Le retour...

Bastille Day is as good a day as any to start posting again. And so, in honor of the French national holiday, a few photos of Paris from my recent "Circular" series. The series is inspired by the circular snapshots made from the 1888 Kodak No. 1 cameras. Rather than replicate the vintage look with sepia, I wanted to do a crisp black and white. The photos are on a square white background because 1. it looks great to have that white space and 2. who has a circular frame? They look extra cool printed high gloss on metal. Check out the full gallery on olivierphotography.com, where you have loads of size and print material options.

Blatant self promotion? Of course. Unlike so many web sites, I don't run ads all over my page. I had a brief experiment with affiliate links at one point, but decided to abandon even that. However, as my views inch closer to 1 million, I can't help but think what role my lack of "monetization" may have played in the waning number of posts over the years. Hence, my return to posting will no doubt be accompanied by a few invitations for you to visit some of my Paris galleries the next time you're hunting for a gift:

There are other images to check out in the gallery, and more will be added in the future. My favorite is a grid of nine circular photos. Any of prints can be any (sqaure) size, from 5"x5" to 40"x40".

The end of the monetization experiment

Marc Olivier, Eiffel Tower at 6 a.m. (buy it here)

So, a while ago I decided to experiment with "monetization" (is that even a real word?). I like to be up front with everything, so I did a post about it. I wondered:

1.Could I do some form of affiliate marketing that wasn't obnoxious?
2. Could I possibly earn money from it?

My answer: yes on the not obnoxious part and no on the money part. I chose skimlinks because I had read that Pinterest had temporarily used it. I have nothing but good to say about skimlinks. It was easy to set up, they represent a broad spectrum of affiliates, and unlike those annoying pop-up ad words, they don't seem to hijack your blog. But at the end of the day I earned maybe less than $30 total. So I don't blame them. My downfall is probably due to the fact that I have posted less and less, and that when I do post, I'm not trying to get you to buy stuff—oh yeah, except for that little link by my photo up there (notice that?).

Based on my extremely limited knowledge of web marketing, the best way to make money from your blog is to push your own products and services (not someone else's). So that's the next experiment.

So this is the end of the skimlinks experiment. I'll scour out that code as soon as I remember where it is. And I'll get back to posting.

Blue Paris

Blue Paris, Marc Olivier

Texture, texture, and more texture.
I put enough layers of texture over this that it began to remind me of those metallic Kleenex boxes with abstract patterns on them from the 1970s.
Anyway, I'm doing all kinds of crazy stuff about texture in my other life as an academic right now which is distracting me from photography. I'll try to merge some of it into my blog soon.

just a photo of Paris

Paris Café, 2012, Marc Olivier

Dictionary Print Photoshop Tutorial

As promised, I'm going to show you how to make cool-looking overprinted dictionary (or other text) pages in Photoshop. This eliminates the need to try to feed dictionary pages into your finicky printer. Plus, it means you can use your favorite pages over and over.

You can see some of my own prints in various stores and online (art.com has a good selection). At first, I was hesitant to do the tutorial, even though a lot of people who know Photoshop probably already know how to do it. I wondered if it would hurt retail sales of my own prints, for example. But finally, I concluded that the DIY audience and the print-buying audience are probably two distinct groups. And of course, there's the fact that the print-buying audience is paying for my work, not for a tutorial. So here we go:

Step 1. Find a photo you want to use, and convert it to black and white. I highly suggest that you do something high contrast, with some white space to avoid a muddy final product. Now is not the time to get all Ansel Adams about things. Go ahead and blow out the highlights and destroy those details in the shadows. It's OK.

Step 2. Find a page of text that you want to use. When I first did these for my home with a printer and actual pages, I used pages from an old dictionary. Then, I dug up some art magazines (circa 1899) I bought years ago at a Paris flea market and started using those.

Once you have chosen your page, scan it at a fairly high resolution. Because I make 27x27" prints, my files end up being huge. If your page is roughly the same size as the print you want to make, you can scan it at 300dpi. If it's smaller, go higher.

Step 3. Open both digital files in Photoshop. You might want to crop your photo to the size you want before you add the text. Then, you are going copy and paste one of your files onto the other. I usually copy the page (select all and then copy) and then paste it over my photo. It will appear as a new layer that completely covers your photo.

