The Real Rembrandt (preview) Session W/Tim Meyer

a sign of okay go ahead Dory you can lip I just turned on the record feature she's muted oh There She Goes okay so um because this is being recorded and it may be rebroadcast at another time if you're if you have privacy issues and don't want your face to be shown or your name at this point you can go ahead and stop your video or you can rename yourself I know Tim likes to know who who's in the class so he likes to have your name there if possible but this may be um rebroadcasted at another time so just wanted to let you know that please try to keep the chat just for questions going forward because at the end if there's a lot of questions we're gonna have to make it easier for Tim to go through and answer as many questions as he can thank you okay um Tim yo I am uh turning this over to you and um like Dora said we will be monitoring um the chat and um let's let's have a great class this this is honestly the first time we've done something like this with um so many of you we practiced this twice and Tim's Computer actually crashed so all of us are pins and needles hoping we make it through this class without that happening if Tim goes away um just be patient a little forgiving he'll have to reboot and then uh magically he will come back to the land of the living so um we're we're hoping for no hiccups and um take it away Tim thank you sir um I think it's probably important to understand that this is not my medium of choice but obviously we are where we are as far as what's going on in society in the world with diseases Etc uh this was an idea we just had we wanted to try something and so we threw it out there on Facebook we had over 100 plus people respond and we have now 10 states and two countries represented here so we're really blown away and kind of amazed uh at the response and so it's very humbling and kind of overwhelming I also am not as comfortable in this particular format as I am standing in front of people part of the reason is I get to move around when I'm standing in front of people so they can't hit me with stuff as easily also my jokes don't transfer over the internet as well as they do in person although I'm sure the Tony Corbell and Pete rezak would tell you that they don't translate in person very well either but um in any event it's not a very spontaneous venue or format but we're going to go through and I put together PowerPoint and uh most of you know that I don't really work from notes I just kind of speak text temporaneously I have some thoughts that are real important to me as most of you know because you most of you know me and have seen me speak before this is a subject that's incredibly close to my heart I'm very very passionate about uh it's been kind of a turning point in my career so I hope to share some of that enthusiasm some of the passion some of the ideas you need also to know that we are a community and right now we're an electronic community but there are people in this room who are my mentors who have been incredibly important to me and so conversations I've had and you guys already know who you are and ladies know who you are well we've sat and we've talked for hours about ideas this is kind of my attempt to do this electronically it was supposed to be smaller than in private and we saw what happened with that so hopefully at the end and once I'm done talking we'll be be able to do a conversation kind of like that I'd love to talk about some of your passions some of the things that have inspired you specifically about Rembrandt but maybe something a little bit about some of the times that we're in so having said that I'm just going to dive in move you guys off to the side and we're going to start with the Powerpoints so on a good day it looks like that okay so you all can see the real Rembrandt David can you let me know that everybody can see that can everybody see that we don't have it yet you don't have it wow this is our first failure um yes oh you know why I have to share my screen to share your screen that would have been a long program longer than normal okay so now you can see the real Rembrandt correct David are we there yes yes perfect okay all right so um again this is about Rembrandt and about what I consider the real Rembrandt and putting this together it gave me an opportunity to go back and visit a lot of my different notes and a lot of things that I've read and things that I've spoken about I've never really I've always spoken about Rembrandt but only in pieces and this is really the first time I've ever put it together in this format so it was kind of new to me also but it's something I've always wanted to do so this title page um I put this together because I wanted something cute and something memorable or whatever but as I did it uh it became kind of a really good example of what the life of Rembrandt was about Rembrandt did over 80 or around 80 different self-portraits of himself and some people say that's because he was narcissistic but the truth is is he actually used those portraits as pieces of experimentation to try out new ideas Etc and if you can see my cursor here as it goes across this is one of the first two known self-portraits going all the way to the last one these last three were done when he was about 63 years old just before he died but you can see the change in the age but you also see the change in expressions and um some people have mentioned that Rembrandt had a really tragic life and Etc but he actually had a very successful and exciting life and then it changed but if you see all the way especially this group right here this is where he was in his Heyday where he was really really successful doing most of the things that we know him for at least commercially and then his wife died which totally changed his life on a variety of different levels and you can see how things changed in his face in his Expressions going through here and so this is kind of like a road map of the emotions and the story of his life and so it I had never thought of this becoming that when I originally put it together but um it's really quite powerful if you know a little bit about his history so we're back here and we're back there okay so I'm kind of going to start at the beginning at least for me which is really about Rembrandt lighting and Rembrandt lighting fundamentally is the studio portrait lighting technique where a small inverted triangle of light is visible under the subject's sign and believe it believe it or not that's all I ever knew in my whole career that's all I was ever taught at school and that's really all the conversations I have normally with most of the people in our profession so this little triangle of light some people call it closed loop lighting is really what everybody talks about and that's what we know about and so when you go back and visit the Rembrandt paintings you will see that triangle of light which is represented right here so if we're going to talk about Rembrandt lighting and we're going to talk about Rembrandt I'm done because that's all I was ever taught until I started to do my own research and what I didn't understand is how is it that you hear so many amazing things about him and all it was about was a triangle so I started doing some research and I found out there was a guy by the name of Rodan Rodan and Rodan uh I was actually one of the people that influenced me a lot and about Rembrandt he said compare me with the Rembrandt what's sacrilege that's pretty big praise has a guy by the name of Van Gogh you might know him as Van Gogh who said with Rembrandt the Colossus of art we should prostrate ourselves before Rembrandt and never compare anyone with him and so when I started seeing this type of Praise from these people to me it's like so what am I missing what not because it's not about the triangle it can't be about the triangle it's got to be about something else and so I started doing research and that is what the path that's the path I went down and that's kind of the path I'm going to describe as we go through right here now so it ain't that right here by the way this is my attempt to be high tech if that's all you know about Rembrandt you're missing out on so much and so let's see what we can do um interesting thing about Rembrandt you're going to hear so many different descriptions about him depending upon who you read and where you go some of them as with any other individual or any other part of History you're going to hear lots of different opinions about him some people consider Rembrandt a prodigy I don't consider Rembrandt Prodigy at all and many do not uh he wasn't naturally I mean it he didn't walk up into a piano at the age seven and started playing he started out and decided he wanted to be a painter and started at age 14 and went to two different people that he basically studied with uh the first one being yakub up here and the second one being Peter lastman and so he didn't have an awful lot of people that he mentored with but ironically uh his work changed a lot and he became the Rembrandt we know so what I wanted to point out here is that these are his original some of his original Works some of the oldest things we have and if you look at the style here you don't see any of the sophistication uh being able to render the human form all the proportions are wrong the color palette's completely wrong I mean you never see a purple like this or a red like this in a Rembrandt you don't see the particular color palette that you would be normally looking for in a Rembrandt it just didn't exist here so by the way there is another story there's a huge debate as to where Rembrandt learned about what he finally ultimately became and where it came from some people think that lastman was the one that uh literally was the influence for it uh because remember that never saw well I'll come back to what he never saw and where he never saw it but um when you look at the fact that he spent six months with lastman six months with lastman is like not even worth the time because he went to study with him he was told he should study with him he went to study with him and it's like that didn't work out there's a big debate as to whether or not to hit a huge argument whether they didn't really get along but to be there for six months in a internship is absolutely nothing inconceivable which brings me to this and these are called tronies this particular one over here is actually at the LA uh Getty Museum and I get to see it on a regular basis it's really quite amazing but these are portfolio pieces so um in 26 1626 he did this portfolio piece and what to do with the troni is that it's not a commissioned portrait it's literally just an example that you would use as a portfolio to demonstrate the skill sets that you have so they would demonstrate things like rendering metal so if you see how they render metal here that's really hard to paint and really hard to make look realistically realistic and so in 1627 he honestly didn't have it but in 1631 he totally did he totally understood how to do it look at the feathers the feathers are used as a regular basis because of the detailing and how delicate they are and if you look closely here you see that it's not well rendered here at all it was beautifully rendered here you look at the skin tonality it's uneven you look at the specular highlights in the nose really not well handled beautifully rendered here if you see