lynda.com debut!

Back in June, I had the pleasure of meeting and working with Ben Long at The Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute workshops.  In addition to his work with many magazines such as MacWeek, MacUser, Macworld, and CreativePro.com, Ben is also a regular contributor to lynda.com, an award winning online instructional video library.

lynda.com produces thousands of video tutorials and training on various topics.  While most of their video's feature courses on software, they have been working towards focusing on where creativity and technology intersect.  Some of their latest videos are aimed at educating not just the practical aspects of a given discipline, but the artistic understanding and creative vision that can be applied.

Ben Long's Foundations of Photography series has been a huge success with lynda.com, addressing technical knowledge of photography with an understanding of the aesthetics of it as well.  Following our work together during the summer at Quartz mountain, Ben and I were reunited for fall courses at The Oklahoma Arts Institute.  The folks at lynda.com took the opportunity to incorporate the workshop into a new course Ben was working on for the site,  Foundations of Photography: Composition.  We were followed by a camera crew who filmed our lectures on creativity, intuition and seeing, as well as critiques and discussions with the students.




This was such a new and fantastic project to work on, and it was wonderful to work with Ben and everyone from lynda.com.  The Foundations of Photography: Composition video series was published on lynda.com on 12-23-11 and has already been a huge success, highlighting as one of the most viewed courses.  I highly encourage anyone interested to check out the series, you won't be disappointed!

New Images on the Website

Just added a handful of new images to the portfolio section of the website!

I've continued working with the mirrors in color, most recently playing with gels to have more control over the color and how it defines the form.  The color has brought a more dynamic element to the images, and the colors I've begun incorporating have been slightly more bold than they were previously.

Check out the 2010-present section at ConnieImboden.com to see some of the latest work!

Provincetown Workshop 2011

Another recent workshop I had the honor of teaching at was the Photography Workshops at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.  I've been a part of this workshop for the past 4 years, and every year has been an incredibly fun and fantastic experience.

For one thing, Provincetown is SUCH a cool place.

The Parade

The workshop was August 14th-19th, which happens to be one of the biggest weekends of the summer for this little town.  On August 18th, we had the chance to see the town's Gay Pride Parade, a truly outrageous, fun, and all around extravagant event.  It was such a blast, you never knew what was next...

OSAI Workshop in Oaklahoma

Last month, I was honored to be part of a workshop at The Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute at the beautiful Quartz Mountain Arts and Conference Center.  The two week long intensive program is aimed at the education and advancement of high school age students in the arts, including acting, creative writing, ballet, modern dance, orchestra, chorus, drawing and painting, photography, and film and video.  It is an amazing academy and an excellent resource for gifted young artists.  I found the students to be fantastic, all of them bright, enthusiastic and eager to learn.


Team Photo

Working alongside brilliant photographers Konrad Eek and Ben Long, I knew we were in for a great time when these two knuckleheads launched an impromptu 20 minute comedy routine to kick things off...

  Konrad teaches photography at Oklahoma City Community College and runs Maxwell Eek Design Photography, a commercial photography studio focused on product and fashion photography for wholesale and retail catalogs.  Ben is a San Francisco based photographer with a long list of commercial clients, a longtime contributor to many magazines including MacWeek, MacUser, Macworld UK, and is currently a senior contributing editor for Macworld magazine and a senior editor at CreativePro.com.  His book, Complete Digital Photography, now in it's 6th edition, has become something of an industry standard.  Together, the three of us formed "Team Photo" and had a blast sharing our diverse passion and knowledge of photography.  (Taking notes myself during their lectures, I found the students weren't the only ones who had something to learn.)

Georgia Review Summer 2010 GAMMA Awards

Last summer, my work was featured in the Summer 2010 issue of The Georgia Review, and I was honored to have one of my images featured on the cover.  A highly regarded literary journal that features everything from short stories and essays to poems and visual art, it's diverse content and outstanding quality has won The Georgia Review many awards throughout the years.

