A Pinch and a Dash Exhibition

I just heard back that 2 of my pieces were accepted into “A Pinch and a Dash” exhibition up in New York. Here is a part of the description of the show from Smithtown Township Art Council’s website: “A Pinch and a Dash” seeks to examine the American woman’s changing role in the kitchen, from rural times when a woman’s biscuits defined her reputation, to twentieth century ready-made preparation.” A big thanks to my hubby Shannon for letting me photograph him. These first two pieces were accepted into the exhibition:

“Kitchen Science”

“Y-O-Y-O (Your On Your Own) Night”

“Grandma’s Got Skills”

Here is the artist statement I sent in with the work if you are interested in reading more about the work:

My recent work is an exploration into my personal experiences with and observations of the family kitchen. This body of work is appropriately titled: “Julie’s Kitchen.” Both my Grandmother and Mother are known for their cooking and my Mother is even more well known for her hospitality. Not many people leave the Snyder house without having something to eat. I have observed that my mother finds satisfaction not only in the act of making meals and goodies but feeding and making people happy through her cooking. 

The modern woman often times functions as both bread winner and supervisor of completing domestic tasks. I feel as though my sister and I have adopted my Mother’s desire to be hospitable through food as well as inheriting the strong work ethic of my Father. Both my sister and I have full times jobs and have chosen to be career oriented rather than the “stay at home mom or wife.” My sister is a scientist and I am an art instructor and photographer. These jobs keep us quite busy. Even though we have full-time jobs the domestic jobs do not end. After a long day of work I find myself pulling something together for dinner very quickly and on many occasions find it a challenge to even do that because I have not had the time to stock the kitchen. 

Naturally, my sister and I have grown to love cooking as well. This is most likely because feeding people has been a family tradition. This tradition somehow edges itself into my life’s work, which is art. I find myself often making and photographing these still lifes of found objects that could be found throughout the home and kitchen. Even though these found objects can be similar in terms of function the way they are used often results in completely different concepts. 

For this series, I wanted to address my role in the kitchen as well as that of my sister.  The piece titled “Y-O-Y-O Night” is a document of this. I find myself commenting to my husband that I really hope his Mother does not look in our refrigerator because there is nothing there to offer. When I come home from work and there is just nothing to pull together for dinner, I tell my husband it is a Y-O-Y-O Night, which means “Your On Your Own.” The piece titled “Grandma’s Got Skills” is a memory I have of my Grandmother. I always thought how amazing it was how well she could peel a potato. For my Grandmother, the kitchen was probably the best place to show off her talents. Her domesticity was her trade. The piece titled “Kitchen Science” is a representation of the multi-faceted life my sister lives. She spends her day as a scientist and then a hard working mom at night. This piece demonstrates how the career life and home life often times merge together. While my sister and I love to cook it is often times challenged by our role as “career women.” 

Tuesday Tip, a bit late…so a Thursday Tip::

Wow, a bit late this week on my Tuesday Tip. Have I mentioned how crazy my life is. I don’t even have kids, so I can’t even imagine what that would be like. Anywho, I really just wanted to see if you photogs out there have heard about pocket wizards’ new models, the Flex TT5 and the Mini TT1. They allow you to use high sync speeds when using strobes. This has limited me so much. I can only shoot a shutter speed of 200 or less on my Canon when using strobes and sometimes that just doesn’t cut it. It is very difficult to overpower the sun with low sync speeds. If you are trying to overpower daylight…especially full sun daylight it is just not doable. But now it is! I am going to have to safe up for these babies.  So, check these out at Pocket Wizards’ website. Mark Wallace  has a review of them on his blog. Zach Arias has a post on his blog about the radio poppers too and their high sync capabilities. And by the way, have you guys seen Zack Arias’ short film he did for Scott Kelby’s blog? Very inspiring… a bit of a kick in the pants. I loved it! Click HERE to check it out. I went to Zack’s One Light Workshop in Atlanta back in November…I highly recommend it!

Just for fun

A few weeks ago when I was experimenting with Photo Merge (a few posts back) I got Shannon to sit in a few more pictures with me and Jacques-a-poo. I don’t think Shannon knows how much it means to me when he lets me use him for my photo experiments  I have a lot of fun just experimenting and I always appreciates it when he comes along. And I appreciate Jacques too. What a little ham he is. And Mary, if you are reading this, do you recognize the shoes? Remember when we did the swap, a pair of shoes for a sweater? I still have the wellies! So, this one was just for fun:

Tuesday Tip: Check this Gal Out

Hey there. I have someone for you guys to check out: Ginny Corbett Photography. Her husband Shane and my husband Shannon have been friends pretty much forever. How lucky did I get that my husband’s best friend is a photographer too. Go check Ginny’s site and blog out and leave her a comment while you’re there.

