One of my favorite "outtakes" of 2010.

Well another year is behind us. It’s hard to believe. Time flies, I guess. If you were to ask me a year ago to predict where I would be right now, I would be way off the mark.

This year brought a ton of changes, surprises, and detours, but it was a great year nonetheless.

During my archive search for the year’s best images, I began to wonder (like any artist I’m sure) if I progressed from last year. Did I make better images than last year? Have I evolved in my style? My first instinct was “no”, given the fact that I traveled so much during 2009 versus this past year, but after pondering for a week or so, I realized that the images that I made in 2010 were by and large a better representation of where I am taking my work. The portraits are stronger and more focused, and I like that.

Included in the mix are images from my Canon point and shoot G9, my Lubitel twin-lens, and my trusty Polaroid Colorpack III land camera as well as a few editorial event images, editorial portraits, images from advertising campaigns, experimental images, a few personal images, and even (*gasp*) a wedding photo. It’s a motley crew of images, presented in chronological order that I dug from 2010.

I have provided two ways to browse my favorite images from this year. In keeping with tradition, the first method is a simple slideshow set to the lovely music of Australia’s Bag Raiders. It’s definitely a lot more upbeat and fun when compared to last year’s slow, instrumental track. The second method is the usual Photoshelter slideshow. So whether you want to just hit play and dance while checking out my favorites or silently click-through at your own leisure, the choice is there.

Heres to an even better 2011!

Check out last year’s “Best Of” post, check it out, and let me know which set of images you prefer. Todd Spoth Photography’s “Best of 2009″ blog post.

BEST OF 2010 – Images by Todd Spoth

The cover of the December 2010 issue of PDN which features an image by Todd Spoth.

Back in October, I was browsing through my issue of PDN (Photo District News) magazine and came across an ad that was promoting one of their contests. I have never really paid much attention to contests, the few that I have entered in the past have been in the photojournalism realm and most of the contests that are advertised in PDN are more on the commercial side. This one was interesting though. The Ultimate Music Moment photo contest sponsored by Billboard Magazine sounded right up my alley.

I have been involved in the music scene in some way ever since high school, whether that meant playing in bands, touring with bands, reviewing or photographing live music or just being a passionate lover of all things musical.

The Billboard/PDN Ultimate Music Moment photo contest consisted of professional and amateur divisions, and had three categories; artist portraits, performances, and crowd. Not only did the contest appeal to my interests, but it sounded familiar. I pondered for a few moments before it hit me. Just a few weeks prior I was working with former Life Magazine photographer, Joe McNally here in Houston. During a break, his first assistant, Drew Gurian, and I got to talking about music, as we are both musicians and love photographing live music, and he had told me that he was a winner of this same contest the year prior.

I knew it sounded familiar!

Weeks passed and the deadline for entry loomed. During mid-October I found myself on a trip to Europe. It was during that trip that friend and colleague Eric Kayne reminded me that the deadline for entry was that same night. Eric was eager to enter his own images of indie band, Arcade Fire, and here I was, in Europe, about to miss the deadline.

I was away from my image archive and on the road with my Mac Book Pro. Thankfully I was able to find high-resolution versions of the images I wanted to enter in my Photoshelter online archive. Phew. I went to the contest’s website, entered my 2 images (seen below), begrudgingly paid my entry fee and hit submit.

"Warped Tour Hands" by Todd Spoth, winner in the "crowd" category of the 2010 Billboard Ultimate Music Moment photo contest.

Image of The Flaming Lips at Summerfest 2010 in Houston, Texas taken by Todd Spoth.

After a few more weeks had passed, I had all but forgotten about the entered images, until I received an email from an editor at PDN magazine informing me that my image was a finalist and that I needed to submit a higher resolution version of the image that made the cut. I excitedly submitted the image and eagerly waited for the December/January issue of PDN, where the winner’s gallery for the contest would be published.

About a week or two ago, I finally received my copy of that issue, opened it up, and was excited to see one of my submitted images, an image I captured at a local Warped Tour music festival, published in the winner’s gallery. My black and white image of the hands of a crowd of Warped Tour spectators has always been a favorite of mine and now it had won in the crowd category of this contest.

Each winning photo was accompanied by a short blurb that the photographer wrote about his or her particular image, detailing how the image was captured and although I too submitted details for my image, it seems they pulled the generic caption information from the file’s IPTC data and printed that. Regardless, my image is there, and my name is with it, and that’s all that matters.

Maybe now I’ll actually get around to updating my website with more live music images.