This month, the Magazine Association of the Southeast awarded The Georgia Review with seven GAMMA awards for 2010.  I was thrilled to hear that the Summer 2010 issue won a Silver Award for "Best Photography" in the General Excellence Category for my portfolio, entitled "Danse Macabre".  The title was taken from a long poem inspired by my work written by Susan Ludvigson, who also wrote the introduction for the feature in the journal.  I couldn't be happier with the introduction and how the whole piece looked in The Georgia Review, and I'm ecstatic about the Silver GAMMA Award!

Click here to order a copy of The Summer 2010 issue of the Georgia Review.

For more about the seven awards given to The Georgia Review, click here to read about it on their blog.

Or click here for the press release.

For a complete list of this year's GAMMA Award Winners, click here.

Working With Color in the Mirrors

As I've said, working in the water with color revealed new dimensions, depths, and interpretations to my work. Differences in color temperature of light above and below the surface of water revealed distinct variations that were totally unexpected, allowing me to see the same subject matter I've been working with for over 25 years in a totally new way. The color also gave form and context to certain aspects of the body and it's reflections, things that were more abstracted by black and white.

After photographing with color under water for 2 years, I decided it was time to explore how color would impact the mirror work.

This is a fairly recent image since starting work with the mirrors again a few months ago.  I think the color has a similar effect on the mirror work as it did in the water- it defines a lot of the forms that were previously annihilated by black and white. The color brings with it an element of reality, and along with the notion that photography is automatically taken as truth, creates a tension with the bizarreness of the rest of the image.

The image above is one of my favorites that I've seen in the mirrors so far.  A lot of the latest mirror work has had an undeniably classical religious quality to it, which is a surprise to me, because I'm not religious.  When I go into a shoot, I don't have an image in mind, or even an idea of what I want to convey.  After seeing this image, I couldn't help but think that not only did it feel classically Christian, but that it reminded me of something in particular.  And then it struck me:

This is from  "The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden", by Early Italian Renaissance painter Masaccio.  I was so surprised to see the similarity not only in the gesture, but in the overall expression.  There's something about the articulation of the image that feels very similar as well, something about the graphic quality...

A good friend of mine came by the studio and had a similar reaction to the image, but a different painting in mind:

"The Birth of Venus", by Sandro Botticelli.  I though it was so interesting he had such a different association with the expression.  The gesture is the same, but the overall feeling is so different than the one in "The Expulsion".  It's also a bit more of a contrast stylistically, but definitely similar.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were other works of art, particularly with the same kind of notoriety as the two given here, that share similarities.  What I find so interesting is that I hadn't planned this prior to making this image, rather, it was discovered after the fact.  I also love that my friend could have such a different, but equally relevant, interpretation and/or association with an image that is just as much a surprise for me as for anyone else.  I feel like that is one of the advantages of working intuitively, that it can lead to these wonderful discoveries, and bring up more interesting questions.

I'm a lousy blogger.

But I'm working on being better about it.  In the past year and a half- or since my last post- I've been extremely busy with a number of exciting new things:

- Continuing with the color work I started in 2008, the images have since taken off on a life of their own.  They have introduced new challenges and exciting discoveries, transforming the forms I have been working with for over 25 years in ways that I have never seen before.  Working in the water with color revealed new dimensions, depths, and interpretations, and working in the mirrors has been equally transformative...

- I was part of a major international photography expo in Beijing, China, organized by renowned critic A.D. Coleman.  In addition to having a fabulous time, spending it with my wife Patricia and some of the most accomplished photographers working today, I also photographed much of the experiences and things I saw there...

- My workshops have been going strong and they have been an absolute joy to be teaching.  It has been wonderful to work with so many gifted students, and I'm thrilled with the work they've been producing.  This year I'm looking forward to more great workshops in Provincetown and Maine, and a new one in Oklahoma coming up this June...

In short, it has been an incredibly productive 17 months.  I know I've been a lousy blogger, and I'm simply racked with guilt about not sharing all of this here.  But in upcoming blog posts, I'm looking forward to posting some of the latest color work and how it has progressed since my last post.  I'm also eager to share images from some of my recent travels, as well as lessons and student work from my workshops.

Stay tuned, the best is yet to come!