 If your file is too large (like mine was), then you can use the transform tool (command-T for Mac users), find a corner (see those lines in the gray area? that's where the little boxes are), hold shift (to make sure you don't skew the perspective) and drag until you get a size that works. Then hit return to apply the transformation.

Step 4. Last step. Already. Make sure that your top layer is active. Now, look in your layers palette and change the blend mode (see where it says "Normal"?) to "multiply."

And magically, you can now see your black and white photo as if it were printed on top of the page.

And that, my friends, is one of the fastest tutorials ever.

UPDATE: And of course, if you want to buy some of the ones I've done in virtually any size print, you can get them at my site for very reasonable prices.

An Art Print and Licensing Story

A few posts ago I mentioned the dilemma of how much commercial stuff to share. But then I also said that my impulse tends toward disclosure, so I'm going to give you a true story of a commercial endeavor and in my next post, a tutorial.

And now, the true story of the commercial endeavor.

Remember this post?

Source: takeoutphoto.blogspot.com via Marc on Pinterest

No? Well, it's been repinned a billion times on Pinterest. The summer of 2011 my wife and I bought an old window frame and I knew that I wanted to use it for photos. It just so happened that a massive old dictionary I have had pages that fit nicely. I printed some black and white Paris photos directly onto select pages, tacked them onto the wall with old upholstery pins, and hung the window frame on top. I posted a tutorial on it, which subsequently got pinned an re-pinned on Pinterest.

From my wall to the mass market
Obviously, I liked them enough to put them in my own house, so I decided I might as well try out their commercial appeal. I am under exclusive contract with Wild Apple Graphics for all things mass-market, so I sent a link of the blog post to the art director along with some sample images. And I figured it couldn't hurt to mention that it was "trending on Pinterest."

The submissions process is somewhat mysterious. From my end, it goes like this: I make some art, I send it (usually via email), they get back to me (mostly) and tell me if they think it fits their needs (I'm sure they know the market better than I do. It is their job, after all.) Next, I prep the files in the appropriate size (often, this has been either 27x27 inch for the square ones and 16x20 for portrait) and then upload them via ftp.

On their end...who knows? Do they print them out and throw them in the air and read them like tea leaves? Do they meet in a boardroom and decide what they like? Does the owner's pet llama have any influence? I couldn't tell you. I know that they work (selling wholesale) with hundreds of clients and go to various trade shows. I know that they run things by some clients to test the waters. Some of the photos they have me upload are never seen again (such as some book prints that I love), and others make it into the catalog. More on that mystery in the future...

A file I once submitted that apparently failed to impress. Source: takeoutphoto.blogspot.com via Marc on Pinterest

Finally, after a few months, a royalty check arrives with an itemized statement that shows me how many of which prints have sold (but it doesn't say which companies have purchased them, for whatever reason). Art licensing royalty rates are not high, but I have no complaints because I realize how many people (and possibly, llamas) are involved in the marketing, printing, and distribution of my photos. In January, for example, about 11,000 of my prints sold. If I thought there were any way I could sell that many prints by myself, I probably would, but that is hard to pull off as one person. Even when my ABC Paris photos were featured on Design*Sponge (which, incidentally, is what got me the contract in the first place), the sales from all of that publicity were relatively modest.

A Paris dog print that has done well.

Source: fulcrumgallery.com via Marc on Pinterest

From printer to digital files
Back to the dictionary print story...I shipped a bunch of actual prints on dictionary paper (and others on paper from old art magazines (circa 1899) that I bought at a Paris flea market years ago. The printing was a nightmare. The printer heads often hit against the edges of the old paper (the dreaded "head strike" that made the manager of the print lab cringe) and I lost of few of my favorite pages to misfeeds, margin errors, etc. One day, I sent my assistant to run off some prints and half of them came back upside-down (not his fault). The ones that worked were shipped off to Wild Apple, where the best of those were digitized. I don't have the files on hand, but you can see an example here.

