This is a question I have been frequently pondering as my head seems to be continuously stuck under the hood of the Macbook pro, tethered to the photographer, like some caped, Getty Images crusader, fighting the fight to sort out the good images from the bad.

Kari Pearson (art director), Jan Guy (model), Thomas Northcut (photographer), Heather Simchuk (stylist)

Recently I worked on a shoot in Fraser, Colorado with Thomas Northcut (photographer), Matt Wright (producer) and Emilie McKittrick (artist data quality specialist and connection to the locations we shot at - she traveled along and helped us with duties too numerous to mention), Seattle-based freelance stylist Heather Simchuk and rounding out the rest of the group was Mike Forster (first assistant), Ted Coster (second assistant), Pamela Chavez (props) and Beth Ryan (hair and make-up) all from Denver.

Looking at image after image rolling into the computer, gives one much opportunity to think. You think about how easily some images happen and how a lot of collaboration takes place on others. So I thought “hey, let’s do a little experiment, or a bit of an un-scientific survey, and take a look at a handful of images from the Colorado shoot and see how they sort out take-wise.” I selected a couple of images we spent a little more time on and a couple that I remembered coming fairly quickly (approx. times noted), wanting to keep this survey small, yet try to provide a sampling of images that are somewhat typical from your average shoot day.

Shot 1: 4 takes/a couple of minutes
*We were working on other variations within this scene and Heather (stylist) saw this shot and suggested that Thomas pull back to get the entire scene. I think Heather had ulterior motives and wanted to get a full body shot of her styling.

Thomas Northcut/Getty Images

Shot 2: 29 takes/approx 1/2 hour
*We probably had the shot around frame 20 and worked on variations of gloves on/gloves off, several body position changes and many attempts at fussing with hair while attempting to make the 12-year-old model look more serene than seductive while her father was on set.

Thomas Northcut/Getty Images

Shot 3: 4 takes/approx 1 minute
*This shot was from a breakfast scene that Thomas and crew lit so that we could set up the scene and Thomas could move around the table and capture various moments as they happened. This was a real moment and I thought Thomas captured it really well.

Thomas Northcut/Getty Images

Shot 4: 10 takes/approx 1/2 hour
*We tried variations of sitting up on the edge of the bed, laying down, messed with her hand position, played around with how her hand was positioned under her head to make her posture look more natural, fill, no fill…Since this shot was all about only using the available light source, we shot very slowly.

Thomas Northcut/Getty Images

Shot 5: 14 takes - approx 40 minutes
*Variations of vertical, horizontal, changed composition a few times, had model use various expletives to enhance the frustrated look on his face…Some downtime occurred while laughing at the second assistant who had fallen in the snow, managing to bury himself while still maintaining a tight grip of the light.

Thomas Northcut/Getty Images

And the survey says…

-5 shots/61 total takes/12 takes roughly on average/rounding up time-wise to about 1/2 hour per shot

I don’t know what that means exactly, other than completing this unofficial survey and me feeling somewhat relieved that the average number of takes wasn’t 150 or something like that. It did get me thinking that since this shoot was for LifeSize, I’d be interested in knowing how many shots on average it takes for say a Stone+ frame. Or even better, who is willing to document all of those shots that we sometimes spend way too much time on and way too many frames on, only to scratch them in the end?

I am thinking that may be better to blog about anonymously…

I’m really excited about the current trend “Tactile Graphics” - the movement of graphic designers to represent their ideas and layouts spatially. It’s blurring the lines between graphic design, sculpture and photography and opens up exciting possibilities for creative’s working in traditional photography and footage to experiment with conceptual ideas.

www.serialcut.com

With the ability to create almost any situation artificially or remove any flaw using software such as Photoshop I think this style of imagery is a refreshing visual counter point. It will be interesting to see if commercial clients agree.

Rosanne Olson/Getty Images

Getty Images is proud to support and sponsor many photographic organizations such as the International Center for Photography, World Press Photo, Visa Pour L’Image, New York Photo Festival and the Eddie Adams Workshops.

We also like to recognize our friends in the fine art world and are happy to sponsor the Photographic Center Northwest’s (PCNW) 13th Annual Photographic Competition Exhibition. The competition draws entries from across the US with jurors whom are nationally known, including Paul Kopeikin, Mary Virginia Swanson, Anne Wilkes Tucker, Charlotte Cotton, Michael Kenna and Keith Carter. This year’s juror is Rod Slemmons, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago.

Entries to the 13th Annual Photographic Competition Exhibition are due May 9. Click here for additional details and good luck!

Daniel Day/Getty Images

“Hansel…he’s hot.”

So says Will Ferrell as Mogatoo in Zoolander, one of my favorite movies of all time. I bring it up, a) because it makes me laugh and b)because most industries from fashion, technology, fine art and food to name a few, are all trying to discover what’s hot, who’s in, who’s out and what’s next. It’s no different at Getty Images.

I head up this great team of people called Creative Research. Our job is to figure out “what’s hot” for pictures. We do this by studying how consumer trends and behavior affect the imagery our art directors, photo editors and photographers create.

In the past months I’ve spent a lot of time with the gang in sales and a lot of time with our customers. I wanted to find out the truth. Are we are bringing the right pictures to our customers?

So, we just completed this enormous study, we looked at over 2,000 print and TV campaigns from the US, Japan, England, France, Brazil, China, Australia and Germany. We looked at photo requests from our customers, we talked to customers, we looked at consumer behavior in each of these studies. Here’s an excerpt that you can now see for yourself.