Below are the scans of the title page of the contest’s winner’s gallery section in the December/January issue of PDN, as well as the page where my image is featured. They are scans so apologizes for the ghosting as PDN’s pages are pretty thin.

Please let me know what you think!

The title page for the Ultimate Music Moment photo contest winner's gallery.

The Ultimate Music Moment photo contest winner's gallery page featuring a photo by Todd Spoth.

The 400 page Blurb book, produced by Todd Spoth and Libby Johnston.

My family has been planning my grandmother’s 80th birthday celebration for about a year now. My family on my mom’s side is a close-knit group of individuals, however logistics is sometimes an issue as we are scattered across the globe from Tokyo to LA to Cleveland to Brazil. We agreed early on to all meet up in Cleveland to surprise my grandmother with a visit.

After I got my travel plans in order, I had to decide what to get my 80 year old grandmother. I had been involved in my scanning project for a few months then and almost immediately decided on producing a photo book as a gift to her.

I’m sure my family is not dissimilar to many in that there are hundreds and hundreds of amazing film images scattered across aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents, that sadly, sit, unorganized and deteriorating in closets and trunks and attics and basements. Given my (somewhat forced) knowledge on digital archiving and preservation, I took it upon myself to start scanning in some of these legacy images, digitally. It was and has been a time-consuming and tedious process, however it is, in the end, worth every minute as now these digital files are easily accessible and archivable.

After scanning in hundreds if not thousands of weathered prints and negatives, I realized I had only scratched the surface. The images I had scanned thus far were from my own personal stash of images from my childhood and from a few handfuls of unorganized photos that my mother, who currently is living in Brazil, had sent over to me. The scanning in of the images using our Canon CanoScan 8800F flatbed scanner was definitely the most time-consuming and tedious part, from there we could concentrate on the book.

Libby and I worked through different concepts and ideas for the book, before ultimately deciding on doing a 7″x7″ book by Blurb using Blurb’s own Booksmart software. We had done several photo book’s with Blurb in the past and had a pretty good experience with them overall. We were coming down to our deadline in getting the book ordered so given the fact that we were familiar with the software and company as a whole, we chose Blurb.

We toyed with the idea of creating 3 or 4 mini-books or creating a really big book with intricate layouts, but in the end decided on a smaller 7″x7″ book that would be filled with full size images from our family’s past. The book was to be hardcover with an ImageWrap cover, meaning there was no dust-jacket and the cover would be printed with our own design. We decided not to mess with the different layout styles and simplify the book by having just 1 image per page, full bleed. There are a few exceptions, such as a few double-trucks, and a few carefully assembled layouts, but for the most part, each page is it’s own photo. This not only made our lives easier in the layout process, it would be a lot easier to experience, especially by someone who is 80 years old.

Our last rule we imposed on ourselves for the production was that all of the images that would appear in the book would be film images. I have tens of thousands of digital images from more recent family events, however for this project I wanted to focus on the past and concentrate on the amazing archive of film images I had recently acquired. Not only was I scanning in 35mm prints from my childhood, but I had discovered a lot of priceless gems such as a set of prints of my late grandfather during his time in the Air Force as well as images of my grandmother in her 20′s, living in Japan.

The old prints of my grandfather during the war are among my favorite images.

Typically during my own portfolio editing process, I toil with cutting down the number of images into a tightly-edited package of only the best, but for this project I had to change my thought-process. We initially tried to edit some of the images down, but ultimately decided that this was not a portfolio and that my grandmother and family would be thrilled to see as many photos as possible. After checking out the page count limitations on the Blurb website we decided to produce as many pages in the time we had to finish the book. Libby worked tirelessly to layout as many quality pages as she could while I worked to come up with a design for the cover. We really wanted to max out the number of pages out at 440 (the Blurb maximum) but due to time constraints we topped out at 400.

Prior to deciding to go for quantity with the page count, I scoured the Internet looking for photos of other large Blurb books, but came up empty. There were a few here and there, but for the most part, there weren’t any real images, which is my inspiration for this blog post and the images that follow.

I tried for days designing different cover ideas for the book. One of my designs included a black cover with “La Familia” in an Old English typeface dipping across the front. After a visit to the local Japanese market I had the idea of doing a parody cover of the packaging of some Japanese rice crackers. I explained to Libby my idea and with both of us in agreement she went to work. She created the entire front and back cover from scratch, mimicking every detail of the original packaging and adding in subtle details as they pertained to the book.

The inspiration for the cover, (right) and the final product, (left)

Since Libby spent so much time and did such an awesome with not only the layout but the cover design as well, I decided to take an older film photo of her and design a credit page for the back of the book.

