Required Reading is a weekly listing of all the bits of visual inspiration, cool videos, news, hip links, and miscellaneous information that rattles my head during the week. The stuff that’s worth bookmarking and gets my brain-juices flowing.

I have also added a subscription feature to the blog – now you can stay updated about new posts and what is going on with my creative life via e-mail. To receive updates just add your email address to the box under Subscribe on the sidebar and voilà! you will be getting regular updates from me in no time. 

• Nubby Twiglet was interviewed by photography consultant Amanda Sosa Stone about her design process and helping to build brands for photographers (including me) | I Love Designers on the Scoop with Sosa Stone

• A hand drawn quote from one of my favorite books, The Little Prince. | Brain Pickings

• The most important article I read all week. A lot of you know how I feel about the awful negativity that is pervasive in the photography industry, I am glad to see blogs like that that are taking a stand against it and showing what they love about photography instead. | I love Photography. 

• While I don’t think the the first equine themed costume would fly today (except for some very specific and scary clientele) this look back at exotic dancers of the 1890′s is a fascinating exploration of changing aesthetic ideals and preferences. | How to Be a Retronaut

• Documenting the creation of an outdoor street art museum in the Wynwood district of Miami, FL. Check out this trailer for the docuseries Here Comes The Neighborhood below.

• John Keatley’s series of portraits of master bartender Murray Stenson are some of the best images I have seen online in weeks. Seeing stuff like this is like visual caffeine, it wakes you up and pulls you out of the online static. | Keatley Blog. 

• Think of how much more interesting everyday life would be if other cultures treated such mundane objects as works of art | The Art of The japanese Manhole Cover

• Eiko Ishioka recently passed away, she was a monumentally talented and Academy Award winning costume designer who is responsible for unforgettable outfits in the films of Tarsem Singh, Bjork videos, Cirque du Soleil performances. I love the work she created for Singh’s The Fall (one of the most visually intriguing films I have ever seen) | R.I.P. Eiko Ishioka

• David Ogilvy – in his own words – on his writing process and why he feels he is a lousy copywriter. Editing is a key skill for all creatives, you need to be able to cull your own bad ideas from the good | Letters of Note

• For all those photographers who are just starting to move into video, Chase Jarvis has posted a quick guide to audio and mics just for you| Buying Mics and Hacking Audio for Your DSLR Video Setup

• For my fellow camera nerds – a hidden camera look inside the B&H conveyor system by Lense. 

• The Affectmedia 2012 Calendar has me in stitches, I wish more companies did fun pieces like this. Oenophile Pinhead was my favorite of the bunch | Photography Served

• Stop aiming for the middle | Prepared to Fail by Seth Godin

• A mega-mix of all the overhead shots in Wes Anderson films cut together.

• Want to get going in the morning? Skip coffee and start listening to film scores while you get ready, by the time you are dressed you will feel like a badass western gunslinger or a spacefaring rogue – after that the rest of the day is easy! I suggest starting off with this one | Elmer Bernstein – Main Titles of the Magnificent Seven. 

• An extensive collection of film stills where the subject is breaking the fourth wall | Look at the Camera

• Rooftopping in Toronto – an incredible vantage point from above a city I love. | Thestar.com

• I am in love with this video of a five year old discussing her impressions on the logos and brand marks of different companies by Ladd Design

The highlight of this past week was the debut of Nick Butlak’s (who has made appearances in many of my pictures) gallery show – collecting a number of his paintings and installation pieces. friends and artists from all over buffalo came by the opening to see Nick’s newest work.

Helping my mother move into her new house had me visiting Niagara Falls a lot this week. Aside from Toronto, this is one of the most dominant landscapes of my youth – It is an oddly unbalanced  mix of industrial structures, suburban hideaways, consumer temples,  and forgotten grandeur. I think I will be working on something more in-depth in the coming weeks to record the area in greater detail.

I have been busy lately with a lot of meetings and portfolio reviews as 2012 is starting to get busy – I have a stack of thank you notes still to mail out to all the awesome creatives that I have met and shared my work with the past few weeks.

The reward for a well executed all night work marathon.

Portraits of Adam Varga that were completed during some downtime between productions. Simple and stylish was the perfect way to capture Adam in these images – I love reducing things to their simplest elements and creating images like these that both encapsulate the subject’s personality and make simple but profound statements about their style. Simplicity and a sense of minimalist style are very important to me in my work, especially now that I have been creating black and white images more often. There is something delightful I find in the reduction of extraneous information from an image that is much more satisfying than adding too much to a shot and diluting its impact.

