Photo Profile – Mike Rusczyk | X-Equals - image, workflow, technology, business

Photo Profile – Mike Rusczyk

Thu, Feb 4, 2010

As a young punk kid, I spent every waking hour on a skateboard. There are a lot of memories from my youth, but being on a skateboard, raising hell, and having fun with my core group of friends was all that mattered.

Fast forward 20 years, and I’m still on a skateboard, but not as much as back then – and I still try keep in touch with my core groups of friends from way back when. Sure time lapses between touching base but those years melt away every time I get a chance to catch up with those people that were a part of shaping who I am today.

Mike Rusczyk is one of those folks that I’ve know forever – an ultra laid back guy who has always done things his way.

But while we set our skateboards aside with dreams of riding professionally, Mike went out and proved to all of us that if you follow your passion, the right things just happen.

Now as a photographer and artist, Mike is again developing his unique style and approach as he follows his passion just as strongly as he did when we were kids.

I would like to personally introduce Mike Rusczyk as our latest Photo Profile artist.

|Brandon Oelling
X-Equals – image, workflow, technology, business

All photos © Mike Rusczyk

Having spent many years not just skating professionally, but also working your camera, how has photography influenced you?

Skateboarding was my introduction to art and photography. Most aging skateboarders will agree, that much of who they are comes from the influences they have found in the life of skating. In professional skateboarding you spend a great deal of time hanging out and working with some amazing photographers. Much of what I know about using a camera comes from being around and shooting with skateboard photographers.

The whole working environment of skateboard photography is pretty crazy and quite gorilla.

They spend their days lying in gutters or at the bottom of large sets of stairs at illegal locations all around the world. They have to avoid police and security to capture images of kids and grown men throwing themselves down huge sets of stairs or large hand railings. I mean the whole affair is quite crazy when broken into small bits.

Through being part of this I have had the opportunity to travel a great deal and be exposed to some amazing subject matter for life and photos. I think the two go hand in hand. If it were not for the influences through skating and traveling, I would not have kept up with shooting photos.

All photos © Mike Rusczyk

Your images have a raw and innocent feel to them. Tell us about how you approach shooting your subjects.

I have always shot way too many photos. I’m always amazed at when you see something that stands out to you as being an amazing moment or subject and you try your best to capture it you can never get it right. It’s as if you have a very small window of opportunity to articulate what it is that caught your attention and you miss it. On a similar note you can shoot away on subject matter that seems mundane.

Then you look back on the images and see something that you did not see at the time of taking photos. Those make amazing images and subject matter. I find that shooting way too many photos opens up the opportunity for good pictures and good subject matter to show through.

I kind of viewed myself as an outsider or amateur when it comes to the types art and work I have developed over the years. This is due to most of my understanding of art, photography, design, web development, and everything else under the sun being self attained or self taught.

I feel like this shows through in the type of images I like to shoot or the type of things that stand out to me. Acquiring most of what I know through assimilation, digging for information and knowledge, can play with ones self-confidence. I mean to say there can be a feeling of innocence in my images because I never really took myself too seriously when shooting.

It always amazes me when I look back on my photos I deem interesting and see that a great deal of them are surprisingly candid portraits. So, maybe there is an innocence that shows through these images because there is a certain value to the subjects that I’m lucky enough to capture.

Many photographers have a favorite lens and body in their bag. What do you pick up when given the choice?

Right now I’m super into my Canon 5D Mark II that I purchased last summer. This camera blows my mind every time I pick it up. It’s crazy how you can have such a powerful tool for documenting in such a compact form. The video is also amazing.

I’m sure that the next wave of cameras coming out over the coming years will continue revolutionize photo and media journalism.

We are seeing a lot of changes in how humans interact with information.

As technology is moving forward our tools are becoming smarter, more powerful, and accessible to everyone. It used to be that to become a serious photographer or filmmaker you had to sink thousand and thousands of dollars into equipment. Today that is no longer the case and this easy accessibility to the tools to manipulate media is opening the flood gates to creative individuals and content.

We are in the midst of a really interesting and hopeful time – it really is the information age. Our tools lend a voice to people, areas, or events that would have gone unrecorded. The 5D and comparable cameras are a perfect example of the demands we are asking of our tools and can show the direction media is moving. So I’m really happy with my Mark II, it’s opened up a great deal of possibilities for me.

All photos © Mike Rusczyk

Tell us about your post-processing workflow.

I used to be really into trying to make my photos look very stylized – manipulating the hell out of each image in Photoshop to get some sort of desired effect. I was really influenced by skateboard photographer Brian Gaberman’s photos. Brian was a master printer turned Photoshop wizard. I spent a good deal of time going after this look, that in all reality was a bastardization of Brian’s work.

That is usually how you learn is trough mimicking someone you admires actions, until you can find your own voice. Now, I mostly do small tweaks in the program Lightroom, which I like to say is a nice way to process loads of images quickly with still retaining the original images integrity. Until a better tool surfaces most of my images are tweaked in Lightroom with the finer points done in Photoshop.

I know much of your work ends up over at Ofad.org. How did this project come about?

A good deal of what I shoot ends up on Ofad.org in one way or another, be it photo based projects or in a utilitarian manner. The site is still very young and I have a lot of plans and some visions of grander. The whole idea behind Ofad (Office of Fine Art and GOOD Design) really started out as a joke, a play on my friends and I taking ourselves and what we do too seriously.

The base concept of Ofad is that everyone is producing in one way or another regardless of the nature of their work.

We feel like some real amazing stuff never surfaces or gets seen, and the Ofad would like to bring their authors and these projects to the light of day.

Ofad and especially the site Ofad.org is a venue for producing ideas or to document past works with a stringent disregard for judgement and other creativity stifling forces. We believe that if you are not humble in your production you start to sound like a professional prick and your work suffers in time.

For me at least this is the base concept for the Ofad project but keep in mind Ofad is an organization of talented people with talented peoples opinions and needs.

The site grows with better content and the people of Ofad get more excited about producing under our project base. The Ofad will take shape. New ideas and internal power struggles will come. The Office of Fine Art and Good Design will have to redefine it’s role in it’s own existence.

Right now the Ofad Project consist of a solid group of artists, photographers, designers and web developers with their respective cluster of friends and acquaintances. So the reach of interesting people and potential for amazing articles on the site is inevitable – so please check in from time to time.