, but it takes absolutely forever! A great place to watch some tutorials for dreamweaver can be found here : http://www.adobe.com/support/dreamweaver/tutorial_index.html . The best one that I have watched so far has been the one about planning out your website, which can be found here : http://www.adobe.com/support/dreamweaver/layout/site_planning/ .

Throughout my past four years in school (I'm graduating this coming May of 2010), I have learned a lot, obviously, about photography. I think the best thing that I have been taught outside of the technical side of photography is how to market myself. From learning how to market myself as a business I have learned the importance of websites in this digital based world. The great thing about having a website as a photographer is all the "free" advertisement it truly is. And by free, I don't mean a free space on the internet, like with flickr, but its a free way to tell other photographers, editors, magazines, companies etc. about what you are as a photographer and a glimpse at your personality. It also show how i see the world through a camera.. But, at the same, with just how important to have a website it is, it is just as important to have a "in hand" portfolio, a real, professional portfolio because seeing a photograph in person is 100% better than seeing a photograph on the internet. Besides the website and the portfolio, you also need promo (promotional) cards. Promo cards are probably the most fun things to make, once you chose a layout (choosing the layout for my promo cards literally took a week). They are mailable little cards to be sent to whoever you would send your portfolio to, they also make for wonderful Christmas cards! Then of course, you also need normal business cards, and lastly a resume. With all of these tools, along with my photographic skills and knowledge from my schooling at RIT, I am truly ready for the real world out there, wherever I end up, and I'm excited. But, for right now, it's time to head back to school for my last quarter and a half of college.

Also, Happy New Years Eve! My resolution for this year is too shoot more photography for myself more often!

I miss the summer

Looking through some older images today, fell upon this and now I miss the summer time.

Back to Work

Hello, it's been a while. I've missed you... Anyway, during my break from school I took a little bit of a break from photography as well, but now I'm back at it, in a new quarter, with new classes, etc. This quarter I'm taking a class in editorial photography. In this class the photographers are working directly with design students, this is definetly a different experience class wise, then I'm used to. Having to pass everything I do with another person, who isn't a teacher, is odd, but I suppose to good practice for when school is out and working with a lot of different people. It's definetly obvious that the desinger I'm working with and myself have way different views on the way a project should end up looking. So the goal of the class is to get work into a class magazine entitled "Positive/Negative". The photographer and the designer working together chose a topic that is either positive or negative, then makes a photograph to go with it, choses an article (or the other way around, all depends), and then the designer puts it all together in a layout. So for the two page spread we chose to do "The Benefits of Drinking Wine". To play off words, such as "health", the photograph will include a wine glass with grapes in it, wine is made of grapes. I want it to be beautiful, elegant, with a color palate of purples, deep reds and shades of beige.

Recently I foudn this new photographer that I've been looking at quite frequently because I think her work is really nice, her name is Syl Arena, and this is one of her photographs:
I think this is beautiful!! I've got an idea for a new series based off this for fruits and vegtables, more to come when I start it!

No pictures today

So this past quarter (now that it's week 10, to me its all over ) I took a class ophthalmic. For anybody that doesn't know that is, it's doing photography of the inside of the eye, it's what gets done at the eye doctor, hard, but once you get it... it's just same thing over and over. Although I find the imagining interesting, I've learned that this is definetly not for me, there are apsolutely no grounds for any creativity. All you can do is get a perfectly in focus picture of the correct field of an eye. From taking this class, I have learned how much I hate having strict rules that cannot be broken in any way. I like to be able to take a picture and then to be able to manipulate it, whether it be with light, the certain objects, or later in photoshop. But, hey, I'm not a very scientific person.

If you're looking for something funky to look at, just take a look through out all of Urbanoutfitters.com. the very long link below, are these awesome headphones that would be awesome photograph!!
http://www.urbanoutfitters.com/urban/catalog/productdetail.jsp?itemdescription=true&itemCount=60&startValue=1&selectedProductColor=&sortby=&id=17224312&parentid=A_COLL_HOLIDAYCATG09&sortProperties=+subCategoryPosition,&navCount=60&navAction=poppushpush&color=&pushId=A_COLL_HOLIDAYCATG09&popId=APARTMENT_WHATSNEW&prepushId=

Fall in Rochester

Rochester isn't necessarily known for it's beautiful weather... but autumn here is really nice... if you look at the ground to see all of the leaves that have fallen. With in those leaves, there are always that few beautifully colored ones that stick out from the rest around them. These are shots from this weekend from Mendon Ponds and Mount Hope Cometary just of that. These were shot with a Canon G11.

Still working on that website, with no new updates up online to it as of the late, but I've been revamping the galleries, and will post when that is up and running

Website update?