I was so excited for this package to come in the mail – I can get a bit nerdy about little things, but when I am working on new marketing and promo ideas it escalates to RPG level epic +1 nerdiness. A little while ago, in an edition of Required Reading, I posted about the The Inkorporated and the unique return letter press inspired return address stamps they were creating. They took on a custom commission for me to create not just a return stamp, but also stamps of some of my brand imagery, that will be used in the packaging of my recent magazine promo. 

Personal Record is an ongoing stream of the images I make outside of my professional career. The personal images, mobile images, outtakes, and random candid images that I take on whatever camera I happen to have handy at the time; a documentation of my day-to-day life and the things I come across that interest me visually.

I spent a solid afternoon working on editing images from a recent production with Kyle Makrauer and Marie Vaccarello. I very rarely work with other photographers in such a directly collaborative way – but the nature of this assignment was all about pairing artists up and seeing what the results were, so Kyle and I (along with out friend Marie) came together to create a series of images that blended both of our visions for this unique upcoming project.

There is one exceptionally long light at the end of my street I inevitably end up waiting at every time I go out. I have photographed it many times while waiting  - but I am particularly fond of this one.

I was invited by my high school to be a keynote speaker at their Party for the Arts to celebrate the opening of their brand new arts facilities. I spoke to an intimate group of passionate art students, families, and faculty members about my journey from burnout to working commercial artist and shared some of my newest work with them. Afterwords, I spent the rest of the evening working with students in the new photo studio on lighting and developing portrait concepts. I am glad that the students are so passionate about creative pursuits, and these new facilities give them even more opportunities to explore their artistic passions. For me it was great going to a school with such a strong arts program at a time when many schools were sacrificing creative education.

I paid a visit to my friend Derek’s studio to get some work done. He had worked on roughing out a new tattoo idea me and we started work on it this week. Derek, as well as being a great illustrator and tattoo artist, is also a talented sculptor, renowned for his satirical hand poured and painted busts of Elvis Presley.

Erin picked up this book for me that I have fallen in love with – Hard Ground, a photo book by Michael O’Brien accompanied by poems written by Tom Waits. I am a big fan of both artists and this book is a wonderful combination of O’Brien’s images and Waits’ words.

A small collection of street scenes and urban landscapes from around Buffalo and Niagara Falls .

Erin and I often brave the cold to make trips to our favorite food truck / taco purveyor. Lloyd Taco Truck is so good it would inspire me to trudge out in arctic weather just to get my hands on a taste of their food. Order it extra hot to combat the snow.

The Frank Lloyd Wright designed Darwin Martin House – I drive past this every day, but it looks noticeably more fantastic in the winter.

Seeing Tycho live last week was one of the best concerts I had been to in some time – If you have not had a chance to listen to Dive yet, it is a must listen to album, and has become the soundtrack for my shoots since its release.

Taking a drive through Love Canal is strange and a little surreal – it looks pretty innocuous for being one of the worst domestic environmental disasters in US history and the first Superfund Site.

I rarely get starstruck, but getting to briefly meet Crispin Glover was the high point of my week. Me and Erin went out to the Market Arcade Cinema to see him perform one of his big slide shows and see a showing of his film It is Fine! Everything is Fine. It was wonderful to see this amazing artist, who I have long been a fan of (and find to be one of the most fascinating and intelligent people in film and art today)  and to see him interact with his fans and share his artwork with the crowd. Even though it was just a meet and greet after the film, I was ecstatic to have a chance to speak with him, for s short time, about his films and thoughts on corporate vs personal art.

I have toyed with the idea of giving some of my favorite images from Personal Record a permanent home on the main page of lukecopping.com for some time now. What started as a small experiment of self-documentation has grown into a regular and very popular feature on my blog. Due to my own ongoing fascination with mobile photography as well as the wonderful encouragement that I have received from all of you over the past few months I will definitely be continuing to capture images from my day-to-day adventures – and you can now view a curated and evolving gallery of some of my favorites from the series here - I hope you enjoy! 

Television personality Lydia Dominick has been in front of my camera many times over the years so much so that we have become regular creative collaborators on a variety of projects that she is involved with in her local community and good friends as well. When it came time for Lydia to update her personal portraits for her media and online needs I wanted to create something a little more refined and formal that the images we had created in the past. A selection of gorgeous gowns and a cameo appearance by model and actor Adam Varga were perfect compliments to Lydia’s always glamorous presence.