these little strings right here one of the techniques Rembrandt was famous for is he painted hair with brushes like everyone else but he also used the other end of the brush he would use the wood end of the brush he would sharpen it and then he would actually scrape through the paint and go down to the ground itself that was a technique he used but here he was terrible at it he just had not he understood what he was trying to do but if you see the Wisps over here on the mustache you can see that he finally mastered it but somewhere between here and here he became the Rembrandt that we know again remember what I said about color palette how this color never shows up again in Rembrandt's work especially in his portraiture and this color rarely shows up in his work and the dagger through the heart really shows up in the work that would be the joke honey uh the um the point is is that somewhere between here he changed foreign that's what he changed with so in 1529 he did this portrait and this was one of the first of a couple that are known as portraits done by him and that's where Rembrandt became really Rembrandt ironically for me I saw these uh images early on and I looked at them and I kind of put them to the side it's like well he hadn't quite mastered what he was trying to do yet and I never really quite understood it because look you got this light coming in from over here it doesn't really hit all five planes of the face uh this side of the face is too dark there might be a triangle here maybe not uh no catch lights really in the eye just a minor one it's kind of very difficult to get separation through here and what is this with the expression what is he doing it looks like he's halfway between what we would normally consider it a regular expression so why is this then in my mind considered a pivotal image I found out actually just a few months ago the history of this painting it's the original is actually in Indianapolis and I hope to visit it in person soon but um it's so significant to him he actually took on students uh relatively early on just about this time a little bit before this time he was about 21 22 when he took on students and he literally made his students copy this image over and over again and as an educator when we find something that is well done and kind of like the Pinnacle or the epitome of a teaching principle we try to make our students do it over and over again to try to emulate it so Rembrandt did this there's at least five different versions of this out there done either by Rembrandt or by his students and it's really hard to figure out who did what but the point is is that why would he have why would he make them copied over and over again unless it wasn't significant so we're going to talk about the significance of this a little bit later another significant significance however is that he was 23 years old and I hear a lot from people well you know back then people didn't live that long remember I lived to be 63 years old and that's a Full Life by anybody's standards even today and so he was 23 when he started to really become who we think of as Rembrandt and so I thought I'd actually go back and look at what I was doing when I was 23 and I would challenge you to think about what you were doing at 23 and put it in perspective that's what I was doing when I was 23. any people my last name no Gina's smiling um this particular image was done when I was in college uh junior college actually Community College and I was taking my first photography classes and Pete and Tony yes that is a light meter in my belt things never change uh the uh the point is is that this is where I began and um I obviously have never attained what remember entertained but it was the beginning and our big our beginnings were not that different he started out as somebody with a skill set but he wasn't who he was in the truth is his Rembrandt worked harder than anyone else he was a great innovator and he was many many things but he worked very very very hard so we'll get past that as quickly as possible so I want to talk to you about real Rembrandt in this case real Rembrandt lighting so I showed you the triangle that's all I ever knew and so let me tell you about specifically lighting so um it's your first word of the day there is no test on this but tenerism is the style of painting usually associated with Italian painter carvaggio and also caravaggio's followers in most of the figures they're all engulfed in Shadows so we're going to take engulfed in Shadow and highlight that some are dramatically illuminated we're going to highlight that and they're dramatically illuminated by a beam of light from often identifiable search source tenebrism or what Caravaggio brought to the world in 1602 was this dramatic illumination engulfed with shadows and beams of light so here's an example of Rembrandt's early work and as you see really none of us there you can see kind of the light source and the directional light coming in from over here but doesn't have the impact it doesn't have the depth of the Shadows none of it has any drama it's not until you get over to here that you actually see a little bit higher contrast but all the proportions around the colors are wrong the drama is just not there so enter Caravaggio corvanchu some of you might know this painting um it certainly is well known for what's going on with the beams of light coming across the drama of the dark low-key environment as a if you're a heart art major you're going to know it for this hand right here uh as you know it's photographers things that are closer to the lens or larger and things that are further away are smaller this hand right here is actually larger than this one here and larger than Christ which is closer which is inconceivable in most historians use this as an example of Caravaggio using a tool photographic tool called a um oh thank you I'll think of the word later on um yeah it's out there somewhere write it in the text Pete um the camera obscure using a camera obscura and focusing on a particular area then sketching that and focusing on the other area and sketching that and when you change and shift the focus all of a sudden the perspective comes comes out wrong and they use this as an example of that and if you look at this right here how right here you have this coming off the front of the table they look at that and go oh that's what he did so beams of light and this is my more favorite example of that the Betrayal of Christ and if you see the beams of light coming in here absolutely incredible uh separate beams of light for here we call this a butt light over here that might be a song I'm not sure the uh this is actually Caravaggio up here and he put a self-portrait in there any you of you that have actually done product photography and done shiny silvery objects will know that the light source for this this and this are coming almost directly from camera angle in this case the artist himself when he's painting it which is completely different than the light sources that are going on here here in here um so the drama that you see here with the depth of the Shadow the way the beams of light coming across and scope the face that is Caravaggio that is tenebrism and that's what changed the world in 1602 remembering camera long about 30 years later and started doing this so do you see the beams of light do you see the Dark Shadows do you see the sculpting of the face um this was his first experimentation with it and I think what he considered his best success up to that point with it it was really incredible what he did and what he did is took this principle in his later work you're going to see that he actually dialed it back for his commercial work but in his Fine Art personal work he always used it to great effect and here's an example of that so this is a very typical Rembrandt portrait and so you can see the beams of light actually coming across here they're not Illuminating this part right up here and even in here it's actually just beams of light like that and it's from Caravaggio that he learned it and it was one of the things that completely made his work different than anyone else's as shown here so these are three portraits that are kind of contemporaneous portraits actually Franz halls and Rembrandt worked with the same client cell and pretty much the same time and you can see uh in some of my classes I call This Global lighting where the lighting's the same top to bottom right here and so there's no fall off on the light down here there's no fall off on the light down here it's the same even illumination even though there's a sense of direction if you look uh of this portrait here of Agatha Bass by uh RAM Ranch you'll see that there's a beam of light coming across right here this was one of the images that I first actually discovered it I was on my honeymoon with the lovely and talented we were at Rembrandt's Studio it was actual studio in Amsterdam and this was on display it's normally in Windsor uh at the gallery there and it was on loan and there and I did something a very dear friend of mine taught me to do called concrete shoes thank you Arthur uh he's here with us today and I was standing in front of this painting for about 15 minutes looking at it and thinking man this is just like really amazing light here and the detail and what he did rendering wise Etc somewhere around 12 minutes 12 I realized well what the heck I do a lot of window light work why is this shoulder darker than the shoulder over here because the window light side is always closer and more brighter illumination and what we see doing and that was the first time I ever saw the beams and uh once you start looking for them you'll see them over and over again by the way this is also an incredible example of understanding your clientele even though these guys worked with exam exactly the same people Rubens did not and so you would never see a Dutch woman in this outfit you would never see these colors you would never see the the cleavage you would never see the looseness the the neck all the rest of it and you wouldn't really see this pose and even though they're all amazing artists on their own they have their own particular Styles understanding what your clients are interested in and who you work for is really essential and this is such a great example that I use over and over again excellent example of tenderism here you probably recognize this uh as the night watch is probably considered the Pinnacle of much of the work that he did I show this for a couple reasons one for the beams of light and it's really obvious to see them coming across and illuminating your different people but the other reason why I showed this is I'm going to digress for just a moment this is not about lighting but this is about posing and we do we all do a lot of group shots professionally and we might do images like this Rembrandt it has many of his Dutch contemporaries were were exceptional at group portraits and so this would be a group portrait and this is a grouped commission portrait and so instead of lining it up he turns lining them up in a straight line and doing them on uh steps or boxes or whatever he turns it into a narrative and The Story Goes that he actually people that paid the most money ended up in the front of the painting although we never really know about this girl in the fish he's carrying but the storyline The Narrative the use of composition the use