Been working on my website for a whole month now... and honestly, I feel like there has been very little improvement in the last 3 weeks, but still proud that I'm doing this all by myself! Anyway, to the left is a screen shot of a possible gallery update. I'm having a hard time figuring out what type of gallery I like the best, and especially how I want the font to look. I like the font choice, not sure how I feel about the font size, color, and current location though. Also, spry menus are proving to be way more frustrating then I previously thought that they would be!!

This Image is an oldie, but I thought that I'd share it. This is one of the first shots that I ever took with my hasselblad.

Panoramas

I've always loved doing panoramas. The one to the left isn't the best example of one (not edited, or cropped), but I love the concept of being able to show everything, in a wider frame to show the entire view of where you are/were. This past weekend I was in nyc for photoplus (or photo expo, whichever you prefer), and I got the chance to walk around the city and do some street photography. I took it to myself to do a few panoramas, and this is one of the results. This wall graffitti is actually the front of a children's daycare center on Houston, which is right outside of Soho. To put the panorama together I used a program called PTGui Pro. Hands down this is the best program to use when putting a panorama together. You could also do it with many other programs such as using the automate in photoshop. The advantage of using PTGui in comparison to using photoshop is that with PTGui it sets control points and figures out where lines match up, etc. Although I did this panorama hand held (you can tell because it doesn't all match up perfectly) it is best to use a tripod because by using a tripod when you put the panorama files into a program, the program will have an easier time matching up all the lines, and in the end saves you time.

just for fun

This is just for the cute factor, my boyfriend and my dog :-)

personal projects

During the school year I always find it difficult to do personal projects because of lack of time, sleep, nutrition, etc (list of excuses could really go on for a century). But this past Friday I put homework aside for the afternoon and got started on a project that has been in my head for some time. Here are two of the in progress shots, conveniently taken with my phone (so excuse the quality)

For this project I am spray painting headphones different colors to create a more graphic still life, which usually isn't my style. Friday I spent a majority of the day spray painting them, which took a few a hours, and then took them into the studios to try out a few different set ups. I didn't have the back drop that I wanted to use with me, so it wasn't as successful as I would have hoped, but I got the exact lighting set up that I wanted to have which made it a good dry run, getting ready for the real deal.

On another note, this coming Thursday through Saturday is PDN's Photo Expo in NYC. If you've never heard of it, photo expo somewhat of a photography trade show, but instead of selling things it's mainly a place where you get try out the latest and greatest of any type of photo gear that you can possibly think of, talk with other photographers, go to workshops about new photo software, and quite a bit more. I decided to purchase the gold pass this year to be able to do more on the floor and go to more seminars.

promo cards

makin' promo cards

Irving Penn

So, it's a sad day in "photo world", Irving Penn, one of the mots influencial photographers of our time passed away today. He had a very simple style that I have always found beautiful and elegant.
RIP Irving Penn

last night

Yesterday in the studio I decided to work with a "light box" effect. I took items that are slightly transparent or flat. I wanted to show light can wrap around an object. I used a profoto head with a 40 degree grid on it. I found this to be really interesting because usually I'm a very frontal photographer, in the sense when I put light on the direct front of an object or person for depth, dimension, or basically so you can view the texture and what the object is. I found when working with the more flat objects, like these skeleton keys that I found at an antique shop.In this particular shot I threw out the focus. By throwing out the focus the light was allowed to wrap around the key more and the lack of focus also allowed the keys to appear thinner than they actually are.

The one flaw to being in the AD program is that it kind of scares me out of being more playful. But with doing projects like this, makes me want to do more playfull projects.

offically up and running

I am officially up and running! If you are reading my blog, you probably got it from my website www.jessdavisphoto.com, but if not feel free to check out my work and let me know what you think here.

This weekend I went out shooting and played around with my lens baby. This is only the second time that I have ever used it, but I think my results were pretty neat. This lens has a tilt-shift effect, but in a small frame, as a 35mm, it's more dramatic.

Here's one of my results from this




Not my usual style, but I like it. The lens baby affected this image by only have a small plane of focus, where instead of the entire image being in focused, only the very top of the weeds are.

Starting Off

Welcome to my blog!
Here I will be updating with pictures of the day, and other projects that don't quite make it to my website. Also will probably update with tons of thoughts and whatever else I feel like saying here.

A little bit about myself, my name is Jessica Davis, and I am currently in my senior year at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) studying Photography with a concentration in Advertising Photographic Illustration, and will be graduating in May 2010. I am originally from central New Jersey, and after school hope to be working and living in NYC.

This is a project one that I worked on over the summer. In my parents garden they had some nice looking flowers, but being up at school I never see it die, so what I did is I picked one, and every couple of hours I would make a scan of it to note the progression of it's life.