Source: art.com via Marc on Pinterest

That was the hard way. Once I started to prepare new files, I did it digitally, as in the "Paris" typographic photo above. This was so much easier to do. If you are pretty good with Photoshop, you can easily figure out how I did it. If you're wondering how to save yourself from the headache of misfeeds and other printing nightmares, stay tuned. In my next post, I'll show you how it's done.

If you want to see more, you can check out some of my prints at art.com.

From Street Photography to Postcard

Across from the Pompidou center in Paris

"Unabashed commerciality. Shameless optimism." That was my goal for 2012. So when I walked by a shop around Les Halles on my way to a movie and saw my photos on the postcard rack, I was pretty excited. I heard back in February that a German company wanted to use two of my dog photos for their postcard line, but I didn't really think they'd be out so soon.

2.50 (and that's euros!) for one card! yikes! And to think that I earn a whopping 4 centimes per card. So maybe I'd be able to buy a baguette if someone bought the whole rack? I guess we'll see over time. I was very impressed with the quality of the cards (nice printing, very heavy matte stock) and I had to buy one of each to commemorate the occasion.

Although someone might think that the photos are staged, they are not, which makes it more (dare I use the term "authentic"?), um, real. In the one of the sheepdog sticking out the back of a smart car, I obviously photoshopped the licence plate (I also changed "smart" to "art"), but the scene is from everyday life. The one with the dog holding a baguette (it's actually a campaillette, if you want to be picky) comes from one morning when I was specifically out looking to take photos of Parisian dogs. It was early in the morning and I followed an old lady to the boulangerie (does that sound creepy?). When she came out with the bread, she let the dog carry it home. It was too perfect! It's part of her daily routine. I asked if I could take a photo (I had to get down at dog level right in front of the dog, so this isn't exactly stealth photography) and she was apologetic about the dog's mangy fur, but happy to oblige. My favorite detail is the hint of the woman's sensible shoes and the ruffle of her dress. It's fun to see a moment I still remember so vividly now sitting in racks of postcards waiting for tourists buy them. 

Dog heaven

Wish I had more than a split second to snap this photo of a dog going by in the backseat of a Rolls Royce.

Tango in Paris

Tonight in Paris...
couples tango at Trocadéro.
warm spring air...quite magical even for a jaded cynic.

Storefront

"Price of Fashion" Marc Olivier, Paris, 2011

Just felt like posting a photo. I've been busy with the Sundance Film Festival and then with catching up at work. Hopefully, I'll get back in a routine soon and do some real posts.

Eiffel Tower with statue

Marc Olivier 2011 (you can buy this and other Paris prints at Olivierphotography.com

I've been wasting time cloning out a big street lamp and the ugly Tour Montparnasse to make this view just a little better than real life. I'm pretty happy with the results. This was the original:

Paris layered collage

I've been doing some very vintage Paris photos overlaid with old maps, letters, and stamps. All part of my exercise in commercially viable work. My own taste tends to be more modern, but this was fun. I have some plans for more modern, colorful, geometric collage I'd like to try next.  Hey, and maybe during Christmas break I'll do some sort of tutorial.

Marc Olivier 2011

Marc Olivier, 2011

Marc Olivier, 2011

Street Stories

Since the photos are already up online at the Kiernan Gallery, I thought I'd post the three of mine that were accepted and tell you the stories behind the photos.

 "Field Trip" (click on any of the photos to see them larger)

I was wandering around Place de la Nation and noticed a group of school kids on a field trip. Their teacher tried to give them a history lesson, but the kids were more interested in the graffiti that had been scrawled all over the statues. For me, this story reads on at least two levels, depending on how much information you have. The first level is about the interplay between the boys and the cherub. It treats budding adolescent humor, curiosity, phallocentrism (if you want to get deeper). The second level would require a closer shot and a knowledge of French politics. The graffiti on the poor cherub's privates reads "la bite de Sarkozy" (Sarkozy's...). One of Sarkozy's notorious remarks when he was campaigning to be President was that the suburbs (in France suburbs has the connotation that might be given to inner city in the U.S.) should be washing with bleach. That kind of callous, racist statement did nothing to help mend the gap between the bourgeois elite and the disenfranchised, unemployed youth of the suburban projects. The statue pictured is called the "Triumph of the Republic" in honor of the French Revolution. Today, Arab (especially Algerian), and to a lesser degree, West African second or third generation immigrants are often treated as second-class citizens (or, "third estate" I should say). In that light, the photo resonates on a more political level.