of design and the use of light on this is I don't think ever been attained again so and let's bring to this again another really strong example of that tenorism where there are beams of light coming across this is uh Christ ia uh Galilee and just really the power the Dynamics the lighting on this is just such an exceptional part of what Rembrandt was doing so I tried to emulate that and this is my meager attempt at doing kind of that style uh the point behind it is that I'm trying to do beams of light coming across you can see it here and the illumination on the face is very different than an illumination on the body on both of these this is a softer light uh less contrast this is a much harsher light much more specular light with the specularity the shininess to the skin is very different between the two areas and that's exactly what I'm trying to achieve here I'll talk about that later but um that's one of The Inspirations between behind some of the work like this so I want to talk about the second word of the day which is actually two words which is homogeneous light I've already described this once but um I kind of went into more detail with it here so homogeneous means the state of equality or state of being of a similar kind of having uniform structure or composition throughout it's kind of like mixed yogurt and unmixed yogurt quite frankly and when it's mixed it's homogeneous and so what I tried to do is point out that most artists under his time uh and before his time were what I call even our Global lighting and so Vermeer is a really good example of this you can see that he's got his windows these windows right here um they literally give you very even light all the way across the top all across the bottom this is in the shadow down here this is a great example of foreground framing element but you can see the illumination on the floor is about the same as the illumination over here so it's what I call even but directional lighting or homogeneous lighting and what made Rembrandt's work different is that he changed that he changed it to more selective lighting and it really again comes from Caravaggio so I showed this in this is from about 1908 and this is before they invented strobes or continuous light sources and it's been since about the 60s what we've been trying to emulate for the longest time which is soft diffuse light coming in from the uh One Direction or another um the reason I show it is two things it's one this is also Global lighting the lighting is pretty much the same top to bottom or homemade genius lighting but the you can see the Gobles are the flags here and how they flag this and also this sense of we shoot with windows that are down here and they built Studios back in the day with lights like this um it's significant because it actually brings your lighting direction not from the side but it brings it from the top up here which is what we try to emulate when we bring our soft boxes and umbrellas a little bit higher up creating that 45 degree angle of light up from above as well which puts your catch lights at the 10 o'clock and two o'clock position but I also show this to all my students because I want them to point out I like to point out to them back in 1908 they were far more sophisticated than we were with window light how they're flagging in the light here and flagging in the light here so it falls on the body in the face just exactly the way they want it they're very very sophisticated we're a little bit lazy in that area which brings me back to Agatha bass and Agatha again I pointed out about the beams of light coming across but what I really want to point out in this is I want to point out that if you look at the light on the face and let me go back I don't know if you see it there the catch light right there is a very sharp specular cash light the no Shadow is pretty harsh uh then all of a sudden as you get down below down here the lighting on this brooch right here again people that have done Commercial Lighting know that the light source for this is completely different than the light source that we have up above with the catch light the light source is very different over here than what we have over here as far as the specularity and also the shadow transfer Edge and so they do that in paintings and been able to do that in paintings for many many years we can now do it in Photoshop but we look at the pearls the pearls how they have this really large specular highlight very different than what's going on with the uh the eye and then notice how you have a specular highlight coming all the way around into the shadow you know that never happens and you know you'd never have specular highlights over here on this side unless you use the fill light or something which they didn't do and so he painted those in for effect but the difference in the nature the concept of having a different light for different parts of the body was fascinating and something that was completely foreign to me because we basically put an umbrella in a softbox in as a light source and boom we just make it look pretty whereas now all of a sudden they're using different lights for different things I was introduced to a guy by the name of John Singer sergeant and he was always blowing me away always been really amazing and I noticed one of the things I enjoyed about his work was not only what he did compositionally in style Etc he was from about the early 1900s um I always loved his fabrics and if you get really close into the Fabrics here you see that they almost become these impressionistic little events going on here but when you look back up at the face you see the face has a much crisper sharper light on it with uh Direction and it's quite different than what's going on here and so I started in my career trying to figure out how to actually achieve that photographically there are certain things you can do in post-production and obviously in uh digital right now in Photoshop we're doing things by adding speculative highlights and diffused highlights and doing contouring Etc but uh it takes a lot of time and it's not necessarily done in the right way it certainly can be done but I was trying to get it as much as possible in the act of shooting so I started doing things like this this particular image on my left some of you might know it might be my most successful image it exists in two permanent collections of two museums currently uh as close as I've ever got to 100 in a PPA competition uh did go alone but um it was my attempt it was the story behind it actually is that this little girl was um her mother was in one of my classes uh and her mother we were photographing we're doing lighting demonstrations Etc and her mother says you know my little daughter's here and I sometimes dress her up and um would you like to photograph her in uh vintage costumes and actually that's normally a recipe for disaster but I looked at the little girl and look what she had had and I said yep I'm there and so in about 10 minutes we put this together and there are some amazing people out there doing incredible work the Edmonds are really good examples of that what they do with the styling is incredible you notice that this is a paper uh thing you can get almost anywhere this is a piece of fabric that we have two a clamps holding together in the back here this is just a book we had floating around and that's just a very large doily or whatever lace thing we have and then a string of almost pearls but I attempted to do it in a style that would be reminiscent of a brand and so I was demonstrating it to the classroom do you see the beam of light coming across the face now the specularity on the face the specular highlight the Shadow the density of the Shadow the sharpness to the shadow transfer Edge and yes I did put the triangle in there sorry I couldn't help myself but you compare that to what's going on down in hand and the hand in the fabric are much less um specular type of work or a specular type of light and so it renders completely differently so that would be one of my more successful examples of it most people that look at this image never ever even think of that they just look at the beautiful girl and the the lighting on it and they look at the expression and they go yeah that looks like a rembrand and so they go with it but there were about four or five other layers on top of things that I've learned from Rembrandt that I really tried to incorporate into this shot um I did this one Incorporated this one because this is window light and I had never done it before I was doing a window light demonstration David was there helping me and I thought what would it be like if I did um that same principle of a beam of light coming across and so that the lighting on the face would be different than the lighting on the body and we actually figured a way how to do it and I hope you can see the difference between the specularity the glow of the face the contrast here versus the contrast of the rest of the body that was all done with lighting and um those are some of the things I'm playing with this is another variation all these images were done for um a class demonstration at West Coast school and the this was my subject which is an incredible subject but I decided I wanted to do that same principle in a dialed back version so I brought the contrast down uh much different than what I did in the other two pieces that I showed you and you can see the definite beam of light coming across here different specularity than what's going on here same thing the face is a very different feel than what's going on in the fabric in the outfit in the foreground and the same thing the face here is very different than everything else going on in the body that has become a pretty typical approach the way I'm lighting things now I can either do it incredibly dramatically or subtly but um it's been a path that I've been on for quite a while and I show this and I'm thankful for the Oregon group for bringing me up um I did this at the night they had before the programs where they had the opportunity for people to come in and photograph models really really great environment I showed up late and so uh everybody had been working for a while and these two models actually ended up being free and they were up against a white background and they were with this very large almost seven foot umbrella and so I asked the first one to pose for me and I did this shot and then this guy comes walking by and I released her and he and she are obviously very different subject matters and so I literally decided to use the same light in a different way and so this if you see the specularity in almost the intensity and the contrast to this on his face versus what it's on his body versus this is my background light also that was all done with one light and yes Tony corbel Tony Corbell and I had what we call the Iron Chef contest contest at West Coast School uh last year and we one of our first things we did was window I'm sorry a single umbrella and a reflector and we were working at the same time with a lot of intensity and it was really a lot of fun and then we showed our images up on the screen and I saw his and it's like okay he's serious and so I've been practicing Tony this is what next time we meet I'm coming for you so uh again single light produced all of those different fields of light um single umbrella so that was Rembrandt lighting and so I want to