Christine Nguyen

You’ve not seen work like that of Christine Nguyen. Much of her current body of work involves combining original photography, items from nature, and a salt crystalizing process that makes each piece organic and delivers unexpected and otherworldy results. She is a busy artist and solo exhibitions of her work have been featured at the Hammer Museum (Project), Michael Kohn Gallery, Andrewshire Gallery, and Sam Lee Gallery in Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include Laguna Beach Art Museum, Laguna Beach; 4-F Gallery, Los Angeles, PH Gallery, New York; San Art, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Sprueth Magers Projekte, Munich, Germany; and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong. Christine currently resides in Los Angeles, California. She received her B.F.A from California State University, Long Beach and M.F.A from University of California, Irvine.

Here, professional photographer and curator Laina Karavani interviews Christine in a series of emails, Internet chats, and phone calls.

NoD: Hi Christine. Where are you from?

Christine Nguyen: California. I grew up in Northern California and currently reside in Los Angeles.

Work by Christine Nguyen

“My work draws upon the imagery of science, but it is not limited to technologies of the present. It imagines that the depths of the ocean reach into outer space, that through an organic prism, vision can fluctuate between the micro- and macroscopic.” – Christine Nguyen

NoD: Oh. Where north?

Christine Nguyen: I was born in Mountain View and then grew up in San Jose. My dad was a commercial fisherman. He fished mostly in the bay area during my childhood and then in Southern California in my late teens. I realized about 3 years ago a lot of my work is partially inspired by the ocean due to the things my dad would bring home and spending a lot time on his boat as a kid. I’ve always been fascinated in nature, the sciences, geology, the macro/ micro, and outer space. Lately, I’ve been into growing salt crystals and collecting minerals and crystals.
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Extracting detailed objects from a background can be a tricky thing in Photoshop, particularly when dealing with fuzzy edges like hair, fur, and leaves of trees. The Quick Selection tool and the Refine Edge feature introduced in Photoshop CS3 go a long way, but there are more powerful solutions…

Personally, I’ve been a fan of the Extract filter for a while. With it, you use a “highlighter” to roughly define the edge of the object you wish to extract, and Photoshop comes pretty close to what you’re looking for. The results can be a little rough or jaggy, but usable or easily fixable in many cases.

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By Brockett Horne

Image: Chris Jordan’s Plastic Bottles, 2007 (detail)

This summer, I’m pondering the enormous weight of numbers:
426,000 cell phones retired every day
9 million American children with no health insurance
12000 plastic bags are used every minute
400,000 plastic water bottles tossed every minute
$60 to fill up my Honda with gas! Ouch!

Artist Chris Jordan presents compelling images that overwhelm with the magnitude of collective consumption. His haunting photographs depict, through repetition, our incomprehensible mass imprint on the world. His images really function as infographics, and illustrate statistical data through the lens of the camera just as effectively as a chart or graph. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently came across the great work of Finnish photographer Ilkka Halso. His photographic series the ‘Museum of Nature’ wonderfully challenges the natural environment from its current state into a future world where it is something we have to visit to experience. The collection of compelling images pictures a series of man-made structures that enclose nature, protecting it from pollution. Using images of nature and 3D digital manipulation, this photographic collection captures a future vision of nature as a museum display. Challenging the audience’s interaction with the endangered artifact of the natural environment, Halso manages to truly visualize a future we so desperately do not want to see a reality. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo stock agency Corbis has come up with an unusually charming promotional scheme: cute and colorful DIY pinhole cameras sporting the agency’s photos and illustrations. The cameras, which take fuzzy photos that have a nostalgically lo-tech look, are ready for download at Corbis’ web site. All you have to do is to pick a pdf of your favorite design (there are currently three to choose from with more to come), print it out on high quality paper and follow the instructions. The cameras were designed by Fwis design firm in NYC who created them exclusively for Corbis. It’s probably a project best enjoyed by those among us that are somewhat crafty (not me), since the origami-like folding looks a bit complicated. But then again, it might be worth a bit of effort. Think of that warm inner glow of accomplishment. And it also makes a great gift. For free.

Checking on the incoming links to my blog one day, I found a link to a photo from one of my posts. I was surprised to see that another blog was using my photo in one of their posts. They didn’t give any credit to me for the photo, though they did link back to it.

I spent some time trying to figure out how they’d found that photo to use and didn’t come up with any firm answers. I even emailed the blog writer, but got no response. It did open my eyes a bit to something I know can be a problem: people taking the images on your web site and using them elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »

While I was in school, and for a few years after graduation, I carried a digital camera with me pretty much everywhere I went. If I saw something interesting, odd or inspiring, I’d snap a photo, and because of this habit, I eventually came to possess a pretty extensive catalog of visual references.

