ZHUANGZI

photographer michael muller turned his childhood fascination with sharks into a career photographing the animals around the galapagos islands, south africa, fiji, and gudalupe island. to that end, michael developed his own underwater lighting rig that, as he explains, sets his underwater photos apart from all others.

“our lighting is one of a kind. about six years ago i created and was granted four patents on today’s most powerful underwater strobe system. each strobe creates 1200 watts of power and i use up to 7 at a time. they are the exact same lights i use in the studio shooting [his renowned] commercial work.”

“my vision was to bring a great white into the studio and shoot it with edge lights and top light, etc. realizing that i couldn’t bring the sharks into the studio, i decided that i would have to bring the studio to them.” 

hammer time. schools of scalloped hammerhead sharks photographed in the galapagos by (click pic) alexander safanov, montgomery gilchrist, eric h cheng, norbert wu, franco banfi, todd aki, chris newbert and larry gatz.  

The Silent Jungle: Process

Our final from fall semester was pretty open ended, but it had to be mostly from observation, so I created a set from materials from the ReStore (a “store” where you can get various free items that other people have donated) and parts of plants from around campus.

Another factor of the assignment was that we had to choose two art books: one that inspired us stylistically, and one that inspired us subject-matter-wise. I chose to combine Jeffrey Catherine Jones’ dynamic compositions, muted color palette, and loose, painterly application, with the fantastical, larger than life environments from The Art of Dreamworks Animation.

It wasn’t a fully polished set because of time constraints, so I mostly used it for composition, texture, and lighting. After creating it, I took several photos of it from different angles and composited them in Photoshop to make three different panoramic compositions for my paintings.

Shame

photo by Brent Bielmann