talk about another thing that most people are not aware of and that is Rembrandt actually during his time was considered not because of his lighting but he was more well known because of his expression and how realistic his people actually looked so I kind of want to address that so if you remember again I mentioned that you did this when he was 23 it's one of 75 plus portraits done of himself but we talked about the expression here what Rembrandt actually started doing at this time is he started experimenting with expressions and that's exactly what this is an example of and so we would paint himself over and over again in different scenarios so that he would be able to practice how to get emotion intensity Etc out of the individuals he was portraying and so these would be also some of the pieces that he would do this is called The Laughing Rembrandt also up at the Getty and this is a very famous uh etching that he did in 1630 kind of during that same time by the way this is also another thing that most people don't know about Rembrandt Rembrandt if you talk to somebody that does print making or etching they will tell you that he was probably the top five definitely within the top five of etchers of all time in all history and when you listen to Picasso talk about Rembrandt he's mostly talking about his etching style there are things that Rembrandt did with etchings back in the 1600s that they still don't know how he did it they were that incredible basically what you do is you take a copper plate and you basically carve out by making scratches um release in there and then you wouldn't coat it and then the areas where you had carved the metal away would you end up with basically reservoirs of ink and then when you put it in a press it turns out uh like that it's also another example of Rembrandt being pretty brilliant business-wise is he not only did his portraiture but he also had a different product mix so he was able to make a lot of these he would do an etching and he would be able to sell it as a much more price effective point and so at a lower price point much more accessible and so he would sell a lot of these in multiple volumes because you could make multiple prints as opposed to coming in for a big ticket item like a portrait but then with the other source of Revenue that he had was actually the teaching which I already mentioned but here's the Expressions you can see and if you look at his work uh he had the ability to make his people look so realistic so this is a close-up uh an excuse the reproduction quality of this here because it kind of went crazy here but if you look at how empathetic how believable how real they are and he did a variety of different things to make that happen but his people looked more realistic than anyone else during that time and also much more into the future I was also just reading that the other thing that made his work so believable is that uh it would be the equivalent of how we sometimes over retouch and the people here are actually believable and they uh they're realistic and so he had the ability to take out in this older man here just enough of the wrinkles and maintain just enough of the residue of the wrinkles so that he still had depth he still had wisdom he still had personality but he didn't over retouch him into that Hollywood glamor God like type of thing and that was one of the things that made his work very believable and very accessible and this is a portrait of his during that successful time so again look at the Expressions they're not over the top they're very simplistic but if you look at the eyes and you look at the intensity there they are just real and they're accessible and no one else was able to do that the way he was that's what people came to aim for and I ended up with these These are later on in his life but look at the expression here and look at the subtleness of what's going on with the eyebrows look at there's a lot of pain you can see here the skin this is later in his life in a very difficult time this is from about the same period it is the emotion that he's able to portray through the techniques he's using and his ability to render expression it was absolutely incredible so edges this is also a relatively recent Discovery for me I'd always known about it but I never really quite understood the sophistication of it what I mean by edges is this uh I was watching a video on YouTube uh it was about trying how to do an exact duplicate or trying how to master the style of John Singer sergeant so when he was going through teaching them how to paint one of the things he had to do he was dealing with actual artists painters and he was um literally having them they had to get him the paint faster because he tended to paint much quicker more quickly than most but he also started doing something about edge control and so the an example of that would be the softness of the edge here as it goes through here in the softness of the edge here and the sharpness of what's going on here and the instructor for this class was describing that during the 1800s 1900s when uh John Cena's Sergeant was painting that there was an obsession in the art industry um in the painting World about edges and how you render edges and they started out actually softening them or selectively softening them and using them to control your movement throughout the frame and so here's an once I realized that they started softening things intentionally and there's kind of like this hierarchy of how we view things one of the things we talk about on a regular basis that our eye tends to go to the lighter areas which they do but then our eye tends to look like look for contrast which it does and then the next layer down is it looks for sharpness and so if you have an area that's sharper and you have a lighter area that's actually lighter it'll go to the area of sharpness every time and so you can see that in this illustration right here this is actually a an image done in wax it's encaustic it was done about 100 A.D and even back then they knew that making the ears and the earrings softer rendered them beautifully but it brought your attention always back to the eyes which were but they were always looking to do so we've been doing that forever and this is just an example of a photograph that I had done in a demo and it was shot on my Nikon 85 at 1.8 so shallow depth of field we've known this principle photographically for a long time but when we do softness we do it on a plane so this point of focus here is sharp fortunately I got it on the front eye this eye goes softer and as you get further back it goes softer softer and softer but it's always on a plane painters figured out that they could do it not on a plane but where they wanted to go selectively and so it was a couple months ago as you might have seen the post when I rediscovered the the Facebook post when I rediscovered these these drawings I hadn't seen them in a long time and then I had started looking at them and I was so fascinated about again sergeant had the ability to render faces beautifully but naturally and believably and so I saw these and I was just enamored with them and then I looked at them really closely I couldn't figure out why I always kept going back to the eyes because areas out on the outside just like a high key portrait this is the lightest area this is much lighter down here than what's going on up in the face right here but I always ended up right here and this is such an incredible illustration of edges if you look at the hair how Loosely it's rendered there's nothing really sharp there uh there's nothing really sharp along this edge here in all these Contours have been softened just enough so that they render the impression or the mood of what he's trying to portray but everything you cannot leave this area without coming back and that taught me about what I call Selective softness and so I started to look back at Rembrandt's work and realized that he had been doing it in the 1600s if you look the eye is the sharpest thing here this is further back and softer but then the whiskers right here are a little bit sharper but he uses selective softness or control of edges to always bring you back home where he wants you to be very subtle but incredibly powerful which brought me then to this so I showed you this image earlier this is an image I did of David and this is what the original image looked like and you see how this was shot on an 8x10 inch camera on four by five inch film so it has inherently shallow depth of field anyway but you can see that this distance even at about five six there's enough depth of field to keep the front of it sharp and the ear sharp Etc but what I went in and did is I made another layer softened it and then I started to selectively pull back the areas that I wanted and so what I want you to see is how I've softened areas like this and areas like this I brought it softer here kind of feeling a little bit like shallow depth of field but I didn't do it on planes I did it on areas I wanted a little more attention here but I wanted to bring it back here so I all have everything pointed in this direction um I found two days ago in re visiting my notes on Rembrandt a quote where he talked about uh something called schumata which I've mentioned in a lot in my uh teaching so motto actually comes from the Italian Meats out of the smoke Da Vinci's most famous example of it would be the Mona Lisa and it's the soft edges that are there that um bring you again back to the eyes and so many other different levels but it's about soft gliding it's about soft edges and the quote was that Rembrandt was familiar with this fumato which was a technique that had been used for quite a while but he used famato specifically to increase the sense of depth and I thought hmm so what I want you to look at you're going to have to figure out for yourself this is with no softening of edges and you can see it's a nice rendering and it's what we're used to looking at then if you look at this tell me if his face doesn't feel like it's projecting forward and that the rest of this is going backwards and uh so he's coming forward this is going back and to me this feel this technique is not only reminiscent of the style but it's an actual powerful execution of how we control how people look at our images not just with shallow depth of field but with Selective uh controlled use of edges that's my latest Discovery I don't even know if I'm good at it yet but that's something I'm definitely attempting to do all right so I'm going to go to impasto and Pasto is not ice cream and um it is literally a technique of using paint in a very thick way in a very loose way got me myself in trouble talking about that just recently on Facebook also an imposter was a technique used in painting where pain is laid on in an area of the circus of the surface it's a very sick very sick layers yeah usually thick enough with the brush or palette knife Strokes said that they're visible they can also mix the paint right on the canvas if they want that's a principle you guys might know the work here I have the name of that and so if you look closely his brush Strokes were not only a vocabulary uh especially his use of color with the brush and how we put complementary colors together Etc but the way the breaststrokes become a the technique is important but what's even more important is how he was able to express the frenetic value The