The custom credit page I designed with a childhood photo of Libby.

When we received the book we were excited to flip through all of the pages and see them for the first time. I was pleased overall, but there were a few things I noted for our next Blurb book endeavor. First, the ImageWrap cover  needs a pretty significant amount of bleed room to actually wrap around the covers of the book. Blurb warned us about this, and it looks fine, but we would have liked a bit more breathing room for some of the cover elements. Since the book is only 7″x7″ and 400 pages, more of the images get lost in the gutter as opposed to a 12″x12″ book with only 10 pages. This really wasn’t too much of an issue once the book was delivered and started to get worn in, but it was a concern. Other than that, the project was a complete success and my family, especially my grandmother had a great time looking through all of the images and reliving all of the memories.

In addition to helping with the layout and cover design, Libby also constructed a tiered-trio of custom made boxes to present the book in along with a few other small gifts. All of the family members were also given a DVD with a similar custom cover layout that had digital copies of all of the images I had scanned in. My goal with the DVD’s and book is to inspire the rest of my family to organize and scan in their weathering prints so that we can properly maintain and archive our family’s history.

If you have any thoughts about the project or have created your own huge Blurb book, I would love to hear your comments and experiences. Please let me know what you think!

400 PAGE BLURB BOOK (JUNE 2010) – Images by Todd Spoth

For Libby’s birthday I got her a vintage Lubitel twin lens camera. She has always loved twin lens units so since the ones in our current collection had completed the transition from functioning camera to sitting on the shelf with the rest of the old-timers, I decided to get a new one. I went with the Lubitel, because it is lightweight (a definite plus for her) simple and is a nice marriage between accuracy and that nice vintage look.

She ran a roll through it while on a business trip a few weeks ago and the results were nice. This week, however, was my turn to test the new toy out. My “toy” for the past few months has been my vintage Polaroid Colorpack III camera so while I was used to the slow process, I was not used to the lack of instant gratification that I get with not only the Polaroid, but with my digital bodies as well.

It took some time to re-calibrate my sense of sight with a waist-level viewfinder once again, but the resulting images were decent. My design background influences my photography and the way I see the world, so my natural OCD with lines and things were put to the test with a very disorienting and someone dim viewfinder. There were scenes that I had wished I would have shot over the week or so that the roll was in the camera, but it gets rather cumbersome when I am juggling a digital camera, a Polaroid camera, an iphone with its own fairly decent camera, and now this Lubitel. The new toys are both fairly large and cumbersome in their own right as well as being plastic and not as robust as my digital bodies so there are definitely challenges.

After my assignment covering a triathlon (blog forthcoming) I swung by the lab and processed my initial test roll which took exactly 1 week to use. I used a 12 exposure roll of Kodak VC (vivid color) 400 ASA for the maiden voyage and was pleased overall. We scanned the frames in using our Canon CanoScan 8800F flatbed scanner with the included negative carrier. I ended up with about 5 images that I liked which I guess isn’t bad for a roll of 12 and for my first time using the camera. I do wish that I was able to somehow scan the images in with the borders intact so that I can see the film info and frame numbers, but I was unable to figure out a way. Libby even constructed a custom carrier, but the scanner’s native software kept throwing us error messages. If anyone has any idea on how I can accomplish this, please let me know.

The 5 selects from the 12 shot roll aren’t the greatest images ever, but I really enjoyed the simple square format and that good-ole film look. They all came out pretty sharp for a plastic camera. There are a couple snapshots from the triathlon this past Sunday, a couple from the previous Sunday visiting family and a random shot from a commercial assignment earlier this past week. The above image is one of the two double exposures that I attempted during the roll. I exposed an image of an interesting area of foliage with an overlay of an image of Libby rubbing her face.

Hopefully Libby will let me “borrow” the camera for some more random fun or possibly a project in the future.

LUBITEL 120 SCANS (APRIL 2010) – Images by Todd Spoth

The other day I decided to play around with a few photo tools I rarely get the chance to utilize. I toyed with photographing a few things in the office and kitchen before finding inspiration and making some rather abstract imagery. The photo above is one I particularly liked from the set. There is a slideshow of a few other selects below. The Photoshelter gallery entitled “Random Abstract” will be updated periodically to include any additional and associated images.

