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Environmental Portraiture with Mark Tucker | April 20 – 26, 2014

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Great face on this young skateboarder today. Late afternoon soft diffused light on the Venice Boardwalk.

Mark Tucker, February 2014

 

This spring, Mark Tucker will teach a workshop exploring how to find and harness light outside of the studio in service of the great faces of the world.

 

Mark Tucker
Environmental Portraiture
In the photo studio
Sometimes keeping it simple is the best approach. In this workshop we’ll learn to make strong portraits using available light. We’ll find the best light, and if it’s not perfect, we’ll modify it with reflectors and fill cards. A field trip to a nearby town will help students learn to approach strangers and to quickly find the best angle and light for a portrait. We’ll learn the emotive difference between hard and soft light and how to use various light sources to achieve the mood you are after. This is a digital photography workshop, which will include enhancing your portraits with basic adjustments in Lightroom/Photoshop. All levels. Code S03P

 

Register here for this workshop

 

Mark Tucker is a portrait and advertising photographer. His clients have included Amtrak, Jack Daniels, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Harper Collins, Penguin Books, Alabama Tourism, Colonial Williamsburg, and many others. He is represented by MergeLeft Reps (NY). He documents his portrait-making adventures on Instagram and Tumblr.

 
 

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Platinum-Gum Printing with Digital Negs: Kerik Kouklis | Apr. 6-12, 2014

Kerik Kouklis, Gayle, gum over platinum, 2009
Kerik Kouklis, Gayle, gum over platinum print of collodion image, 2009

Platinum/palladium printing is a nineteenth century photographic printing process based on iron, platinum, and palladium rather than silver. It is considered one of the most beautiful photographic processes because of its very subtle gradation of tones. Kerik Kouklis will be teaching this process at Penland this April.

Paltinum/palladium prints are made with paper that has been hand coated, and they are exposed in contact with a negative that’s the same size as the final print. The success of the print depends on using a negative that matches the characteristics of the platinum/palladium material.

Creating these negatives used to require a high level of darkroom skill, but today, carefully-tuned negatives can be made with an inkjet printer, making the whole process much more accessible. This is the method that will be used in this workshop.

 

Kerik Kouklis
Platinum-Gum Printing with Digital Negatives
In the photography studio

We’ll start by making digital negatives with the QuadTone RIP program and Epson printers. Then we’ll use these negatives to make platinum/palladium prints, and we’ll cover the fundamentals of the gum bichromate process. Adding layers of gum bichromate to a platinum/palladium print can result in prints ranging from subtle to wildly colorful. Combining these processes allows you to use both the left and right sides of your brain to produce work that’s uniquely yours. Darkroom or alternative process experience helpful but not required. Students should have basic skills in Photoshop (adjustment tools, layers, etc.). Code S02P

 

Register for this workshop here

 

In addition to covering the production of digital negatives, hand coating the paper, and making the platinum/palladium prints, this workshop will also include an introduction to another nineteenth century process called gum bichromate. This process involves pigment suspended in a medium that hardens in response to light, and a gum print can be made in almost any color. In this workshop, the gum process will be applied on top of the platinum/palladium prints as a way of adding new tonalities to the images. 

 

Kerik Kouklis has taught photography at the Photographer’s Formulary (MT), Ansel Adams Gallery (CA), and Project Basho (Philadelphia), among others. His work has been shown in exhibitions at the Ansel Adams Gallery (CA), Taube Museum of Art (NC), and is housed in  collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts (PA).

 

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Winter Studio Visit: Tom Shields

 

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The chair. A form for one. A group of chairs: a human gathering, a table, a home. Gertrude Stein put it this way: Is there not much more joy in a table and more chairs and very likely roundness and a place to put them.

 

Tom Shields has been messing with wooden chairs—and our domestic contexts for them—for a while now. He collects, breaks, and alters–reworking flat-backs, ladder-backs, whatever chairs he can find by responding to and then rebuilding them into each other. (And away from each other, too.) Even the bank of discarded chairs that Tom keeps as raw material in his Penland studio (below) feels kind of irreverent:

 
 

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It’s not just chairs: irreverence fuels all of Tom’s sculptural “furniture” work. Take this recent commission, made from a group of original Heywood-Wakefield tables:

 
 

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“Blasphemer,” says Tom, grinning as he tells us what one studio visitor called him after seeing the commission. If you’re a mid-century modern junkie, Tom might just be your nemesis. But looking closely, the tables retain their modern context. Form is interrupted and not shattered: the “futuristic” lines and planes are made fluid by Tom’s choices. It’s almost as if the atoms in the birch went haywire and some happy blasphemer came along and set the forms into each other, responding to the tables as potential parts of a larger functional sculpture.

 

In the irreverence in Tom Shields’s work, reverence. To put a finer point on it: in irreverence, reverent play. Gertrude Stein, another blasphemer, would’ve raised her glass. She said in 1935: A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.

 

Photographs by Robin Dreyer; writing by Elaine Bleakney