Compassion the energy the chaos in this work through the through the use of breaststroke so the reason why I want to show this to you is that when they first started out in the beginning of Rembrandt's career he was very much typical where they were trying to make sure the breaststrokes didn't actually show up except when you were trying to do individual breaststrokes here but um this was very typical of rendering paintings during that time uh and they had been doing it since the early Renaissance and so they gotten really good good at it and so the your economy at the point where they wanted to go somewhere else so Rembrandt really wasn't the first to lead this style this is a really bad reproduction but you can see there's absolutely no brush Strokes there it almost looks photorealistic of uh photographic but then when you get to this illustration of 1661 Saint Bartholomew which is also at the Getty so you start to see what he started to do with brush strokes and he wasn't the first one to do the impasto uh people are like Titian for example before were working within dealing with it but he took it to a brand new level that no one had gone to before and they were trying to get it originally when they were doing it they were trying to get it so that it was just looser a little more about the feel of the fabric than it was about the actual technical rendering of the fabric uh when you when he got to this point this became about the emotion of this work and by the way look at the eyes look at the empathy look at the feeling um look at how the fabric is rendered how loose it is Rembrandt also had a quote about the fact that he didn't want his people to get too close to the work he actually had an anecdote where he said that don't get too close to the work of the paint fumes will kind of get to you so he asked his people to move up move back a little bit and the intention was is that this work looks better further away we now look at it very closely but it has a feel and emotion and a power and intensity that is unique and he was one of the ones that took it to a whole new level this particular painting called the Jewish bride I saw also on that same trip to Amsterdam with my wife and I have since discovered that this is a pivotal image because if you look at the sleeve you can see that not only are there breaststrokes there but he started layering things on top and building up structures that were absolutely insane Beyond breaststrokes you can see it happening here all sorts of different places in this particular illustration there's a story about van Gogh going by with a friend of his and he stood in front of this painting and he was reduced to tears in front of the Jewish bride he wrote something and this is a loose translation where he said something like he would gladly give up 10 years of his life to sit in front of a painting this painting for two weeks eating only a stale crust of bread um he stayed for hours in front of this painting and would not move and obviously this was a great pivotal change for his work it turns out if you actually look at what he was doing in Paris at the time he left Paris and realized that what Rembrandt and others were doing with brush Strokes he did not have the technical skill to do and so he went and learned how to do it and then created his own style out of it but it was from the inspiration of people like Rembrandt that we now have this he was only a couple centuries ahead of his time and there's the breaststroke statutory insane so um that's kind of the end of the PowerPoint but I got three more points I want to make this is again then goes quote about Rembrandt about being a Colossus of Art and no one should ever compare themselves with them there are so many other things about Rembrandt that are really just insane and amazing um I just shared with you a few and some that have inspired me and something that have been really important to me and I showed you a couple examples of how I've been trying to incorporate some of his work or some of his ideas into my work so I do want to talk about three other things in conclusion one of them is tradition what I learned from Rembrandt I learned a lot about tradition and traditions that we honor I came up in an industry where we were using Umbrellas of soft lights whereas 20 years 15 years before I came up in the industry they were using hard lights they um what we started doing with umbrellas and soft lines and soft boxes and window light was a response to the work of George Harrell was the response to the work of Joseph karsh and all the people that were working in the industry at that time where they were using harder light sources and everyone wanted to soften it so that was a reaction to what they were doing then that was it started in the 30s and in the 30s it was a reaction to the work that had been done before that which was soft out of focus and over retouched and if you look at the work of what I learned with rembrand I learned that Rembrandt was such a great innovator he started doing things and nobody no one did before he had Ebbs and flows in his career and ultimately at the end he died unsuccessful and broke because he was he went ahead with ideas that other people at the time didn't really recognize as being that incredible but he started in a place and he was bold enough and brave enough to experiment with things and push the envelope beyond what was done and so even just the Simplicity of bringing a beam of light in here uh and changing the contrast was enough to make his work significantly different than he ultimately went on to change and make it even more dramatically different I show this image here stylistically in this image over here which you've already seen and I get this comment all the time well my clients won't necessarily like the work that you're proposing that I do and the answer is is that all of these represent very specific Styles in formats that were the king of the day and it was someone who changed or challenged those ideas like a Rembrandt that actually brought us to the next level of where bell bottoms are or how high skirts are how those skirts are if fashion is such a great example of how style changes and for us to be on The Cutting Edge of style I think is really important and I think Rembrandt to me is an example of someone being very very bold and courageous in making that happen throughout technique because I think technique's important and I gave you a whole variety of different things on technique that I think are significant this particular book you see how it's all worn and beat and as I don't know there's like 25 Post-it notes on pages that have things like this for illustration uh where I've gone in and I've written all over the book because it's about this is the best book I've ever seen if you're really interested in Rembrandt's techniques Etc he has two books out it's Ernst Von neveting he's totally The Source but there's other people like Charmin and others that have really good content but um I don't know Charmin talks about Rembrandt being a really depressed guy leading a tragic life and I don't really believe that's the case I think he's definitely went through a lot of very difficult times but there is so much that he gave in so many different ways and this is an illustration of what uh veteran does which is here's Rembrandt's work and here is someone else's work and he's pointing out that the Dutch at that time understood that when the light from the would bounce off the face here and eliminate the shadows in here and they knew that too uh that was pretty common knowledge and they understood that light from here would bounce up in here underneath the eyebrow here and give a little bit of Illumination and it would also change the color and they knew it here also a lot of people also knew for example not only do you put a catch light in the eye but you put areas of moisture specular highlights underneath the eye and it makes it look so much more real and so much more believable and the part I cut off down here actually talks about the major difference between this and this is that this guy rendered it so perfectly so minutely and Rembrandt did it loosely and it gave it a believability that uh this looks too plastic and this looks real and so again Rembrandt was known for not doing perfect images but people as they actually really were and so my point is about technique um if you guys want to do a hunt for different words remember it was a master of uh hooting and you guys have no idea what that is and you can even Google that it won't even exist anymore but it was a technique for actually separating things from the background uh using control of contrasting colors tonalities and values and he was a master at it and he was recognized at four in his day but that's uh not even recognized now as a technique in what we do photographically there's also a master of uh species [Music] which is if you Google that it doesn't even exist in the Lexicon now as what it was back then what this was the very beginning of painting with looseness and he was also a master's famato which I also expressed to you but having said all that nobody really cares nobody cares that he was Master all those different things are all the different techniques that they've talked about they care about how it looks they care about how it makes it people feel and again Rembrandt was known for House people were so believable in the emotions and they were so accessible and so he I described some of the techniques that he got him there but nobody cares about the tech excellent and so do not let what I learned is that do not let the technique be the master of the artist but but that the artist be the master of the techniques to use them in the in the means in a way to achieve the artistic end that they want and then my last is thought is about where art meets business and I think it goes back to that point where it's like well my clients won't like that or my clients want to see more light in the eyes or they don't want to see Deep Shadows and I totally get that but I think you need to understand we got what we have 10 different states here two different countries and um work on the East Coast looks different than working on the west coast work in Bozeman looks different than a work in Dallas work in France looks completely different than the work in England or the work in Spain or Italy and so it really depends on who your clients are you need to understand where you come from where they come from but you also need to know how to challenge and to push and to find new ideas I look at where we are right now and we're basically doing a restart and I know that word probably gets misused Etc but we're at a point in history and photographic business Etc that um we're probably not sure whether it's going to look exactly the same when we come out of it as what it looked like when we went in and I think it's probably realistic to believe and to assume that it's going to change somehow and so I'll use just this as an example um I would look at the age group that we have here of people and say most of us probably didn't spend that much time when we were busy in our lives because our age spending a lot of time on YouTube spending a lot of time uh on some of the different channels Etc uh we just didn't have time to do it now look at the amount of time and the way you get your information and I pretty much predict that when