How a duo of bloggers is changing the fashion photography industry with animated sinegraphs

Cinemagraph created during New York Fashion Week last month



Rising stars Jamie Beck and Kevin Borg make up the duet behind the wildly popular Tumblr-blog From Me To You .



(One could say 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 an appearance in Lucky Magazine , but we are sure that this is only the beginning.)

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The 28-year-old Beck and the 30-year-old Börg combine an unusual set of talents that attract not only the attention of the Tumblr community, but also a growing list of brands and editors.



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



Börg is more involved in the technical side, creating the design of the blog and the actual bluegraphs - animated GIF-images 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 were already engaged. Before they started working together at the beginning of this year, Beck - who says that from 13 years on, photography is everything for her - was still filming. Börg convinced her to buy a digital camera, then start blogging and Twitter, and recently upload her pictures taken on the iPhone to Instagram. (“I'm already obsessed,” she confesses.) He also designed it with Tumblr.



For some time Börg took footage from the TV show “Saturday Night Live” and turned the elements into cyclic animations on a fixed background. They became the prototypes of their first Blue Tentacles, published on February 13, 2011.





The first blue and Beck and Burgh under the name "Tentacles", published on February 13, 2011.



Beck recalls that, after the publication of their first bluegraphs, no one else wanted to order pictures from her. Everyone asked her to make “this moving thing” - it was then that they decided to invent the name “bluegraph”. They felt they needed a new name, because what they created was not an animated GIF.



“They have cinematic quality ... like a live photo. This is always a photograph in the first place, ”says Beck.

How do they create bluegraphs

Jamie Beck



Beck and Börg never know for sure whether the bluegraph will work, which creates difficulties when brands order from them. “We can be 90% sure,” says Beck. “If we shoot on the street or at Fashion Week, and I cannot control the environment, then there are no guarantees.”



To create a bluegraf, Börg and Beck focus on the animation of a single object: for example, a swaying chain or spoon moving along the edge of a cup of coffee. When shooting in the studio, a couple can use point sources of light to create shine and hair dryers for waving hair and clothes. Beck directs the camera, the Canon 5D Mark II, while Burgh controls the props that create the animation.



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



According to Berg, shooting a bluegraf takes, roughly speaking, no more time than taking a photo, but the editing process usually takes a day.



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





On a test shoot for Juicy Couture in August

An additional advantage of the audience

Cinemagraph ordered by Juicy Couture



Beck and Burg make attractive for brands not only their photographs and sinegraphs. They also accumulated a significant audience of their own - their six-blue series with Coco Rocha in dresses from Oscar de la Renta received 55,000 reblogs and likes and more than 2 million "impressions", as Tumblr fashion director Rich Tong told a conference in Paris earlier this month. This influence makes the duo a valuable tool for distribution.



Or take the recent Beck and Burgh campaign for the fashion brand Juicy Couture . They were ordered to create a series of sinegraphs 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 15,000 reblogs and likes each.



“In Jamie and Kevin, it's great that they are not just 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 publish photos ... [and] a hungry audience?”



The question of Robinovich was, of course, rhetorical, but he makes you wonder.



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



Beck says that she never coordinated blog coverage in her contracts directly, but it was discussed with the brands — namely, when and what to publish. Brands do not control what is happening in Tumblr, and she cautiously agrees only to proposals that do not contradict its principles.



“If I’m going to work with someone, then this must be part of my life — something I want to share,” Beck explains. “They can hire me to create a banner, but I want people to see everything 360, and I hope that my readers will be pleasantly surprised or inspired.”