 "Starbucks"

I was walking around the Saint Sulpice Church (which tourists never visited until the Da Vinci Code), when I saw some girls at the side of the church doing photos in a swimming suit and a headscarf. They looked like students doing an art project. They were most likely of Moroccan or Algerian origin and the headscarf (which initially she had covering her face) with swimming suit shoot in front of a Catholic church was clearly meant (or so I assumed) as an artistic statement. They made their way to the front of the church and I followed them. I stood at the side by the church entrance where a beggar woman sat waiting for passers-by to put change in her empty Starbucks cup.  I snapped a couple of photos and exchanged a smile with the woman as she looked at the camera. Then I put some money in her cup and she commented on the shoot going on behind her. "Elle est belle, n'est-ce pas?" (She's beautiful, isn't she?). This was the last thing I expected to hear from a woman with such apparent dedication to modesty. I titled the photo "Starbucks" to draw attention to the corporate logo on the cup, which for me, brings questions of capitalism and consumerism into the story of class, gender, culture.

"Angel of Repose"

I snapped this in the metro, all too aware of the disapproving gaze of the people around me. Or maybe that was just my fear of being exploitative. As a rule, I try not to take photos that mock people. In street photography, it's easy to make people look bad. But the French humanist photographers I admire (like Doisneau and Cartier-Bresson) never treated their subjects with disdain, so my aim is to keep things in the humanist tradition. Despite my initial hesitation, I realized that the target of the photo is not the man but the ad campaign, or rather, the stark contrast between the real conditions of poverty and the carefree images conjured up by a large and expensive department store. In other words, if anyone comes out looking bad, it's the people who don't have to sleep underground. On a technical level, the photo was very dark and needed noise reduction and exposure adjustments in processing. One difficult decision was how much to correct the white balance. The metro light is dark and yellow, so I decided to leave in some of that color cast when I did adjustments.

The first and third of the above photos were accepted for the online show and the "Starbucks" photo was one of the 30 accepted for the gallery. You can see all of the photos on the Kiernan Gallery's website.

Ex post facto influence

Paris, 2011

To quote Wikipedia, "An ex post facto law (from the Latin for "from after the action") or retroactive law is a law that retroactively changes the legal consequences (or status) of actions committed or relationships that existed prior to the enactment of the law."

I'm adopting the Latin term to describe retroactive influence, specifically, an influence that affects the way you assess a photo that you have already taken. 

Have you ever looked at a photo you once ignored and reassessed it in light of work you had appreciated elsewhere? That is what happened to me today. I was sorting through some Paris photos for a project and my eyes stopped when I came across the photo above, not because it was what I needed for the project but rather because it made me think about the following Saul Leiter photos I had been looking at the night before:

 photos via (ana)logbook

Not that my photo is as good as Leiter's or that it was inspired by him at the time I took it. Two immediate differences: 1. there is no human presence in my photo and 2. the tones in my photo are less warm and saturated. In Leiter's photos, the angle of the hand or of the head draws in the viewer's eye. The slight glimpse of humanity haunts the photos. It makes me wish someone had been sitting in that blue car when I took my photo.

But my point is that I might never have noticed my photo today (which, although it is no Leiter work of art, still really pleases my eye) had I not been admiring Leiter's work last night.

Last night I had been thinking how I would like to do some photos inspired by Leiter. Today, I realized that I already had—retroactively. And that, dear reader, is my tale of ex post facto influence.

DIY: Print photos on old dictionary pages

I first saw this idea floating around the Pinterest boards. People had printed photos onto old dictionary pages. I just happen to have a HUGE unabridged dictionary from 1937:

 I love the marbled exterior and the tabs. But since I don't actually USE the dictionary other than for decor, I thought it could stand to sacrifice a few pages for an art project.