we leave where we are now how we get information for all of us including our age group uh is going to change and has already changed uh it would be inconceivable that I could put out a Facebook post a year ago in 10 countries our 10 City attend States and 100 people showing up to me would be inconceivable yet today it happened and it's not that uncommon we communicate this way now and I think it might be one of the ways we're going to communicate which brings me back to how are your people in your businesses going to communicate what type of work are they actually looking for and how is it actually going to translate so um do not let business suffocate art and whether or not you just experiment as Rembrandt did and maybe pay a price and maybe have a different product line separate from what you do to make your money whatever it may be that's important but uh for us to progress as a society as an art form especially photography requires the boldness I just discussed and I think that I learned that from Rembrandt above all so David can we open for questions yeah I think this is a good time um that we segue into the question and answer period Tim um could you first go ahead and stop sharing your screen no yes of course great so I think the best way to do this um if you have a question use the hand gesture feature and then um Tim you can kind of go ahead and call on somebody and then what I will do is um we'll unmute them so that you can hear the question and um everybody else can too so and I thank you guys um your um so well behaved for for this it makes us almost want to do it again you want to describe what we're thinking about doing um well I was letting you do that but yes we um Tim had I when we talk about presenting this material and anybody that knows Tim um this is so um close to him that he has so much material we some of so much of what he wanted to present ended up on The Cutting Room floor right so um we got this down into a preview session rather than the the director's cut um we still have all of that material ready um and he's adding more to it so um Tim is going to come back and offer the uh the class after this one um in smaller bites so we're because it's going to be so intense we are thinking of letting only 15 people in um and trying to uh get through this uh the next phase of the of where we would go from here um and Tim I'll I'll let you say speak to that like really the idea was I wanted to talk here about ideas about Concepts about things that motivated me moved me things I've discovered along the way but uh again Rembrandt's a painter and so I can't teach you how to do his techniques and painting because I just don't know but I'm looking for ways of actually transferring some of his ideas I showed you a couple of them uh into photographic techniques and so what I decided to do I've taught some of these principles in other classes at West Coast school and some of the programs you've seen me at but what we decided to do is put together another program it's a three-hour program the idea is a little bit to 15 people it would be online like this but it would be specifically about how I take and photographic um technique and possibilities and use those principles uh I use Rembrandts ideas and translated it into photographic technique so if you're interested we put it together that would be a charge when we would um charge for the three hours I I don't know if you want to put the link or just email them a link and if you're interested great if you're not don't worry about it if anybody's interested leave me a message in the chat and I will send you the link um I had to really twist Tim's arm to offering this class for um 99 dollars so there it is um okay let's go ahead and jump into the question and answer part and again use the hand gesture if you can't find it just go ahead and wave and we'll um we will find you so I'm going to switch my look to gallery and um actually I'm seeing a couple questions over here already um thank you Paul Oh you mean you're in the chat I'm in the chat I see Callie here said she was interested in learning more about hooting and the um especially color values get the book it has a really good reference to it I can show you the page for it but uh because nobody even talks about that principle and if you're interested in painting and or more sophisticated levels get the book I showed you the Rembrandts uh the painter at work and he also Bender hooting has um Amanda vetting has another book also that I don't even have that um he's the king and he's less BS and more about technique da okay um I'm done with those questions our comments anybody wow okay wow if I could visit one gallery where would I go actually in this room right now there are a bunch of gallery mates arth Arthur and I uh visit galleries all the time I flew to Minnesota to visit a show there for Rembrandts who were there like 60 Rembrandts there or something aren't there um and we spent a couple days there which they couldn't understand why we actually spent a couple days there wow most people would come in and leave after two hours and we were there uh just going back over and over again looking at the work you know actually there is in California there's a pretty good collection I don't know they're all different I guess it really depends on what you're looking for you know there's good bad good and bad Rembrandts some of his amazing stuff is incredible some of is just stuffy cranked out to make a buck is just kind of average and so the Getty has a couple pieces that are kind of on either end of the spectrum uh it would be great if you had an opportunity to go to the museum in Amsterdam and actually visit his Studio they pretty much took it back to the condition that he added in I went through that again when I was on honeymoon and it was fascinating to me I was always told that window light from Rembrandt came from a very small opening in a in a wall and when you look at it the whole wall is lights is all windows and so it just learning and seeing how light fell in that room would be important to you so now just I mean the Mets amazing they're the lube is amazing um reich's Museum in in Amsterdam is amazing um there's a great place in Indianapolis I want to visit because he has one of that that first portrait that I'm looking for National Gallery has a pretty decent one so yes all right next now again if you guys use the hand gesture um we were hoping to have questions live so that everybody could hear the question Sophia I just unmuted you well thank you now bye so my question is and I can I can say this open-heartedly I guess I'm not sure that besides going to some kind of Museum that I've ever spent more than a couple of minutes looking at something you know just appreciating maybe how it was done in terms of brush Strokes or whatever the case may be but when you say that you sit and stare at something for a minute after minute after minute I'm curious if there's a process that you go through to analyze what it is that you're looking at just and what what are the questions that you're asking yourself I mean is there a is there a sequence to that or is it just you kind of sit there and how it comes to life here in this chat room we actually have the creator of that concept called concrete shoes Arthur are you you have a good mic there let me unmute Mark Arthur I learned this from Arthur rainbow okay Arthur you're live go ahead his lips are moving but I hear no sound okay there Arthur go ahead better can you get closer to the mic yeah better huh somewhere turn your volume up no no huh all right then let me um also I'll paraphrase and you tell me where I got it wrong the idea is he gave an assignment to all the students and the idea was that you would literally know about now yes oh yeah we're there okay all right so hi everybody um it was always fascinating because the the first phase of this was you would grow into a room in the museum with a group and the first painting sculpture whatever it was that you stopped that for whatever reason you didn't know the reason you stopped at it something grabbed your attention that meant you had to stay there and you go through phases so the first thing you do is you you go through the normal looking at it trying to understand what it is you're looking at okay I'm trying to recognize things and stuff and that's where you start to think about techniques and things like that as a photographer you tend to then translate how that would work that you would do it so that's probably the first step that you go through is saying to yourself okay what is it that I like like about this and then secondly where I to do it how would I do it so those are the steps you go through that are the left brain steps then I think because you've been there for a while you start to let go of some of that that's your first instinct and start to let your right brain come out start thinking about what it is that made you stop there in the first place what's moving you to really be drawn to this particular painting uh that has been an hour now telling us all the the things that Rembrandt usually do to connect to you the viewer get you to emotionally feel the power of that painting um whether it's light and everything else I think and you could talk about this for a long time and I'm not going to spend any more time but there are a lot of those kinds of questions if you want someday I can send you the questions and things that you ask yourself the last piece of that for me was always then staying there long enough to watch other people who would stop and wonder why they Embrace to that particular painting too what what was the power of it that Drew people in so anyway it's a long process but it's yeah at least getting something from the experience and not just walking through and going look look look so to add to that because of the nature of who we are we have a tendency to look at so much information we don't spend an awful lot of time with it often it's only seven seconds and we look at an image in a museum it's even less less than that for most of the stuff but the assignment of giving someone where they have to spend 15 minutes in front of an image is inconceivable to my young students when you even as I do it when I and others do it things change in your mind and so yeah you go to a technical place first uh to a left side first but then after a while your technical brain gets bored and then it's much easier for your aesthetic brain to start looking at things and if you allow yourself to start seeing things and thinking about things uh and again you give yourself structure in that you're there for a certain amount of time you start to discover things that you just had never even imagined before all right Tim we have uh Antoine up next and it's one it's going to be good I can tell already you are unmuted all right so I posted the the the question in the chat but I'll repeat it uh so on several times we've we've met and we've seen each other you've always talked about the difference between European lighting and American lighting and that you you know usually um you recognize one of my images even if it's in competition um maybe it's because you know my style already or but I I'd like to go I'd like to for you to talk to that that to them talk to a little bit more about that part like what what what does European lighting or American lighting means to you okay I can invest you that