What do you think? Talk to me people.

Photo: Erik Dreyer

As an interesting follow-up to the last post about the copyright issues surrounding the Pop Art show in London, is an article in the NY Times a couple of days ago about appropriated photography in fine art. Included are quotes from photographer Jim Krantz, whose work has been appropriated (with much success - the piece in question sold at auction a few years ago for upwards of $300,000) by the most famous ‘appropriationist’ of them all - Richard Prince. Mr. Krantz’s photography is currently on display at the Guggenheim Museum by way of Mr. Prince’s well-received 30-year retrospective exhibition there currently.

Mr. Prince’s canny insouciance is captured nicely in a quote from 1993, where he off-handedly compares his series of appropriated Marlboro Man imagery to bank robbery: “No one was looking. This was a famous campaign. If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.”

Despite what one thinks of the means used, Prince’s selection of the Marlboro Man imagery is appropriate in more ways than one - for years the now legendary Prince has been carefully cultivating his own image as one of a cowboy or outlaw of the art world. What could be ‘cooler’ than a successful bank robber? Images of cowboys (from advertising no less), biker chicks, inane one-liner jokes painted on canvas, seedy pulp fiction book covers reproduced as large paintings, actual hot rod hoods as sculpture - it all glows with the “aren’t I a bad-ass”, James Dean-meets-King Midas aura that surely is the unspoken base appeal at work behind Prince’s success. It operates like a cultural pheromone, luring everyone from the bookish critics, curators and academics who have steeped themselves soggy with arcane theory and hope some of the cool will rub off, to the uber-rich and listless collectors of uber-priced art, for whom the promise of an injection of life-blood from the netherworldly cultures of the American hoi polloi is irresistible, to young art students (who in a former era may have gone to Hollywood), who find reassurance in the Prince story (for themselves and their parents as well, who initially balked at the art school price-tags) , sensing that it augurs well for their own future success - after all, looking cool is what they’ve done so well their whole life.

But these more sordid motives are rarely if ever mentioned, indeed perhaps taboo, though easily discernable beneath the kind of intricately coded veil of mystifying sophistry that seems to have become the sole function of art writing (or perhaps always has been?). To wit (from the Guggenheim’s introduction to the current show): “[Prince’s] deceptively simple act in 1977 of rephotographing advertising images and presenting them as his own ushered in an entirely new, critical approach to art-making—one that questioned notions of originality and the privileged status of the unique aesthetic object”.

But I admit to being a bit incendiary here, perhaps betraying the influence of Prince, provocateur par excellence, on myself as well. I do feel Prince to be an important and influential American artist, but also wonder if that importance might not rest at least partially on what he has revealed about the inner workings of the art world in contemporary society (intentionally or unintentionally? yet more fodder for the art sophists) . Whether it’s his influence or not is arguable (certainly not his alone), but when perfect recreations of grunge and gutter-punk get-ups from barely a decade ago sell for thousands of dollars in high-end fashion boutiques, I wonder if we’re any the wiser for it.

Insightful take on the Pop Art Portraits show up at London’s National Portrait Gallery by Notable Internet Personality Cory Doctorow on Guardian Unlimited online. It is interesting to think about the evolution of Intellectual Property, especially the activity in that arena of late and since the advent of the internet, against the backdrop of cultural production within that same period (coincidentally up to and including the work of Paul D. Miller - see previous post). The ironies in this instance are particularly sweet (or sour perhaps), as Cory points out. My hunch is that we’ve many more such ironies in store, even more absurd, before this issue blows over - if it ever does…

Motoyuki Kobayashi, a Getty Images contributing photographer in Tokyo, is included in the 2007 Art + Commerce Peek Festival, which recognizes outstanding emerging photographers.
The Peek website has video clips relating to each of the selected artists’ work. On the Peek site, click on this part of the collage of images to see the video for Motoyuki:

We live surrounded by images, under the spell of visual stimuli. Taking a break in that rush is an absolute necessity. In Paris (France), the market research company Gatard & Associes offers a room on its website, e-dito.com, to discover arts, culture, literature, and to share thoughts about advertising and marketing.

This month Jumping in advertising is deciphered. The writer, Christian Gatard takes us in the advertising backstages. Exploration is done through the prism of mythology. Following him opens our minds for a journey to unexplored areas of our culture and for times as far as 30 000 years ago. Gatard gives us tips to consider shamanism in a new way. The next topic that will be deciphered in E-dito.com next issue is the MASK in advertising. Provocative and appealing idea! Wherever you live if you dig up an interesting and recent advertising example relating to the Mask theme, do dare to share it with the E-dito.com guys : redaction [at] e-dito [dot] com. You’ll make them happy. Enjoy! ( Jumping Frog - Courtesy of American Images Inc / Getty Images)

Opening largely the vision about upcoming trends and future, Just A Kiss, a strategy and curiosity agency in Paris (France), has published the second issue of Jak Lab web magazine. Supported by Gatard et Associes, this JakLab#2 welcomes many contributions from artists, strategic planners, photographers, novelists. Philippe Cazaban, Nicolas Dubost from Nelly Rodi , Monique Wahlen from G2, Pete Jeff, and many others… For this new issue the theme is about “The Absolute Necessity”. Discover texts and photographs written with freedom, inspiration and creativity. JakLab is a quartely free publication on the web. Enjoy it and share it. (Brigitte Mantel)

Interesting discussion yesterday on KQED San Francisco’s Forum with Michael Krasny on “Photography and Its Future”.

Photo: FPG via Getty Images