Exhibit 5a | Creative Disobedience

As many of my regular readers will know, I’ve been working on a personal project in between paying gigs for the last few weeks, and I’m now ready to go public with it. I have always wanted to learn how to cook. I mean to really learn how to cook. I have gone through phases over the years where I’ve watched a lot of FoodTV and messed around with cooking some stuff, but never really had the opportunity to make progress. Part of this was due to my tiny kitchens in New York and my soul sucking cubicle job which made easy-to-cook dinners and take out food seem like the best bet.

So, now that I have a great kitchen and am able to use my free time a lot better, I have decided that I am going to learn to cook. And since I have the skill level to make interesting and appetizing photographs of my food, what better way to mix my career with my cooking education. To that end, I have just launched a new blog called Shoot to Cook: A Photographer Learns to Cook.

The new blog is going to cover my food adventures, as well as some posts about food photography. It has already taken over a significant portion of my free time and it is a lot of hard work, but I’m having a blast doing it. Please check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks!

Hi.

So, yeah, no posts for a long time…but there is a good reason for that. I’ve decided to focus my energy purely on my photography career and as such I’m going to be focusing my blogging onto my newly released, updated and shiny portfolio site: jonathangayman.com. This pretty much means that I will no longer be posting much here at Exhibit 5a. I don’t plan to take the site down, but it will certainly become even less active than it is now. So please add jonathangayman.com/blog to your rss readers and watch for new content over there. Thanks!

P.S. Don’t delete Exhibit5a from your readers entirely though – I will still feel the need to rant and rave about something that I shouldn’t have on a big, grown up, professional site…so I’ll post it here.

It’s been a busy week, and today was the first day back in the office. My last assignment before the long weekend was in Minneapolis, and after some trials and a frightening run in with a corrupt flash card, I’m back. Overall I feel pretty good about the shoots thus far and now I’m getting keyed up for a grueling few weeks of almost non-stop shoots. It’s going to be intense, but I’m liking the work. I’m evening getting some variety in there, so more to come.

In the meantime, here is a shot from the nearly lost corrupt flash card of Minneapolis in the morning…kinda has a sci-fi feel, no?

I am in Chicago for a shoot, then off to Minneapolis this afternoon for another shoot. It’s hectic and I’m tired of traveling alone – the excitement of traveling for photography has worn off. I miss Dr. Girlfriend and I’m ready to come home. The work itself is still exciting. I even got up early this morning to get some exterior shots of the Willis Tower (formally the Sears tower) as part of the project. I really like this one…

Here are some more garden photographs that I made recently in PA. I think these go quite well with the corn photos from last week. I absolutely love the color and the complexity.

I was in Martha’s Vineyard last weekend (along with the President and the Clintons, apparently) visiting some friends who were vacationing there from California. We were fortunate to get the use of a guest house outside of town in Oak Bluffs near a lake, which proved to be a great spot to watch the Friday night fireworks display. Despite the fact that the fireworks were directly in front of us, they were largely hidden by the cloud cover (provided in part by Hurricane Bill). The result was that in many cases the fireworks resembled footage that I’ve seen of nuclear bombs going off. Very surreal.

I was in PA for a wedding last weekend, and I took the opportunity to photograph things that I’m normally not able to do. In this case I went into a cornfield and made some images. I have been experimenting with some counter-intuitive methods of making photographs outdoors, since my efforts thus far have been unimpressive. I’ve found that my photographs outdoors have been either poor quality, flat and boring, or else very much like traditional stock photography. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with the traditional shots – in fact I’m working on building a library of stock images for sale. But as I continue to refine my taste and find style that works for me on a personal level, I want to push myself beyond commercial photography that I make for a living.

So on Saturday, rather than sculpt the ambient light into a nice, easy photo, I turned my camera into the sun in the cornfield and started to play with a wide aperture where there is a lot of light, and a lot of contrast. The result was a series of rather ethereal images, verging on abstraction which I’m really liking. Here are three of my favorites from the shoot.

I’m hoping to build on this concept and style, although I’m not entirely sure about where to go next. And of course with the heat that we’ve been experiencing in the last few weeks I don’t want to be outside at all.

I don’t watch much regular TV these days. My couch time is spent watching streaming netflix or hulu, so when I watched Bravo’s Make Me A Supermodel last night, I was shocked back into the world of commercials. I was watching because a friend of mine who I met teaching my lighting class at SVA last summer, Clay Patrick McBride was the photog for last night’s episode. It was kick ass (as it always is) to see someone you know on TV, and it was even more exciting because Clay was shooting on a kick ass set which included all kinds of kick ass pyrotechnics. Makes me jealous that most of my “large production” shoots are in offices with accountants.

Other than the photography part the show itself was pretty lame. Since the final four were three guys and a girl I figured they’d leave the girl in for balance, but then by the end it occurred to me that the demographic is probably mostly women, so having three men for finalists makes more sense. But the way that they mold this “reality” is ridiculous. For example they dressed the girl who was kicked off in the most unflattering dress I have ever seen, and then the designer (who is also judge) complained about how she looked in it.

Anyway, nice job Clay, nice to see you get some good exposure!

Photos ©Bravo