Stills in Motion (Textured) 49-55

Exploring motion and textures at the same time. I like the juxtaposition of the movement suggested by the blur and the stillness of the paper-like textures.

Texture Photography - Untitled #5

Texture Photography - Untitled #4

Part of the Nude Series I I've been working on.

Texture photography - Untitled #3

Texture Photography - Untitled #2

Here's another photograph on the latest series using textures. This one is made up of 3 textures blended together in multiple layers.

After I posted the previous one, a few people contacted me asking about the technique I used. I plan to write something up about how I'm doing these photographs once I get some free time (which has been pretty much non-existent lately), but one thing that surprised many is that instead of using Photoshop for these I've used Pixelmator.

I bought Pixelmator a few months ago but hadn't had time to play with it. However, I recently did a fresh install of my Macs and decided to not install Photoshop for a while to force me to use Pixelmator. I like it a lot, although it does lack several features I miss from PS. I may write a review at some point.

Texture photography - Untitled

I've been playing with textures lately and I'm really happy how the new series is turning out. More to come soon.

An afternoon landscape in New Zealand

In 2005 I went to New Zealand for a short trip. It wasn't a photography trip, so I only took an old Canon PowerShot G5 not expecting to spend any real time on photography.

It's a mistake I'll never do again.

Although I didn't, in fact, have much time to shoot, on the few moments I did manage to do it I regretted not having my gear with me. Mostly I missed the better lenses with wide apertures. Today I was organising my Aperture library and spent a few moments going through the photos from this New Zealand trip. I realised I've never shared any of them, so I decided to post a few. They're not great, but they're no good locked away forgotten in my library.

The above shot is, if I remember correctly, somewhere in the South Island between the Franz Joseph glacier and Arthur's Pass. Maybe Greymouth. What I do remember is that we stopped for a rest and food after driving for a while, walked towards the beach, and saw this. It was late in a winter afternoon, which gets very cold in New Zealand.

I liked how the rays of light cut through the clouds in the background.

Eugenia in colour

It's time to change it up a bit. I've been posting a few photographs shot in film with the Nikon F3 lately so I thought I'd put up something different today.

This is Eugenia, a model I met in a photography class I took a while ago. We started talking back then and she mentioned she was from Ukraine, so I told her about my People of the Globe project. She liked the idea so we set up a time to shoot afterwards. I've posted images for that project before, which are all in black & white. This one was shot the same day while mucking around after I'd gotten the ones I needed.

textify.it - font photographs

I've been playing with textify.it, a website that renders a photograph using fonts. It's an interesting concept and the results can look quite entertaining.

Here's one of my photographs after being run through it.

The original is a black & white photograph of Jess. The settings in textify.it that I chose are:

• Font Family: monospaced
• Font Scale: 1
• Character Quantity: 89,000
• Character Set: @%#

It's a fun way to play with photographs. Somewhat similar to the 1-bit binary images I've done, although I like the 1-bit's better.

Backlog of Project365 photos updated

I was in Mexico for a few weeks in December and had my iPhone in Airplane Mode most of the time because I didn't want to come back to a huge phone bill. That meant I couldn't upload the photo-a-day straight away, so I ended up with a bunch of them that hadn't made it into my Project365 blog.

I finally took the time today to upload them. Here are a few. To see all of them go to the Posterous Project365 blog or to my Flickr set.

Project 365 complete!

I did it.

Admittedly, I did cheat. But just a bit. It took me a bit over 365 days as there were a few I missed (I think around 8 days), but still. It feels great.

Over a year ago I decided to give this a-photo-a-day thing a shot. I was taking a lot of photographs with my iPhone and was loving the simplicity of it all. The apps are amazing. Well, some of them at least. I even reviewed a few back then, did a 3G vs 3Gs camera comparison, and created a new gallery specifically for photos created with the iPhone here on my site.

When I started the project, I wanted to give myself a few limitations to keep me focused. For this year's Project365, all photos had to be:

• taken with the iPhone
  
• edited in the iPhone using a variety of apps
  
• all in black & white
  
• uploaded directly from the iphone
  

To keep it simple, I created a new blog in Posterous for the project. The cool thing about this is that I could just email the photos to my Posterous blog straight from the iPhone and they'd automatically end up everywhere:

• In the project's blog
  
• In Facebook
  
• In Flickr
  
• In Twitter
  

So what do I think now that I've finished?

It's been a great experience. It's really cool having a visual record for every single day of your life for a full year. Some photos turned out really good. A lot are really lame taken while I was rushing from one meeting to the next, or at the end of the day with crappy light. One is just a black square! I took that one when I was already in bed. I remembered I hadn't taken the daily photo so I just grabbed the iPhone, chose the built-in Camera app, and took a photo. It was pitch dark. But it still counts.

All of the photographs are in the video above in the order they were taken. It's really a slideshow created in Aperture and exported as a movie file.

After I exported, I realised it needed music so I added (with permission) a track from Coto Normal called Negative. I recently discovered them and I'm a fan. Their music is amazing. A huge thank you to Coto Normal, the music made the video great.

You can find more about Coto Normal here:

• Coto Normal in YouTube (and listen to some tracks)
  
• Coto Normal in MySpace
• Coto Normal in iTunes (buys some tracks, you'll enjoy them)

Project365 - close to the finish line

Just a few photographs shy of 365. Although I have to admit I am cheating. Kind of.

Time wise, I should've finished a few days ago, but I did miss a few days throughout the year. I do remember a few I just didn't have time, a couple I couple I was sick and didn't get to it, and one or two I just forgot. But overall I think I did ok.

I'll write a full review once I hit 365 photographs in a few days. In the meantime this is today's shot. As always, taken with the iPhone ( I'm actually writing this post from the iPhone). Edited with Spica.

New gallery for People of the Globe

I haven't posted anything in a while. Work just got really hectic and I haven't had time or energy for anything else. However, today I decided to update the gallery for the People of the Globe project while playing with the new BorderFX plugin, which if you're using Aperture 3 I definitely recommend. The new version is amazing.

These photographs are straight out of Aperture 3. I added the borders (thin black line, then white, then slightly thicker black line), and the text (project name, title, copyright) all from BorderFX.

Anyway, here are some photographs from the People of the Globe project. These didn't make it into the new gallery, but I might've posted them on peopleoftheglobe.com but without the borders.

Another black and white landscape

As part of my new view on sharing a lot more of the photography I do, I decided to start posting some of my black and white landscapes. I've only posted one before this one so far, but I do want to show a few more.

All photographs from my Project 365 are now CC

Out for a stroll, originally uploaded by gabrielponzanelli.

I just updated the license for all my photographs in the Project 365 set in Flickr to an Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd) Creative Commons license. That means, anyone is free to use them for any non-commercial activity as long as they don't change them in any way and they link back.

Let's see what happens.

Bigger versions are in project365.gabrielponzanelli.com, a Posterous blog I created just for this project.