MAKING THE PRINTS

There's really not much to it:
1. Carefully rip out a page and measure it.
2. Choose a photo (or in my case, 6)
3. Convert the photo to black and white. It's best to use photos with some contrast and a decent amount of white space. Whatever is white will not actually print white on your page; it will just show through to the background.
4. The first tricky part is to figure out the margins so your photo will print on the right part of the page. Not that it's necessary to be exact with this kind of thing. I measured the size I wanted, made a blank document in Photoshop at that size, opened my photo, copied and pasted it into my blank document, and then used the Free Transform tool to make it the size I needed with the margins I needed. The best thing to do is approach it with a very forgiving attitude. Apply the "galloping horse" rule (which is that if you don't notice the error when galloping by on a horse then it's fine).
5. The second tricky part is feeding your paper into the printer. If your paper is old like mine was, you'll have to carefully hand feed it.

Once I knew it was going to work, I used the first page of the dictionary for this photo I took of an iron gate in Paris:

One feature of this particular dictionary that I really like is the letters down the right side.

Another cool thing that you can see on this crop of a bike photo is the dictionary illustrations that show through, like these wasps. I used all Paris photos, which makes me wish I had an equally cool French dictionary to cannibalize. (The photos I snapped of these completed pages, by the way, had the awful lighting conditions of incandescent+sunlight, which is why the color doesn't always look uniform.)

 

The door knocker looks really cool, in my opinion, because of the contrast and the ample white space.

DISPLAYING THE PRINTS

I bought an old six-pane wooden window for $10 at a consignment store. I knew I was going to use it for photos, and it turns out that the panes are just about the right size for the dictionary pages. My plan was to simply tack the pages on the wall with decorative upholstery tacks and then hang the window on top of it. The trick is figuring out where to pin each photo. I hate doing anything that requires measuring and calculation, so I hung up the window, marked with pencil just outside of each pane, took the frame down, and then put painters tape to show where the divisions were:

(Did I mention how sick I am of that wall color? It's changing very very soon.)

I had to take the window on and off a few times and adjust the tape until it lined up pretty well:

Finally, I just started tacking on the pages, making sure that they were at least in line with each other (I didn't care if they were perfectly centered in each frame--galloping horse, remember?).

I used a variety of upholstery tacks that had been sitting in a drawer in the basement just waiting for something like this. Here is what it looked like before I put the window back up:

The detail of a chair (top left) seems to be a favorite. Top middle is my favorite, but I like them all. In fact, I have about 20 photos that are good candidates for this sort of project.

Finally, I hung the window back up:

OTHER OPTIONS
You can save yourself time by just framing the thing. Or better still, don't even frame it; just use decorative pins, tacks, or whatever. You could also save yourself the printing effort by scanning the dictionary page and making a composite, but I really wanted to print on the actual pages.

Maybe this will inspire you for your own project. If you do something and post it, send me a link.

BONUS!
Don't want to make your printer hate you by feeding it old dictionary pages? OK. Check out the tutorial I just posted on how to do the whole thing in Photoshop.

AND...You can also buy my exclusive versions of the prints you see here with all of the flexibility (almost any size) and durability of photo paper (or giclée, canvas, even metal) you can get them on my site.

Co-starring light

I wish I could remember the exact quote and who said it, but the idea is this:

No matter what we are taking pictures of, we are always taking pictures of light.

Seems obvious when you hear it, but I was looking at a contest on "The Poetry of Shadows" and it got me thinking about that idea. The fact is, most of my street photography isn't really about light. Or rather, light is far less important than the people and the geometry of the shot. I quick survey of some of my recent Paris photos made me realize that it wouldn't hurt to let light play a co-starring role if not the lead more often.

Now, if I happen upon some photos that are all about "the poetry of shadows" then maybe I'll submit something. Not the bike shot above (that I photographed one day walking home in Paris), however, because the judge takes photos of garbage smashed in parking lots (I'm not criticizing, I actually think they look really cool) so I don't think the pretty bike shot would be her cup of tea.

In any case, it might be a good exercise to look through some of your own photos and pretend you are going to submit some to a show about light or shadows. What kind of role do you give light? Cameo appearance? star? supporting actor?

Scenes from the Montparnasse Cemetery

Serge Gainsbourg

Charles Baudelaire

 

Jean Anouilh

A young man who died tragically at age 21

Abandoned, in process of being reclaimed by the cemetery