PUBLICATION OR LOCATION: AFRICA (self-published photo book)
PUBLICATION DATE: January 2010
LINK: n/a
NOTES: This little book has been a long time coming. Back in July of 2009 I spent a little over a week exploring Southern Africa and came away with a diverse set of images from the coastal villages near Cape Town to big game hunting near the border of Mozambique. I decided to take a few of the selects from the journey and put together a nice coffee table photo book. The book is being self-published via Blurb.com and will hopefully look great. I will try and take some images of the actual book when it arrives, but for now you can preview some of the various layouts below. They are in no particular order and are only a small sampling of the actual pages.

Every year Libby and I send out a self-designed holiday card using our own skills as graphic artists and photographers. When it came time to produce this year’s card we had some initial trouble coming up with a fresh idea. After a bit of thinking I came up with the idea of using images taken specifically with my iPhone.

We whittled down hundreds of images from 5 continents and numerous events down to 70 colorful images that all appear on the front of the card. I wanted the thumbnails on the front of the card to be large enough to be readable to the viewer, yet small enough to maintain the graphic element of the grid. After putting the design together, we were both pleased with the initial outcome, but wanted to take it a step further. I decided to create the online aspect to supplement the physical card. IPHONEADVENTURE.COM is the manifestation of that.

Since all of the images that were chosen represent a significant moment or memory from 2009, we wanted this project to go beyond just a tiny thumbnail, and to explain itself, in context.

All 70 images from the physical card, are viewable in a larger, un-cropped format on the website. In addition, each image is accompanied by the date the image was made, the GPS coordinates corresponding to where the image was taken as well as a short and candid description of the image. Since the iPhone automatically embeds GPS location data into each photo taken with the device you will be able to see exactly where we were when we took the image via Google Maps. Clicking on the coordinates in each image’s description will open up a new window with data about the location.

Happy Holidays to everyone. Please take a moment to visit our little end of year project, IPHONEADVENTURE.COM

(ps. the image above is also an iphone image!)

After spending a good bit of time in Brasil, Ive noticed that in most cities, namely Rio de Janeiro, street art, whether it be graffiti, wheat pasting, stenciling or another form is thought of and subsequently dealt with a lot differently than it is here in Houston. Of course this differential may be a lot less apparent if you live in a more concentrated and older metropolitan area such as New York or Baltimore, but Ive lived in Baltimore and visited New York several times and the difference is apparent.

Around every corner, whether it is in the expensive suburbs of Barra or in the doldrums of Centro, you are bound to stumble across something interesting, but for every colorful, detailed piece there are hundreds of base tags thrown up randomly. The walls covered with the inane scribblings of the juvenile underbelly of Rio only deter for seconds as they are usually replaced by huge murals that make traffic somewhat bearable and sometimes pleasing.

As I walked around Rio most recently, I made it a point to try and make a photo of most of the instances of street art that I came across. There are pastings, traditional graffiti (in several styles), murals, and just plain old interesting walls. The overall diversity of styles in street art that you see on a casual walk around Rio is incredible. Regardless if you see some forms of street art as vandalism or criminal in nature, it’s all art, and for that I give it my respect.

I wish, when I walked (or drove) around certain parts of Houston, that Id be greeted with a nice, big, mural of something as colorful and whimsical as what I saw in Brasil.

I always enjoyed my old (current until today) business card. It was nice and clean and matched my older web portfolio nicely. It was glossy on both sides and displayed a nice mix of color images in a neat little design on the front with one image and my info on the back. Earlier this year I upgraded my web portfolio and since it was completely redesigned, I wanted, then, to create a new business card to accompany the change. I had a partial design that I had created at the inception of the new web design, but never followed through. Recently a few of my co-workers and I were out to dinner and while showing me a few of their new cards they inspired me to finish my new card. So I did! I wanted a new, more simple design with one bold image on the front and the info on the back. I just picked up the new cards today and I love them. Below is an image that shows the new design.

In other news, my mom called me earlier to tell me she was filming a movie all day. My parents live in Rio de Janiero, Brasil. She occasionally tells me about some ridiculous event going on there, and when she mentioned to me yesterday that she was asked to be an extra in a movie, I figured she would gather in a crowd of thousands and be an ant on the screen, but when she updated me just now, I found out that the situation was a bit different. Apparently the film is a mockumentary about documentaries made in Rio that show the favelas in a harsh light. The producers and director wanted to show that the people of the favelas are for the most part a friendly and happy people. The film features actor Bill Pullman and Fisher Stevens (of Short Circuit and LOST fame) While I am unclear on a lot of the details, she did tell me she was riding in a jeep and sitting across from both actors for a better part of the day filming in Rio’s largest favela, Rochina, which I had a chance to visit during my trip earlier this year.