Each Monday, we’ll highlight one indie photographer whose body of work deserves special recognition. Please enjoy their photography here, and make it a point to enjoy the rest of their work on their website.

 Joel Robison is an emerging Conceptual Self-Portraiture photographer who hails from British Columbia, Canada.  In Joel’s workflow, he formulates a concept and then builds on it, after he has his idea visualized he executes the necessary photography and then manipulates the image to bring his concept to fruition, the results are breathtaking.

As a testament to older cameras Joel currently uses a Canon XTi with his favorite lens, a 50mm f/1.8, attached.  He chooses this lens because he shoots mostly in natural light and finds that this lens lets in an incredible amount of light.  Joel says  of his treasured lens “[it] helps when shooting outdoors when lighting can be difficult. I love the soft focus that it gives and the bokeh when shooting backlit images is unreal!”

Joel keeps a journal of ideas that he adds to continuously, when he goes out to shoot he usually has an idea  set in his mind which helps him to focus on details and organize his thoughts.  Ninety percent of his photos are done with natural light so he tends to pay close attention to the weather and the sun patterns to make the most of available lighting.  After each shoot, he processes his images in Photoshop, sometimes simply adjusting curves and levels and sometimes adding textures, manipulations or using brushes to create the image that he is looking for.

Joel lives in a mountainous and forested area and while he loves to shoot in his own surroundings, he admittedly has a strange attraction to large bodies of water and would love to shoot in or near the ocean to see how being close to the water and tides will impact his work.

Joel says the biggest technique that he uses on a daily basis is what is usually called “The Brenzier Method”.  Joel says “I love presenting my work in a square format, for me it’s the most aesthetically pleasing cropping format and it allows for dramatic negative space.”   Since he primarily uses a 50mm fixed lens it can be difficult to get a square crop without merging or stitching photos together to expand the frame and create the square crop.  The Brenzier Method is essentially taking your main shot and then shooting a wider selection of the landscape or setting around your focal point so that you can expand your canvas.  To accomplish this, Joel shoots his main image and then he sets his lens to manual focus and then takes photographs of the surroundings that he then stitches together.  He typically works in a clockwise rotation and takes anywhere from six to thirty additional photos to merge into a single background image along with the image of his primary subject.

Joel came upon a technique quite by accident that allows him to give some added focus and contrast to an image.  He uses a darkened gradient to burn the corners of the photograph.  He says of one of his signature techniques, “I stumbled upon a great way to do this and it saves a lot of time.  In Photoshop, I apply a radial gradients going from dark to light and then change the layer mode to multiply or soft light depending on the image.  After this step I then play with opacity and Gaussian blur to give it a burnt look.”

When asked to name two artist whose work he really admires it was though Joel had them on the tip of his tongue he said, “I really admire Rodney Smith’s work, his [style] is whimsical and beautiful and simple.”  Joel also really admires (recently featured on FYP)  Brooke Shaden’s work.   She is an artist who he met through Flickr and he finds Brooke’s attention to detail and creation of a whole different world amazing.

Joel  hasn’t done a lot of portraiture that aren’t self-portraits but says that he would love to take conceptual photos of other people as well as traditional portraiture.

You can find more of Joel’s work on Flickr or Etsy, I also recommend joining his Facebook fan page so you can keep up with his emerging work

Jeremy
Jeremy is a consultant, educator and photographer based in the Caribbean. He shoots an eclectic range of material, but his favorite subjects are urban and seascapes, people and aircraft. He mixes his love of technology and travel with photography. Following a brief post college hiatus he picked up a camera again in 2003 and has been shooting ever since. You may view his work on his website

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