Cross Your Fingers

I learned yesterday, that my image of Lordes and Esteban was chosen as a finalist in the American Photography 23 competition. The winners will be announced in April, so please send out good vibes.

Bomb and Cradle

This is the result of me falling into a creative black hole of time. In this case, it all started with my two very good friends Michael Loncar and Erik Carlson. Loncar is an amazing poet, teacher, musician, filmmaker and man about town. Erik Carlson is an amazing musician, architect, photographer and all around artistic handyman. Loncar is currently living and teaching in Taiwan. A year and a half ago Erik and I made our way there, on what I refer to as “Sideways, without the premarital affair and wine.” Our trip to Taiwan was amazing in so many ways, but I will always remember it as a photographic safari. Fast forward to last week. Erik asked Mike and I if we had any video footage from the journey to donate to the making of a video for his song Trick With A Knife. Loncar rose to the challenge and locked himself in his apartment for a weekend and made a great video. When I watched the video, I realized that the last two and a half minutes of the song would be a perfect soundtrack for images I had recently taken at The War Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. I watched Mike’s video in the morning and then proceeded to have a productive day of photographic office work. Mid afternoon, as a reward to myself for hard paper pushing work, I decided to just “start working on the slideshow.” Five hours later the rough draft was completed.

Dr.Robert

Often in my creative process, one thing leads to another. This little animation grew out of another “great idea” that went horribly wrong. When I was thinking of different scenarios for the Apples In Stereo photo shoot, I had remembered hearing that Robert Schneider, the lead singer, likes to do calculus for fun. I decided to photograph Robert working on one of his equations on Plexiglas to give the impression that I was shooting through the blackboard. As individual shots they just do not look great, but when i clicked through them quickly in the browser they came alive. The music is a little teaser track on the Apples new record, New Magnetic Wonder. The band liked the final result so much that they included it in the enhanced features of the CD.

I have wanted to include this in the blog for some time, but I just realized how to post video. If you would like to see more slideshows of my travels please visit www.joshuakessler.com and click on the bottom half of the orange square labeled slideshows.