How the bloggers duet is changing the fashion photography industry with animated cinemagraphs

Original author: Lauren Indwick
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A cinemagraph created last month during New York Fashion Week

Rising stars Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg make up the duo behind the frenzied Tumblr blog From Me To You .

(One could claim that these stars have already risen, given their recent campaigns with Ralph Lauren and Juicy Couture , a photo article in the New York Times and the appearance in Lucky Magazine , but we are sure that this is only the beginning.)

28-year-old Beck and 30 Year-old Burg combines an unusual set of talents that attracts not only the attention of the Tumblr community, but also a growing list of brands and editors.

Beck is a photographer, main model and blog stylist. She uses her pin-up, makeup and hairstyle skills, as well as a vintage wardrobe to create glamorous images of American icons such as Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly .

Burg is more involved in the technical side, creating the design of the blog and the actual synagraphs - animated GIFs that look like moving photos. In addition, he - as I understood from meetings with one of their clients and their manager, Karen Robinovich from DBA - is engaged in business relations, noting the wishes of clients and deadlines.

They met in 2006 through mutual friends and are already engaged. Before they started working together earlier this year, Beck - who says that starting at age 13, photography was everything to her - was still filming. Burg convinced her to buy a digital camera, then start blogging and Twitter, and recently upload her photos taken on iPhone to Instagram. (“I'm already obsessed,” she admits.) He also designed it with Tumblr.

Burg while taking shots from the TV show "Saturday Night Live" and transformed elements into cyclic animation on a stationary background. They became the prototypes of their first tentacle cinemagraph published on February 13, 2011.

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The first Beck and Berg cinemagraph, entitled “Tentacles,” published February 13, 2011.

Beck recalls that after the publication of their first cinemagraphs, no one else wanted to order photographs from her. Everyone asked her to make “this moving thing” - just then they decided to come up with the name “cinemagraph”. They felt they needed a new name because what they created was not an animated GIF.

“They have cinematic quality ... like a living photograph. It's always a photo in the first place, ”says Beck.

How do they create cinemagraphs


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Jamie Beck

and Berg never know for sure whether a cinemagraph will work out, which creates difficulties when brands make an order with them. “We can be 90% sure,” Beck says. “If we shoot on the street or at Fashion Week, and I can't control the environment, then there are no guarantees.”

To create a cinemagraph, Berg and Beck focus on animating a single object: for example, a swaying chain or a spoon moving along the edge of a cup of coffee. While shooting in the studio, the couple can use point sources of light to create shine and hair dryers to wave hair and clothing. Beck points the camera, the Canon 5D Mark II, while Burg controls the props that create the animation.

Beck and Burg then import the files and edit them in Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. The number of frames that they use depends on the environment. For the Gilt Taste website, they created very long loops and inserted what was done using HTML5 video layers. The cinemagraph for their Tumblr will ultimately be from 25 to 100 frames; in banner advertising - even less.

According to Börg, taking a cinemagraph takes roughly no more time than taking a photo, but the editing process usually takes a day.

Both Beck and Berg are unhappy with the limitations of connection speed and file size, which leads to the need to use GIF-files and, therefore, lower quality. Beck expects that in a year they will have the opportunity to create cinemagraphs that look so realistic that you could touch them.

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On a test shoot for Juicy Couture in August

Audience Benefit


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The cinemagraph ordered by Juicy Couture

Beck and Berg make brands not only their photographs and cinemagraphs attractive. They also accumulated a significant audience of their own - their series of six cinemagraphs with the model Coco Rocha in Oscar de la Renta dresses received 55 thousand reblogs and likes and more than 2 million “impressions,” Tumblr fashion director Rich Tong said at a conference in Paris earlier this month. This influence makes the duo a valuable tool for distribution.

Or take the recent Beck and Berg campaign for the Juicy Couture fashion brand.. They were ordered to create a series of cinemagraphs using Juicy Couture products, some of which appeared as banners on a number of fashion sites, and some - like the one above - appeared only in their own Tumblr, receiving over 15 thousand reblogs and likes each.

“The great thing about Jamie and Kevin is that they are not only artists - they also have a portal for distribution,” says Robinovich. “Why would you just hire a photographer if you can hire a photographer who has a place to post photos ... [and] a hungry audience?”

The question of Robinovich was, of course, rhetorical, but it makes you think.

In a recent interview, Scott Schumann is a photographer for the Sartorialist blog.about street style - he said that he earned somewhere from a quarter to half a million dollars a year on advertising on his blog - in addition to other earnings. Will photographers have chances without blogs and online presence? And will blog coverage become a familiar part of contracts?

Beck says she never agreed on blogging directly on her contracts, but that was discussed with brands - namely, when and what to publish. Brands do not control what is happening in Tumblr, and she carefully agrees only on offers that do not contradict her principles.

“If I'm going to work with someone, then this should be part of my life — something I want to share,” Beck explains. "I can be hired to create a banner, but I want people to see all 360, and I hope that my readers will be pleasantly surprised or inspired."

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