An interesting and brief article on photo critique
and another
one more
and finally a rather more detailed and informative guide.
However here are the ten most annoying critiques!
Photograph: Joe McElderry - 'Climb' artwork on iTunes
Although I'm not a fan of manufactured music and hope this cover version does not become the xmas number one I love the photography, and again with album artwork I'm not sure who the photographer is...
Digital Imaging on a Shoestring
I can't actually remember where I was when digital imaging became a force to be reckoned with, but I don't think it was in 1998, the year of the article. I can remember my first digital camera, a Fuji FinePix 4800 from Currys in Folkestone that cost over £500 and had 3 megapixels. It was made of an all metal body and designed by F.A.Porsche who designed the 911.
The Golden Rule of always working from a copy still applies today as does always backing up.
Finally I like the part where a 640x480 pixel image can be printed at 2.6x2.0 inches on paper at 240ppi, or use a higher resolution image in the first place. The image above was taken using my Fuji in February 2002 at 1.1MP and I recently managed to print it and others at 8x6 inches and was very happy with the results...
Moscow: Shooting it Like a Pro
Lenin's Tomb has a bizarre rule that states that photographers may not shoot with a lens longer than 77mm mounted on their camera unless they pay a fee! A Time Magazine Photo-Guide to Moscow gives ideas of what to look for that can be applied in your own city...
Photographer: Robert Capa
Photoshop Tutorial
Retro Surf Logo Design - this is a great tutorial and technique may be used in 'Urban Montage' for Introduction to Digital Imaging.
I Dreamed A Dream
Photographer: Gianni Galassi
I stumbled across the work of Gianni Galassi and admire the invention and creativity. An interesting article on what constitutes a photograph follows a blog article on The Online Photographer website stemming from Galassi's work.
Photographer: James Nachtwey
Getting into photography as a professional appears very hard, having read this article it must be virtually impossible. This is a job advert where you work for free to gain experience and the photography hiring you doesn't have to pay. I wonder how many thousands of applications he gets?
Photo of the Day: The Hot Melts (2009)
Harinezumi Camera
Digital Harinezumi: Lo-fi coolness! USA Video Blog from Some Like It Shot on Vimeo.
"Creating warm, dreamy and surprising videos, the tiny Harinezumi camera by Superheadz was inspired by the Super 8mm silent film of the '60s and can take two hours of footage (without sound), whilst being compact enough to carry with you just about anywhere. Don't feel like filming? The Harinezumi also takes colour-saturated, dreamy still photos." - Urban Outfitters
Hard to find in the UK at the moment and expensive to ship from the US but this camera is what I am looking at for the Dreamland Visual Research project and could also be used in Photography in Context for the next project.
Photoshop
- Lightroom 3 beta available
- Photoshop iPhone App/website
- Other artists - Tim Marrs & Stuart Michael Bruce
- Adrian Brannan
Camera Obscura
- Camera = Room
- Obscura = Dark
- Camera Obscura = Dark Room
- So contemporary cameras are tiny dark rooms!
- Camera Lucida = Light Room
- Jeff Curto - Photo History Podcast
Tutorials
Small group discussions
- Settling in okay despite missing first project "Making Strange"
- Enjoyed practical Polaroid sessions
- Like large group critique sessions but don't like viewing images on projection screen
- Learning to critique other peoples photographs
- Okay to keep "Critical Journal" by blog as long as archives available
Critical Journals
- Test shots
- Putting into practice
- Evidence
- Mistakes!
- Printing
- Recent or re-shoot only
- Pin sharp/clear
- Nice composition
- Show relationship between aperture and shutter
- Prints need to be protected
Colouring a Black & White Photograph
- Skin: adj layer > curves
- RGB > Red
- Draw line curve up
- RGB > Blue
- Draw line curve down
- Ok > "Ctrl+i" (to invert)
- Lips: Red line up, blue & green line down
- Panorama: File > Automate > Photomerge > Choose Open Images > Auto
- Layer blending to remove objects (open all photos)
- File > Scripts (loads files in stacks) > Add open > attempt & create both click yes
- Layer > Smart Objects > Stack Mode - Median
- Clone Tool - Rid, healing tools
Ghost Ships
- Ghost Ships - personal work by Bryan Hawkins
- Ships made from objects found from the sea
- Second assignment - Dreamland
- Working towards an outcome
Camera Raw
- Basic tools include advanced heal and clone plus straighten tool
- Tone Curve > Points > Medium Contrast
- Tone Curve > Parametrics > (adj mid points)
- Split toning
- Printers are ALF22 = LaserJet, ALF22Printer2 = Epsom
- Print > Output > Color Management
- Printer Profile?
- CMYK - TIFF - High quality print
- RGB - JPG
- Assignment on a CD, minimum of 5 photographs, A3 montage, 500 word evaluation
- Evaluation - why composition, how, new goals and aims
- 3 Photographers who inspired the piece in some way
Photography in Context
- Photography Exhibition 9th December 6:30pm
- Next week sessions is small group tutorials (3:40pm)
- 2 of 3 images, interim sign-off
- Mixed media/mixing mediums
- Develop a criteria in own mind
- allocate a weekly budget to printing, we should all be printing
Introduction to Photographic Studies
- Variety of different styles of portrait
- Not just portrait format
- Portrait/Landscape/Square
- Depth is more important than breadth - Essay
Colour Management
- everybody sees differently
- colour is subjective
- adobe RGB (or sRGB for web), Red, Green, Blue
- CMYK, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key Colour (Black)
- Possessions assignment to be both prints and on disk
- Printers in Uni not at acceptable standard as yet
- Quiz 45/50
Visual Research
- What is a 'found image'? - Photo of a photo, photo of road sign, photo of a tyre track
- Complex issue
- Influences - has everything been done already?
- Appropriate the change - image becomes something else
- Andy Warhol - Coca Cola - What did I see in this image?
- Mass-produced, uniformity, everywhere, shelving
- Common answers but in the Coca Cola image the bottles are different!
- Andy Warhol - Elvis - appropriate, Elvis has become a product
- Jeff Koons - Rabbit - pop life, reflections so that looking at art is part of artwork
- Also attitude and where the art is form part of the artwork
- Collage - Image A + Image B = Image C (not Image AB)
- Tom Wesselmann - Still Life No.30 (1963)
- A lot of art provokes issues without giving answers
Film: One Hour Photo (2002)
"truly, deeply scary"
I was thinking of having a large metal wall to display my photographs magnetically. Having seen this film, I am having second thoughts!
What I Liked about this film?
- Photos by kid with instant camera are intense and highly saturated images of toys, mainly close-up. They are superb!
- Great to see cutting of negatives and film process.
- Leica Digilux camera
Street Photography Tips
- Travel light, one or two lenses adequate
- Carry camera over shoulder, ready
- Use 1/250, f8
- Get close
- See a 'canvas' and wait for subject to walk into it
- Keep shooting even after you think you have the shot
- Keep the camera lower than subject's eye-level
- You have three seconds before you get noticed, when you do, stay part of the scene, smile and interact
Picturing Identity: Tanner, Bearden & Basquiat
- how to develop ideas
- what is the creative process
- relate to photography but aren't photography
- book: explore ideas, play with images, store-up ideas to be developed
Photography Within the Context of Other Arts
- Informed by and informing of other arts
- Interchange occurring between painting & photography
- