Bryan Niven | |
---|---|
![]() | |
Born | |
Nationality | American |
Occupation(s) | Photographer and Digital Artist |
Children | 3 |
Website | http://www.bryanniven.com |
Bryan Robert Niven (born April 21, 1979) is an American artist and photographer, known for his surrealistic and color-saturated images displaying families and individuals in a caricaturistic style. Niven is also known in the surf industry, and on social media, for his unique and extreme bodysurfing images, and videos. Niven currently resides in Pismo Beach, California with his wife and three children. [1] [2] [3]
Apple has involved Niven in various projects including presentations at the Apple Store in Soho, New York, and as a contributing author for "Apple Pro" on apple.com. [4] International exposure followed Niven after he photographed Rancid drummer Branden Steineckert in 2007. Niven's image of Steineckert debuted a few months later during a presentation of Aperture that Niven gave for Apple, in New York City. Further International exposure came after Niven's work was featured in a four page article "The American Dream in Technicolour", in the UK based magazine, Digital Photographer.
Adobe has also worked with Niven, licensing some of his images for use with their on-going Pop-Up Stores, detailed on Adobe's Blog, involving their photo-editing software Adobe Photoshop. Other collaborations include companies such as CNET and their Gotham, Hands-On Holiday Guide, event in New York City. In 2009 Niven was showcased as a VIP photographer for Dynalite Inc., joining a list of well known, and well established photographers, (much his senior), such as Michael Grecco, Vincent Versace, Nick Vedros, Jack Reznicki, Joe DiMaggio, Nancy Brown, and Lynn Goldsmith. Dynalite has since featured Niven's work in well known photography magazines such as PDN, and Shutterbug. Dynalite uses Niven's work to advertise their lightweight studio lighting, "road series" and ring flash units. Niven's work has been used in national product-leaflets for Dynalite as well, in photography stores, including New York based B&H Photo Video.
After years of running his photography studio, Niven moved back to California, in 2017, to California’s Central Coast. Growing up surfing, Niven stumbled onto bodysurfing in Pismo Beach, and began filming and photographing his extreme first person waves, using a 360 camera from GoPro, called the GoPro MAX. Niven began posting footage to Instagram, and other social media outlets, gaining popularity, including sponsorships, such as Slyde Handboards. Niven is known for his positive attitude in the water, and is often vocal in his excitement, for both his own rides, and the waves of others, as well as his encouragement of others.
In late 2023 one of Niven’s photographs was selected by Red Bull, from around 50,000 entries, and featured on their official website, as a Red Bull Illume Photographer, [5] for their international Red Bull Illume photography competition, hosted in Austria. His image, “Brightside” was selected as one of only 25 others in the, “Creative”, category. Niven’s image was also included in Red Bull’s limited edition book, featuring the semi-finalists, finalists, category winners, and over-all winner. Niven’s image was also featured on Red Bull’s illume website, and social media pages.
In 2024 Niven began talks with one of his bodysurfing sponsors in a bid to purchase the company, and planned to release a custom, signature model, bodysurfing handboard, featuring Niven’s own board design and artwork. However, Niven ultimately decided against the buyout, and instead began prototyping his own boards.
Niven manages several blogs and websites, consisting of commercial and personal blogs, web galleries, photography courses, and YouTube outlets featuring his behind-the-scenes-videos of his productions. Some of Niven's websites appear to have been earlier blogs and websites, which now direct followers to new addresses. According to a recent entry in one of Niven's own blogs he continues to stay busy with projects including another internationally reaching project, taking him to Jerusalem.
Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the most used tool for professional digital art, especially in raster graphics editing. Owing to its fame, the program's name has become genericised as a verb although Adobe disapproves of such use.
Rancid is an American punk rock band formed in Berkeley, California in 1991. Founded by Tim Armstrong and Matt Freeman, former members of the band Operation Ivy, Rancid is often credited as being among the wave of bands that revived mainstream interest in punk rock in the United States during the mid-1990s. Over its 33-year career, Rancid has retained much of its original fan-base, most of which was connected to its underground musical roots.
Branden Steineckert is an American musician. He is the drummer for the punk rock band Rancid and a founding member and previous drummer of the Used.
Digital "darkroom" is the hardware, software and techniques used in digital photography that replace the darkroom equivalents, such as enlarging, cropping, dodging and burning, as well as processes that do not have a film equivalent.
The Ken Burns effect is a type of panning and zooming effect used in film and video production from non-consecutive still images. The name derives from extensive use of the technique by American documentarian Ken Burns. This technique had also been used to produce animatics, simple animated mockups used to previsualize motion pictures, but Burns's name has become associated with the effect in much the same way as Alfred Hitchcock is associated with the dolly zoom.
Aperture is a discontinued professional image organizer and editor developed by Apple between 2005 and 2015 for the Mac, as a professional alternative to iPhoto.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, usually called Lightroom, is an image organization and processing application developed by Adobe. It is licensed as a standalone subscription or as part of Creative Cloud. It is supported on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and tvOS. Its primary uses include importing, saving, viewing, organizing, tagging, editing, and sharing large numbers of digital images. Lightroom's editing functions include white balance, presence, tone, tone curve, HSL, color grading, detail, lens corrections, and calibration manipulation, as well as transformation, spot removal, red eye correction, graduated filters, radial filters, and adjustment brushing. The name Lightroom is a play on the darkrooms used for processing film.
Nature photography is a wide range of photography taken outdoors and devoted to displaying natural elements such as landscapes, wildlife, plants, and close-ups of natural scenes and textures. Nature photography tends to put a stronger emphasis on the aesthetic value of the photo than other photography genres, such as photojournalism and documentary photography.
LeRoy "Granny" Grannis was a veteran photographer. His portfolio of photography of surfing and related sea images from the 1960s enjoys a reputation that led The New York Times to dub him "the godfather of surfphotography." He was born in Hermosa Beach, California.
Let the Dominoes Fall is the seventh studio album by the American punk rock band Rancid, released in June 2009 by Hellcat/Epitaph. It is their first album of new material in nearly six years, following 2003's Indestructible, and their first with drummer Branden Steineckert, who joined the band in 2006 after the departure of founding drummer Brett Reed.
MediaStorm is a Los Gatos, CA based film production and interactive design studio. The company produces online news stories using high-quality photography, audio, interactivity, and video, and consults on interactive web projects. Seattle Post-Intelligencer said that "telling powerful stories through powerful images, MediaStorm has earned a reputation for engaging multimedia news."
Red Bull Illume is the world's largest adventure and action sports photography contest. Its aim is to showcase the most creative and captivating images from the adventure and action sports world, and celebrate the photographers working behind the lens. It's open to amateur and professional photographers alike, takes place every two years and features images and video submissions that showcase adventure sports such as surfing, kayaking, mountain biking, rock climbing and street sports like bmx, skate and parkour. After the winners are selected, the 50 top images are exhibited on two meter by two meter lightboxes in both outdoor and indoor exhibitions around the globe.
Mikkel Aaland is a Norwegian-American photographer, based in San Francisco and Norway. He is known for work in the early days of digital photography, as well as his twelve books on photography. He is best known for his 1978 book Sweat, an illustrated history of sweat bathing. His documentary photographs have been exhibited in major institutions around the world, including the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the former Lenin Museum in Prague. Aaland is the author of works of memoir, books featuring his own photojournalism as well as works on digital imaging and various Adobe Photoshop products.
Norman Seeff is a photographer and filmmaker. Since moving to the United States in 1969, his work has been focused on the exploration of human creativity and the inner dynamics of the creative process.
Nabil Elderkin is an American-born Australian film and music video director and photographer, who is of Iranian and American descent. He is mononymously credited as Nabil in his videos. Elderkin has directed videos for musical artists such as: Dua Lipa, Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, John Legend, and Foals. Born in Chicago and raised in Australia, he is most recently based in Los Angeles, California.
Chris Burkard is an American photographer and artist, based in the California Central Coast region. He photographs landscape, lifestyle, surf, outdoor, and travel subjects. Burkard takes a photojournalistic approach to make editorial projects, using multiple media. He uses natural light to capture humanizing moments.
Zakary Noyle is a professional surf and wave photographer living on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, best known for his large wave photographs.
Affinity Photo is a raster graphics editor developed by Serif Ltd. for iOS, macOS, and Windows, alongside Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher. Development of Affinity Photo started in 2009 as a raster graphics editor for macOS. Its first version reached general availability in 2015 with the Windows version launched a year later. It is a successor to PhotoPlus which Serif discontinued in 2017.
Camilla Rutherford is a Scottish photojournalist who lives in Wānaka, New Zealand. Rutherford specializes in outdoor sports photography and often shoots in the mountains of New Zealand. She shoots subjects related to sports, travel, and lifestyle.