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www.adamryanmorris.com is now viewable in a new mobile-friendly format. Cell phone- or iPad-using viewers of my site are automatically routed to the new version, which you can check out at www.adamryanmorris.com/mobi. So if you’ve got your phone handy and you’re feeling ambitious, give it a whirl and e-mail me with what you think. (The previous mobile-friendly HTML version of the site is still available for now.)
Two things…
I’ve thought a lot over the last few months about how to showcase my newest personal and commissioned work, and I decided to add a “recent work” section to www.adamryanmorris.com. It’s now the first listing in the “portfolios” menu.
Also, I’ve added lots of new and previously unseen work to the site, including these portfolios: moments, places, wire on white, Thomas & Murray (sunset street ’scapes from an intersection) and fashion (that’s “low-key fashion of a sort,” not high fashion).
In a previous post I talked about fixed-focal length lenses and a favorite creative exercise: leaving the house with one lens, challenging myself to make interesting pictures with whatever’s in front of me. (It really helps you see the world from a new, or at least different, perspective.) The frame above was made that way, with a 50mm lens.
Unlike a wide-angle lens, a 50mm starts to really allow a shallow depth of field. I like to find a tangle of branches, set a good baseline exposure, and lock focus, then look around via the camera. With a shallow depth of field, it’s amazing how many patterns — unseeable to the naked eye — reveal themselves.
I photographed Milwaukee band The Dim Suns at Bay View’s Club Garibaldi the weekend before Christmas. These guys have all been in major Milwaukee bands over the last decade or so. Franz Buccholtz, the drummer, is a multi-talented musician who also moonlights as half of the ambient duo Signaldrift, which has a new album on the way this spring. Club Garibaldi was a great spot for a show. Their stage is in a room of its own, and there’s lots of space for the crowd to sit or stand. There’s also a working disco ball, a smoke machine, and bright lights. I’d never been there before, and I was impressed. (With the music, too!)
I’ve shot plenty with the Canon 5D Mark II since acquiring it last month, but not much with wide focal lengths. So last week on a rare free morning I drove to a favorite stretch of urban wilderness along the Root River Parkway for some exercise, both physically and mentally. I had been using a crop-factor camera for the last couple of years, so for example my 20mm lens was effectively a 35mm lens. It was time to reacquaint myself with how the world looks at 20mm.
I’m big on fixed-focal length, or prime, lenses and on challenges. Prime lenses force me to work for my shots, move around, wait for the right moment. It can be harder, but well worth the effort. With that in mind, now and again I like to leave the house with one lens and see how much I can push myself to create interesting photos out of whatever’s in front of me. On this day, it was the wide-angle lens and a jagged, snowy plot of land. I photographed a trio of trees, their messy branches pointing every which way.
Soon, I’ll share a frame or two from a similar exercise with the newly rediscovered 50mm focal length.
ONE skate magazine printed this photo of Milwaukee freestyle blader Dallas Kilpatrick in its latest issue. (For those in the know, here’s the caption: Soul grind on the bench, transfer to top soul on the wall.) Dallas and I discovered this spot during a low-key mid-day photo mission. We shot a few versions of this trick, but I prefer this frame because it emphasizes Dallas’ style and the split-second just before he fully locks the second grind.
Self-portrait in wire. December 2009.
PART 1.
Here’s a preview of a project I’ve just embarked on. As usual, it starts with an idea. Then the idea is picked at and probed — I like to think of this as the discovery phase — and refined. This one’s a self-portrait via wire. Where will this work take me? Will I deliberately fashion the wire to look like something? Or will I twist and turn it at random, pushing myself to make something out of whatever appears before me? Probably the later, though I’m not entirely sure. Yet. The important part is that I’ll go somewhere, and be the better for it.
PART 2.
I’m excited not only about this project but also about the future. I’ve got a lot of work to add to my online portfolio, and some reorganizing because of that. I’ve always been fond of organization and order. Of the narrative kind, I mean. The order and positioning of photographs is no exception. I like to work and rework the order until it feels just right — and to me, that “feel” is very important. Hopefully it is to you, too, as viewers and/or artists of any sort.
I photographed Electric Eye Neon sign company’s owners in their workshop last month for The Bay View Compass. The photo above ran in the paper, and below are a few more frames. Above, Marj Inman, Electric Eye co-owner, heats glass tubing so it’s bendable. (The big flame lasts for less than a second; after the initial flareup it’s a low blue glow just above the surface.)
Assorted tools and pieces of glass piping as seen on one of their worktables.
Electric Eye has made signs for lots of the area’s prominent businesses, including WMSE radio.
They love what they do and see it as an art, but it’s also about commerce.
I’m super stoked (to use a dated word) about a photo I captured the other night at Bay View’s Cactus Club.
While a projector chaotically splashed the stage/band with colors and images, everything aligned and I caught this shot of Canyons of Static guitarist Ross Severson sneaking a sip of water. It goes back to something I mentioned a few weeks ago: You make your own luck. You put yourself in the right place so at the right time your instincts and reflexes can take over to capture that glimmer of a moment that wasn’t there a second earlier and won’t be there a second later.
I gravitate toward these images when I’m shooting for myself or on assignment. I find these moments fascinating, and I suspect it’s a combination of my background as a newspaper reporter/editor working under intense deadline pressure and as a photographer/participant in extreme sports, where the pressure is high for about a dozen variables — the lighting (natural and artificial), the angle, the timing, the subject’s positioning and expression, etc. — to all be spot on at the moment you click the shutter.
I like to work my butt off — to sweat — for my photographs. Of course, there’s a different kind of satisfaction that comes with snagging the money shot on an assignment when, say, your subject only has a few minutes to spend with you. (More on that in this previous post.)
The Shepherd Express, Milwaukee’s alternative weekly newspaper, hired me to photograph Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm a couple of weeks ago for its cover. The photo ran in this week’s issue.
Knowing that he would be pressed for time and that the shoot would be at the newspaper’s offices after his interview, we used two quick setups: 1. A black seamless paper background in a hallway, lighting him with one strobe. 2. Natural light in the building’s entryway, a few feet from the pouring rain. (The same rain that ruined our plans for a walkabout photo session).
The more traditional shot ran on the cover, and the “studio” shot ran as the inside lead for the story.
