The Granddaddy of Them All

I just finished doing a podcast with a very good friend of mine, Tim Herb of the blog Black and Blue. His is an all sports blog and he usually features a Goal of the Day. He has very good stuff, I recommend checking it out.

The podcast has us talking about the up coming World Cup. I am a huge soccer fan and incredibly excited for this. The feature photo is of Wesley Sneijder from Holland who is one of my favorite players. We featured a full group break down as well as a few predictions.

I've talked about the marketing for this event and marketing plays a huge notability with the players and teams as well. Some teams don't have guys that play in really prominent leagues, but are still great players. Playing in those huge leagues with high marketability makes guys more favorite and teams to be favorites for such a huge event. Gerrard, Villa, and Messi are three guys in an Adidas soccer campaign because they are so good. Them being good in more competitive leagues makes them stand out more which makes them more well known. These are the players we look to shine on huge stages, whether it be Champions League or an international level like the World Cup.

This makes some of the competition for lesser known players more interesting. We've seen almost everyone on the England National Team play before because they play in high profile leagues for high profile teams. But Serbia and Slovakia play mostly in their home countries for smaller market areas. Both of these teams are viewed as dark horses for the World Cup, though Serbia is most people's pick as THE Dark Horse for the tournament.

I'm really excited to see how some groups will fair and how some players will perform at insane levels to prove their worth at such a high level. Some players even become known because of this stage. Franck Ribery was known in France, but after his duo performance in the last World Cup along side Zinedine Zidane, he moved from a lower market to a high market playing for Bayern Munich. This stage sets some players up for success and let's some players fall to their knees. Landon Donovan is one of the most prominent USA players who has failed to show up on large scales and been a huge disappointment. His play leading up to this World Cup has been captain worthy and US fans are eager to see his performance.

I hope this sports post doesn't put anyone off, but I'm glad to be diverse in my topics. I hope everyone is as excited as I am for the World Cup, and I hope you show your pride when you're team takes the pitch.

Also, enjoy the podcast!

Photography as an art.

I know it's been a while since I've posted, and I apologize. I've been focusing my time into finding a job, blah, blah, blah.

I felt like I lost a lot of drive to be creative since I graduated and I went to get some ideas from the magazine rack at Barnes and Nobles. I don't really consider photography to be an art, becuase you don't create anything you just capture something. I understand the "art" comes in appetures, doing touch ups, exposing negatives, photoshop and all that good stuff. But photo still half-assing a creation or screwing up something so it looks cool. I'm not saying avoid photography it's garbage, but as far are as an "art" I was skeptical.

Digging through magazines like CMYK I started getting frustrated with the lack of design oriented stuff and looking through some of the less "high end" photography. By high end I just mean the magazines geared toward "the buyers and sellers of today's art world". I'm in no position to be buying art right now. I started browsing through B&W Photography, a magazine that's for black and white only photography. I was moved. I pulled over a little bench and sat looking through it for a solid hour. The first real note of photography that to this day I regret not owning was at the LSU Museam of Art (MOA). It was an underwater shot of a naked woman swimming. It took me 30 minutes to figure out it was a woman. It was under choppy water so the light refracted in crazy ways all over the woman's body. It was phenomenal.

Looking through this magazine, I wasn't as enthralled in it as I was that photo at the LSU MOA but I started to realize that the content had a lot to do with it. Photography is creating emotion, a sense of longing, a desire to be there. I took a photography course in college, my teacher sucked, the class sucked, it was a joke. I attribute some of my distaste of photography to that class.

I'm not even saying "good photography is art". Artist photography is something hard to pursue and only 1 out of your entire portfolio may be "art" and it comes down to capturing an image rather than creating it. It also has to do with the basic fundamentals of photography and the lighting, angle, emphasis, etc. But it is, in my opinion, that hard to find good artist photography.