I don’t carry a camera with me anymore, for a couple of reasons. For starters, I already lug around a laptop, a phone, keys, my wallet, sunglasses and sometimes an iPod. It’s a ridiculous amount of gear, and frankly, the camera just isn’t making the cut these days. But the real reason why I stopped taking pictures is because, more often than not, the images just weren’t all that compelling after the fact. Taking a photo was too easy, and as a result, I grew lazy.

And so I appreciate UNphotographable, a website created by Michael David Murphy. The pages of UNphotographable contain written descriptions of images that, for one reason or another, could not be captured on film. The great majority of the accounts are provided by Murphy, but I believe a few were produced by others. Here’s an example:

This is a picture I did not take of a woman standing on an overgrown median of the Van Wyck Expressway early on a Saturday morning, early enough that there was one sliver of sunlight making its way across the road, and she was caught in both the light and tall grass, bent at the waist, picking herbs or salad greens from between discarded fast food containers and old tires, incorporating a wild, pinwheeling movement with each pick, her arms swinging up like scythes, alternatively holding a fistful of greens high in the air, as if each leaf were a triumph, as her opposite arm swung down to pick anew.

In a world where images, especially bad images, seem destined to proliferate, I find this Read the rest of this entry »

Remember when designers had to choose between Illustrator and Freehand, or Dreamweaver and GoLive? That was before Adobe acquired Macromedia. Today, there are fewer options. But Apple is trying to change that, at least in one category.

Currently, there are currently two pro-level, post-production applications for digital photographers: Apple Aperture and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Aperture was first released in late 2005. Lightroom hit the shelves in 2007. From the start, both programs offered complete raw support, non-destructive image editing and high-end printing features, and both included a wide range of image adjustment tools that helped photographers produce top quality shots. Both programs also had image management capabilities that far surpassed anything found in iPhoto or Adobe Bridge. So, for the most part, it was all about which interface you preferred. (Unless, of course, you were a Windows user; Aperture is only available for the Mac.)

That is until now. Aperture 2, released last week, includes a wide range of innovations not found in Lightroom. By Apple’s count, there are “100+ new features” in the latest version of the app. You can view a full list of those capabilities here, but there are a few obvious standouts that I think are worth noting.

Integration. When you’re married to a specific brand of products, you hope and pray that they’ll work well with the other apps you use. Aperture has always supported native PSD files, which is about all you can ask for with regards to Adobe integration. But Aperture 2 also works seamlessly with iPhoto. I’ve never been totally comfortable managing my images with Adobe Bridge, so if you’re like me, you’ll appreciate this new built-in compatibility.

Speed. High-quality images can quickly bog down a system, and users have often complained about the sluggishness of both Aperture 1 and Lightroom. But Aperture 2 is supposed to be a lot faster, Read the rest of this entry »

Apparently not all of Adobe’s products are as essential as Photoshop and Illustrator. This month, Adobe announced that it will cease to operate its relatively new service, Adobe Stock Photos.

The Adobe Stock Photos service was introduced in 2005, but it wasn’t heavily promoted until 2007, when Adobe released Creative Suite 3. The service provides users access to numerous royalty-free stock photo libraries, including those maintained by Masterfile, Getty and JupiterImages, and everything occurs via the Adobe Bridge interface.

Say goodbye to Adobe Stock Photos in Bridge.

The Adobe Stock Photos concept was a good one; it’s like an iTunes Store for royalty-free images. But for numerous reasons, the service never caught on. Here’s why:

ASP dealt almost exclusively with the “expensive” stock libraries. Designers working on big-budget projects often use such resources, but those with less to spend or those in of only small, lower-res images almost never do. ASP thus had little to offer customers in these latter categories.

Also, big-budget designers were typically already committed to a single stock photo company, or they already had an effective image searching process in place. Either way, ASP was a little late to the game.

But let’s turn our attention back to that first reason, because that’s what’s most interesting about Read the rest of this entry »

Jorg Colberg of Conscientious and Miguel Garcia-Guzman of Exposure Compensation asked a handful of prominent photographers, curators, editors and gallerists to select a portrait and describe what makes it great.

The Stewart Sisters, 7th Grade. Photographer: Judith Joy Ross.

The responses they received are both enlightening and ambiguous. Take for example these words from Timothy Archibald about the above portrait taken by Judith Joy Ross:

The girls are being photographed, communicating with the viewer, being self aware and being all of these things and more, nothing is very dramatic, nothing heavy handed, but the end result feels utterly profound. The result seems to be a picture of these girls, but then seems to be communicating something universal as well.

More images and all of the written responses can be found on Colberg’s site.

via kottke