Murat Süyür

When I asked what art impresses him, professional photographer and conceptual artist Murat Süyür replied, that “which has a new point-of-view, a new vision.” Appropriately, that’s why his work impressed me, so I asked him a few more questions.

Who are you?

I’m a conceptual and advertising photographer from Turkey.

Why do you create?

I just create because there is nothing more to do with the things in my mind. It’s like decharging.

Tears

Explain one advantage and one disadvantage to being a professional photographer in Turkey.

Advantage is we’re in the middle of European and Asian cultures, so this makes our vision a little bit different from others.

Disadvantage is generally clients are thinking the advertising is an unnecessary expenditure and can’t see how important the branding is. This makes shooting budgets too low and as you can guess budget is something really important for photoshootings, productions, post productions.

If there is not enough budget to make a big production, the work isn’t going to be a charming and attractive thing.

Immediate Holiday Services

Describe a typical photo shoot. Where do you shoot? Who’s on your crew? How is your working style unique?

A typical photo shoot is starting with a brief in agency. Art directors make a concept for the clients, and they explain to me what kind of images they need by showing me the storyboard or a sketch. Then we make a plan for that shooting with my agency handling the production part.

After everything gets ready, we start shooting it with the art directors, producers, clients, all in a set. I generally shoot in studio but it depends on the work of course.

Even the easiest shooting takes 3-4 hours at least, but generally shooting takes the whole day. After shooting, the post-production starts for me. I’m using a middle format Hasselblad camera for my shootings with studio flashes.

I have some friends who are interested in shootings too much and they help me every time. I can say that they are my crew.

I don’t think I have an unique working style. Maybe just my works are different.

Drunk

Digital art is evolving rapidly in all directions. Which way are you headed?

Digitalism is really getting popular in every part of our life. Of course in art also. 3D designs and illustrations are being a real threat to photography, especially still life photography. 3D designs are getting easy and so realistic that we won’t need to take pictures in 5-6 years’ time. So I’m a bit into learning some 3D designing tools. But I’m also changing my style a bit to people — portraits and wide-angle conceptuals instead of tabletop still life works.

My thanks Murat for sharing his work. Please visit his deviantART page for more.

How to find the center of anything in Photoshop

You can quickly locate the center of a document, layer, or group of layers in Adobe Photoshop with one technique.

First, create a selection of whatever you’d like to find the center of. To select a document, press Ctrl+A (Select > All.) To select a layer, Ctrl+click on its thumbnail in the Layers palette (you can also Ctrl+click on its layer mask or path mask thumbnails for mask-specific selections.) To select a group of layers, Ctrl+click on one layer’s thumbnail in the Layers palette, then Shift+Ctrl+click on additional layer thumbnails (or masks) to add them to the selection.

Once your selection is set, choose Select > Transform Selection, or (with a selection tool active) right-click in the document window and choose Transform Selection from the context menu. The bounding box crosshairs mark the center of the selection, whether it’s a document, layer, or group of layers.

Turn on Snap (View > Snap or Shift+Ctrl+;) and drag vertical and horizontal guides from the rulers (View > Rulers or Ctrl+R) to the crosshairs to mark the center. Press Esc to cancel the selection transformation, then Crtl+D (Select > Deselect,) and you’re done.

Jean-Pierre Roy

Painter Jean-Pierre Roy combines technical talent with a remarkably unique artistic vision to show me wonders I hadn’t imagined seeing until I recently discovered his work.

Who are you?

My name is Jean-Pierre Roy.  I’m a 34 year old painter living and working in New York City.  I was born in Santa Monica, California and worked in the film industry as an artist from a young age.  After studying film and painting in undergrad, I did a stint at DreamWorks and EALA before getting into Matte painting.  From there, I wanted to recontextualize my images for a gallery environment and decided to move to New York to attend Graduate School at The New York Academy of Art.  Since then, I’ve been exhibiting within the US and abroad and have my first solo museum show in the fall at the Torrence Art Museum in Los Angeles, CA.

Why do you create?

That’s both a tough question and an easy one.  I think that ultimately, I don’t really have a choice.  There is a neurological component to this practice… a compulsion to make things… an OCD to create a visual document of indescribable ideas.  For me, making images is the only form of meditation that satisfies both the emotional and intellectual spectrum of my life.  It’s a sandbox of my own design that allows me to meld my love of imagination, analysis, intellect and raw emotion.

The End of the Old Model (440)

There is a vibrant and violent contrast between the natural and the manufactured in your art. Why does this inspire you?

One of the fundamental motives behind my process is the act of reproducing the physical systems of the world from imagination. Smoke, metal, rocks, plants… even lens flares are all quantifiable. They are natural systems of matter that receive light… and it is the analytical application of invented light that forms an underlying meditation, if you will, that compliments the larger, thematic narratives of my paintings — change, time, decay, rebirth. This contrast between structures speaks to a larger struggle for control between the systems of man and the systems of nature. It is the moment where they overlap, where the two are neither wholly themselves, or neither wholly each other that serves up a wonderful moment of discovery for me.

The End of the Old Model (660)

You intellectualize your art. How does your left brain effect your creativity?

I do feel that if I wasn’t an artist, I would really be somehow involved in the sciences. The act of discovery is an important part of my process and of what I want to deliver to the viewer. I recently watched a home movie of a birthday party for my sister — in it I was about 9 years old. A friend of my mother’s asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said, “I’m not sure, maybe a scientist, maybe an artist, but whatever it is, I just want to know [how] everything in the universe works.”

It’s a bit of a huge statement, but I do feel that so much of the process of my work does come from this analytical desire to want to understand the fundamental interactions of the physical forces of the world. Representational image making begins with an act of thinking… an act of analysis not just of the subject, but the surface. Da Vinci said that painting wasn’t just a repository of knowledge, but a source of it. We sometimes forget that even with the most expressive of painters, the act of abstraction was an intellectual decision as much as emotional one…

Geometry for the Post-Divine

My grandfather once said, “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” That popped into my head today while I was doing something, as it oftentimes does. What advice has stuck with you?

Your grandfather gave you a sound piece of advice… I feel very close to those sentiments myself! You know, the studio can be a lonely place. It can be a monastic, hermetic existence full of self-doubt and anxiety. One thing that my father always told me growing up was, “He who goes alone, goes the farthest.” It has a certain taste of the Golden Age of Exploration to it… very Ernest Shackleton. Somehow, on the darkest night of [the] soul, this one has stuck with me and given me that extra amount of strength. A knowledge that if I just sail a little farther, I’ll find a safe harbor for the night.

My thanks to Jean-Pierre for sharing his work. Please visit Jean-PierreRoy.com for more.

Select Individual Kuler Colours in Adobe Photoshop CS4

Kuler, Adobe’s user-generated colour scheme database, is integrated into Photoshop CS4 (Windows > Extensions > Kuler.) This is an excellent tool for bringing the inspiration of other artists into your workspace.

As with most new tools, however, its usability could be improved. For instance, you can’t use the Eye Dropper tool to select a Kuler swatch. Instead, when you find a colour you like, you must 1) select that colour’s scheme, 2) click on the drop-down menu to its right, 3) choose “Add to Swatches Panel,” 4) go to the Swatches Panel, and 5) pick the specific colour you want.

Here’s a quick and easy workaround. Whenever you have the Color Picker open, click anywhere in the image window and drag onto the colour you want in the Kuler Panel. This single-step solution makes Kuler both more usable and inspiring.