Required Reading is a weekly listing of all the bits of visual inspiration, cool videos, news, hip links, and miscellaneous information that rattles my head during the week. The stuff that’s worth bookmarking and gets my brain-juices flowing.

• I have been noticing a lot more imagery by  photographers that captures the most mundane and normal things  in beautiful ways this year. This study on street lights and evening landscapes is captivating. | Reconfort D’une-Lumiére Dans l’obscurité.

• Fashion Served really is one of my favorite places to see amazing work – another project was grabbed me this week was this one, created by Bara Prasilova for designer Hana Zarubova | Air Force.

• A look at shooting a commercial for one of the most enduring (and scariest) commercial mascots, and a discussion on all why cologne need a hint of flame broiled meat. | Kareem Black Explains Shooting The King. 

• I am terribly excited about new a Wes Anderson film | Moonrise Kingdom

• Rediscovering the joy of solitude has been a big blessing to me at time, it is often when i have my best breakthroughs and most important moments of self examination. | Learning to Sit Alone, In a Quiet Empty Room. 

• A photo collection that I really enjoyed, so few figures int he public eye have been featured in such a sheer volume of amazing and iconic images – let alone someone I find so personally interesting | Muhammad Ali: 70 Iconic images for 70 Years. 

• The amazingly complex art of Minjeong An is almost overwhelming in its scope and can be explored over and over again. | Self Portrait as Informational Diagram

• A solution for crafting simple newsletters and e-mail lists with impressive impact for creatives | TinyLetter

• I could see a certain awesomeness coming from putting something so nightmarish in my space | Dark water – Carpets inspired by Cthulu

Personal Record is an ongoing stream of the images I make outside of my professional career. The personal images, mobile images, outtakes, and random candid images that I take on whatever camera I happen to have handy at the time; a documentation of my day-to-day life and the things I come across that interest me visually. 

My refrigerator is now covered in tons of these day of the dead magnets that I found on Fab.com

Scenes captured during my week from around the streets of Buffalo, NY.

A whole lot of behind the scenes images from my shoot with Once Vintage

A weekly trip to my favorite Pho place.

Kyle Makrauer - caught in a snow storm and visiting the studio for a collaborative project.

The snow finally picked up here in Buffalo, unlike the sane photographers who stayed indoors, I spent a good chunk of the morning roaming around the neighborhoods by the studio taking Instagram photos.

I have decided that I need to buy an industrial fresh squeezed orange juice machine for my studio immediately.

Self-portraits, with and without Chops.

I am always looking to change things up and add different elements to my marketing mix to keep things fresh – partly to move away from the too many generic e-blasts / too many generic postcards burnout that a lot of photographers get stuck in, and partly because I just love making cool things and sharing them with others. To kick of 2012 right I wanted to share a project that I have been crafting with the help of the phenomenally talented Nubby Twiglet (Who I have worked with on my identity and branding projects for a couple of years now. I never cease to be impressed with how well her design and layout work complements my photography), a 58 page magazine that collects some of my personal favorite  images and series. I have used the MagCloud service in the past in my work with Auxiliary Magazine and always been impressed with their quality, which has just gotten better and better over the years, so they were the clear choice for me when it came time for me to print the small runs needed for my publication.

I grew up obsessed with reading whatever DIY music, art, and literary zines I could track down at local record stores in Buffalo and Toronto and made my own hand bound photo-digests for years – and I think that services like MagCloud keep that spirit of self-publishing alive in a new tech and design savvy iteration. There is something pleasurable about holding a magazine or book in your hands, turning those pages, and finding something new on every page that never gets old. I was so excited to create a vehicle  for my artwork that was in the same vein as those zines and underground art rags that I loved so much when I was in my teens.

Update: You can read about designer Nubby Twiglet’s take on the project here.

This will be going out to a pretty targeted list of recipients (and some long time dream clients of mine), but you can still check out the design with the digital edition available below.

I have a lot of plans this year to keep making cool stuff and finding new ways to share my work and I promise that I will keep you all posted as I finish putting them together.

Update 2: Thank you all so much for the wonderful response to this project. I had not initially planned on doing this but I have received so many requests from people that want to get their hands on a copy (far beyond even the small print runs I produced for my promotional needs) that I have made the MagCloud version public. If you are one of those people that wanted to get your hands on a copy you can now do so.

Luke Copping – Best of 2011