maybe I can have Tony Corbell speak about this because Tony Corbell can tell you why the Beatles are significant why their music was so Innovative and creative in the context of where it was and how you can recognize a Beatles song from queen or sting or whatever it is there is a particular style and approach to things I honestly believe it comes from where you live a culture that you come from um the European style is much quicker much looser much less structured and the American style tends to be depending upon whether you're from the city or from outside the city and whether you're East or West Coast to me has a very distinctive flavor and once you get good enough at it and see enough of the work I think that you literally get a feel for it would you agree with that Tony yeah I would I think they're I think um you know I think back to the comments from a great fine art photographer uh John Paul caponegro when he stated uh hey Sophie she says hi uh when JP stated uh find your own voice stop trying to be all things to all people find your voice and people will come to you for that voice and Antoine you've clearly found that voice uh Arthur found that voice Tim did we Tim Kelly all of us we we all find something that draws people in Gregory heistler always said I don't want to do one thing and do one thing well I'm a photographer and I want to shoot everything and and he's one of the few people on the planet that can shoot everything pretty damn well you know but most people yeah yeah I mean you have to find the one thing that speaks to you and go that direction and follow that path and if you make mistakes great maybe they're meant to be there maybe maybe they're not mistakes maybe that's you you know so you've got to take take those Pathways when you come when they come to you and follow that follow your heart on those things I learned that from Arthur 20 years ago okay thank you all right I appreciate that on the feedback not the feedback though but then you know you have to say a lot okay um next is Randy Siegel has a question let me find Randy so I can unmute yeah right I think my screen isn't like yours here we go and and where's Randy there's Randy I'm actually not Randy I know I'm Randy's better half as Tim knows or Worse half I don't know she stepped away and uh she has a question I think about concrete shoes she said she wrote it in the um in the chat uh comments okay so I think Arthur answered that one yeah we kicked out with concrete shoes yeah okay okay and somebody just wrote ah my three favorites Tim Meyer Tony Corbell and Arthur Randall all in the same place it's pretty amazing huh socially distanced okay anybody else raise the hand gesture and um we can get you to ask your questions directly to the professor no okay that means it was either that good or that bad a few people you said they left me speechless okay so I have some questions Andrew You Know Who You Are you're incredibly talented and skilled um up and coming guy hadn't been around as long as Arthur Tony and myself what did you get out of this are you talking to Andrew's iPhone that Andrew are his lips moving well I have to unmute him I which which Andrew can I unmute him I can't I Andrew did I get you uh unmuted hang on yes hey hey Tim how are you there you go uh so did you hear my question uh can you repeat again so you're an incredibly talented guy winning all sorts of awards and your work is incredible I just met you recently and so um I want to know is there anything in particular that you took away from this um because you are so skilled you come from an area of expertise already I think the biggest thing I took away is I I don't know what I know so I need to touch base on some uh some of the history some of the principles of Rembrandt and some of our past uh Masters to kind of fine-tune some of my skills and kind of revisit some of that so I just actually just ordered that book that you recommended on Rembrandt to kind of start a A New Journey uh for me and one of the things I've been really working on is kind of sketching and painting and trying to learn some of these principles to try to help my photography so I think if anything it's it's take a step back and look look back at you know what where this all started and learn learn from some of our grades and some of the Masters okay so David I want to throw this out as a question to everyone here and then also Gina has a question as well oh okay Gina I don't I don't oh you were just practicing raising your hand yes okay well then you know like anyway um my question is uh for any of you in the in the room here um is there anything that really surprised you about what you heard today uh that either hits you in a particular way or is there something that has changed your point of view is there something really valuable that you're taking away from today and I'd like to know what it is raise your hand and then I can uh bring you in anybody would like to answer that question Brian's over there okay hang on Brian let me get to you and Brian you are on the the use of global light like Vermeer uh Brian you have to pump on your quality a little bit and start over how's that got it okay um when you talked earlier about vermeer's light the kind of global light and then um the um Kenner brewerism light uh the Caravaggio light sometimes we get stuck in these um you know one way or another and uh Pete rezak and I saw that when we went to the Portrait Gallery how everything was broad lit and maybe you can speak to like how we get stuck in these these Trends and yet we look back on this work and it's beautiful and we embrace it but then you know I'm I'm maybe speaking a little bit from image competition we say oh well that won't score well how do we get out of that box I think Arthur talked about it um artistic imprisonment one time yeah yeah actually a lot of us have talked about it um when I was talking about tradition that was really my way of walking around that topic and so I was trying to point out that pretty much everything we do I'll use print competition as an example almost all the judges almost all the Educators that are out there were educated by people that had been educated in the 60s and Beyond the 60s and so a lot of the mentalities a lot of the phraseologies that we use and a lot of the things How deep the Shadows can be whether or not she brought be brought lit or short-lit I mean there's just a whole list of them a lot of those come from a generation that started in the 60s and so if you were to go before that the definitions would be completely different and so if you take the work done from the 30s to the 50s it wouldn't do well in print competition at all yet it was actually iconic and incredible uh and so unique in a way that's not recognized now and so it's like we've been eating chocolate ice cream for a really really long time and we kind of forgot Neapolitan and we so we don't really know because the Educators my point is I think it's mostly the people that are educating and teaching they're incredible and the people that are teaching there's some some of the best content I've seen in a long long time out there but uh Arthur myself Tony and many of the others in the room here have spent their life really trying to get people to look outside that box and say you know what this is a great box but it's a small box and so that that's kind of my quest which is the whole point about all most people know about rembrand is the triangle and that's like kind of that's stupid that's a huge huge loss if you don't know some of the other things that he accomplished and so that's just one small example of that and so the truth is you have to push the limits and be willing to have a print score 72. okay uh Pete rezak let me um unmute Pete Professor can you hear me oh unfortunately yes sir first of all thank you so much for being so uh gracious with your knowledge once again for so many of us I've greatly appreciated learning uh again from you today uh so obviously one of the things that that you pointed out and build on what Brian just said about broad lighting but also the shadow transitions with the hard light and then also with the character and personality of some of the other softer lights uh and the shadows and I guess uh tying in with the with the sharpness of the image where the eye wants to go to you versus uh you know the softer edges where they're there but not to uh draw too much attention so uh building on that concept I think that that was really great that you shared that with us today no I was just saying thank you that one of the things you want me to take away was the sharpness that was answering my question yeah no no so thank you for that thank you that's excellent okay we have Celia next in Arthur rainbow also raised us in okay so let's go to Celia let me unmute her am I mute okay you are good to go hi thank you so much Tim this is a great program um and I I stress again about on the sharpness thing it just broke my head today because I did not think of that I always thought about the sharp of the light in the shadow and the eye goes to the light but never thought of the sharpness so I really I really got a very very important piece today from it um and I'm I'm yet to um go back and see how I can apply that to multiple portraits because it's very obvious to see that in a single portrait but I wonder how I can apply it to multiple people in the same shot a group shot yeah even if it's not large but still is it allowed to like it is a good idea to sharpen every face of the of the group or so the uh image I showed you done by John Singer sergeant of the two kids the little girl in the white outfit and the older brother up above um John Singer Sergeant was also incredible at root shots uh just like Rembrandt his compositions and design were through the roof um I just discovered the selective sharpness and how it pushes things forward and back uh and gate and it works in a way of Dimension as well as a way also of directing the eye um when I went back and when I learned that principle I went back to that particular group shot I showed you and realized that what they did is they de-emphasized the fabric and the edges of the fabric and re-emphasized the eyes and so yeah you've been doing a group shot it's it would be amazing it's wonderful it's like 3D I never thought of it thank you Arthur had another question and a lot of people are actually throwing comments into the chats session they're great they're great comments I wish you guys would put your hand gesture up so that we could hear them um Robert I see you uh get to you right after Arthur I need to find Arthur again and it's like an unmute Arthur and then Tim if you want to just cruise through the chat I've been looking through yeah okay okay I just had a quick thought am I up and running here you're up and running live sir okay all right so Tim had mentioned um the early days when he started and there was umbrellas and it was soft boxes and things and uh and he had some beautiful images that he's done and it's not that you can't do this with a soft box or with any light uh I was fortunate to be a stage ahead of through the back evidently where we didn't have soft boxes we have parabolic lights and I was lucky enough to know and learn from karsh he would use nothing but one light source and we were getting those beams of light like Tim has been talking about uh so my point is if you have been intrigued by what