Nick + Bethany

Just finished up with Nick and Bethany’s engagement pictures and wanted to share my favorites from the day. And my usual indecisiveness has led me to post too many…just couldn’t make up my mind. Here they are:

Tuesday Tip: Photomerge

This is fun. Photoshop has a feature that will stitch together photographs the make a panoramic image. I have done this before with just a landscape, but wanted to try it with people in the scene. I had a shoot over the weekend and tried it, but had a hard time getting it together because of the focus. So, I asked my husband (and Jacques too) to come out and pose for me so I could try this option with people. To do a photomerge you take multiple shots from the same position. They need to overlap a bit for Photoshop to stitch them together. I used a tripod for the shot below (very cheezy models, but available models…this is why I try not to get in photos), but you really don’t have to as long as you are steady. You will want to keep the exposure consistent both in camera and if editing in RAW. To merge photos, open Photoshop and go to File>Automate>Photomerge. This will open the Photomerge dialog box. To start out with I just went with the default settings. Click on Browse to choose the images you want to merge. Here is the result I got from this weekend…it is very small and hard to see details. Again don’t pay attention to the cheesy models….jacques snuck in the shot too, (he is in the background chewing on a stick, one of his favorite things to do):

Your final result will have some funky edges where things didn’t quite line up exactly. All you have to do is use the crop tool to move in close.

Nick + Bethany….engaged!

Congrats to Nick and Bethany! They are getting married this August. All the picture fun started today with some engagement pictures. Just wanted to give a sneak peak from their session. More to come!

New Products!

In the beginning of the year I announced my new products. I have just begun to get some new samples in. I received Alan and Arlissa’s proof box the other day and I love it!! Now I can custom design the proof boxes with an image on the front, side and back. I am looking forward to getting more of these in. Here are a few shots of them:

New Blog!!

I finally have a nice shiny new blog, thanks to Robbie Stokes! If you are interested in getting a facelift to your blog or website check his site out by clicking HERE. Before I could only post smaller pics. Remember Jill and Ty from  a few posts back, I really wished I could have posted one of them larger…so much better…see…

 

Tuesday Tip: Sizing Horizontal and Vertical Images Using a Batch Action

It has been a while for Tuesday Tips, I know. So, I have a very helpful tip today. I have been trying to think of a way to batch resize both my horizontal images and my vertical images from the same action. Before I had been separating them into two folders, one for horizontal and one for verticals. But, that gets old and quite annoying. I dug around a bit and finally found a solution. There is one catch (isn’t there usually one): all the images need to be the same size to start with. Which is fine if you are batch resizing images from the same camera from the same session. Often I need to resize when I am sending hundreds of prints of to the lab to be printed, say as all 4×6. I also resize before I upload images to my proof site. So, here we go:

Step 1:

In short, I will be using Image>Image Size in Photoshop to find the right percentage to resize to get a 4×6 image. You will have to play around a bit to get the right percentage. Just for example sake, let’s say I have a folder full of both horizontal and vertical images that have a pixel dimension of 5120×3413 (horiz)/3413×5120(vert) and I want to resize all of them to 4×6. Open an image from that folder. Then on the Menu choose Image>Image Size. Be sure that “Resample Image” and “Constrain Proportions” are both checked. Under Pixel Dimensions change the unit to “percentage.”

 

Step 2: 

Enter the width or height that you want (so I entered 6 inches for my width because I opened a horizontal image). The percentage will automatically adjust. For this image, my percentage is: 35.16%. Kind of a weird percentage. You may want to write that down for the next step. Don’t click OK quite just yet. Click Cancel if you want to go to the next step. (You can decide which type of Resampling you feel is best). 

Step 3: 

Now you can set up an action to resize both vertical and horizontal images based on that percentage. 

Step 4:

Once you have set up an action, you can resize the entire folder by going to File>Automate>Batch. If you do not wish to write over your full size images, don’t forget to set up a new folder for your resized images. In Batch, you will indicate which action you wish to use, which folder you want to apply that action to (Source) , and then where you want to save them (Destination). Just another tip, you may really want to consider backing up your images to another location just in case you accidentally indicate the wrong folder to save to.

Hope that helps!