you've seen today uh and you want to give it a try you might have to get a different light source than what you're used to using if you're using light umbrellas and and soft boxes and we're lucky nowadays and we have all these great little lights but you can do it with a flashlight and you might just want to go out and get a couple of flashlights and try your beams of light and you might get real excited about something new that's old that's all I'm gonna say I've got some really expensive lights and really if you've ever had a class with me in a studio environment you know that I use a lot of profoto and a lot of other modifiers Etc um and there's a lot of people I mean Chris Knight is doing some really nice stuff where he's cutting the light that's really beautiful there's a lot of different ways of getting there and the the key is is understanding where to place the light and I think that's one of the bigger differences between what they were doing remember I was doing what cars was doing what Harrell was doing they were using beams of light and you had to be very specific in where you placed it there is an art form to that that is being lost because when you're using large Global lights it's so much easier it's just kind of like a shotgun effect you can do beautiful things with large lights but the um they're so easy to use compared to lights that are more selective and specific so you have to practice more yeah uh Robert did you have a question I think you guys saw your hand up uh just shake your head up and down and I can unmute you okay good while I'm unmuting Robert um Tim I'm going to go ahead and plug your class I just got a message from Kat that it is actually now on the website if you guys want to go to California Center for Digital Arts look for the online classes you will see uh Tim's class which will be in two weeks same time Thursday but two weeks from today on the 30th and it's priced at 99 for only 15 people so you guys are the first to hear that um Robert I'm still trying to unmute you and then Antoine I I see that your hand is up too okay Robert you are live with Tim Meyer okay well David and the professor I want to thank you for actually facilitating this is how cool can it be and then being one of the older guys here um starting in the 60s with parabolics uh and barn doors and all that and evolving into a flashlight has been quite a transition and we have to appreciate that but one thing I'd like to talk about is the actual round table that we're having right now I think that's unique in itself they have this many Masters and and phenomenal photographers in one group talking about portraiture and portraitus inherently Fortress photographers have always shared their information and Tim you've been one of the best to be out there and generated with your generosity and sharing the information and your interest and your passion thank you dude you're doing a great job the I think this should be just the beginning in this type of forum uh on any particular subject whether it be Port uh lighting or posing or just uh how we appreciate art in general so thanks again and one thing you always seem to mention when I'm around you is a Chiara School however you might want to pronounce it you didn't mention that today but we but all about lighting and that's what we do all about people and so thanks again I really appreciate it thank you thank you I didn't see Tim Kelly hanging out over there I knew he was originally scheduled but now I see him actually over there in a different part of the screen there's more people over here that I totally ignore it my gosh okay so uh Antoine has another question for you uh Antoine live again with the professor okay so first of all here this is what I have there you go um and wait a minute wasn't in there where was my book where was my book uh it's on the way it's on the way um what was I going to say yes uh well last time we told last time we talked uh you know we were talking about the um and Hollywood lighting from the 1920s and and things like this and that made me um think when you were talking about beams of life that made me think of of that in a more like exaggerated way because you know they were using tons of different hot lights right that were going in different directions to give that feel of of directional directionality and I don't know um I it made me it made me think of a modern version of Rembrandt's you know tenderism or something like that you know with a with your colliding and um that's what I that's what's on my mind later for for this past couple of months I keep wanting to reproduce on something like like that do you think that style has as a uh any uh similarity between what round red used to do and and I'm sorry who am I comparing it I'm sorry I feel like you mean the difference between Rembrandt and the 30s you mean yeah the the like the the Hollywood lighting the Glamor Shots you know the of like uh George Harrell was a very short little guy that went to Chicago Institute of Art went out to Laguna Beach in Southern California to become an artist and was lousy at it but he knew how to do photographs he started doing headshots um the artist on there and then a couple of the Hollywood people started to know who he was and they saw the work and uh if you look at George Terrell's work uh you actually to me I see corvallaggio all over it it's about being Delight he actually started working with the hot lights he put them on booms and he lit the way Caravaggio lit it's obvious he just modernized it and made it appropriate for the subject matter that he was working with and so he did other things uh what he brought to the table was not just a directional light but he brought the glamor to it he turned these Hollywood glamor types into goddesses and gods and he was able to do it with the tools he used which was the hotline it was really amazing so yeah it was all Caravaggio was written all over it sorry yes CC Tony Corbell had a question or comment okay let me go back to Tony before you get here there you go Tony um I'll be brief I just I'm gonna jump off here in a second I just wanted to say thanks again to Tim and and uh what a gathering you've brought together here um one of one of my great my great memories and great qualities of Tim is he's the only guy in the world that you can go to lunch with and have a two-hour discussion on the light and Shadow from a salt shaker on the table and and make it an interesting conversation and one that when you walk away you're going I my brain is exploding here and uh between Tim and Arthur uh we've had some of these conversations that are not normal conversations and people think one of those guys are so weird and I guess we kind of are but we somehow speak this weird same language and it's been amazing uh run for me for my however many years in this craziness but nobody defines it better than you Tim thank you for doing this and you've you've removed the uh as they say you've removed a veil of blindness and ignorance from a lot of our minds today so thank you thank you well I've got um Tony has incredible content whether it's through his Pro Photo stuff is that I mean he's in so many different places you have two books out that are really amazing at least two Tim Kelly had uh a YouTube video uh YouTube uh subscription Channel with some fabulous it's a fabulous Channel he has fabulous Channel um you should go look at Arthur Arthur I'm not sure where your content is available but one of the great minds that I've ever met um Arthur in a way this is kind of like the New Paris sitting around the table with a wine isn't it um yeah I could use them now yeah I bet you could I think Tony already had some but the but it's interesting and it would be fascinating to be able to bring a group together just to chat just to talk to share a word be nice and ideas it might be possible to do that now that's that's what surprised me about where everyone came from but it's uh I know Brian you've had some of these conversations um those are things that Arthur and I have talked about it many many times where the artists during the um early impressionist period the modern artist period would all come together sit around and drink wine and talk to whatever hour in the morning and they would play ideas off each other it was such a big explosion of great art and ideas and I mean I've been able unfortunate enough to do that on a micro scale macro scale and it would be so amazing I mean again I'm amazed at the people that showed up here and talked um I mean I sat at the feet of Tim Kelly I don't know how many years ago that was Tim Kelly but the uh that was a lot of years ago I was his yellow jacket at West Coast school and just sat and watched and listened and absorbed and I've been doing that ever since unfortunately to um Tim Kelly had to go that's all good we have a final question coming in from Brian but before that um karna from uh the wine country right Napa um she brought a Diet Coke to taste to today's session for you thank you very much I appreciate this time she brings you a Diet Coke and she's right there in Napa so um thanks for that karna and Brian um we'll wrap it up with you and then again you guys um if you want to go to the site I will send you a link for the class um there's a few spots left thank you um you know that you jumped on and you are in the class um there's still a few spots left um yeah mine was actually a thumbs up to Tim's comment about how it would be great to come together and have these kind of Roundtable discussions and maybe pick a topic and kind of dig in on it um you know soaking up just the wisdom from so many different people on uh this call would be something I would love to see to see happen um you know maybe even if it's just us all doing self projects on trying to perfect that technique of the shallow depth of field and you know bring some of our images and you know show to each other and I mean we can just kind of take it from here but I was kind of just giving a thumbs up to the whole day thank you thank you Brian excellent again I am floored and I am just so pleased even now we chatted afterwards there are so many great minds here and uh young old and in between and it's a really amazing I'm seeing some of the best work ever produced here yet I'm also seeing some of the best work ever produced being forgotten and so I would love to uh see if we can do something like this and continue to talk um Tim I just got a doors right on it she uh put the link in the chat so if anybody just don't wait for me to send it to you it's right there in the chat box okay well um great job Tim and thank you again for everybody for tuning in with us today and um being uh you know so patient and forgiving to this new format that we are trying to figure out ourselves so um with that I think um well Jim you want to wrap it up no but I mean this is way over said but I really love you guys I really appreciate everybody's here there pretty much everyone here on the screen in front of me has a story and we shared something somewhere and that's really really precious to me so thank you all okay all right bye everyone foreign

Channel: California Center for Digital Arts

Views: 294

Keywords: digital arts, photography, camera class, camera course, basic photography, DSLR, david laneve, beginner photography, protip

Id: 6b0YK3zlb4E

Length: 100min 33sec (6033 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020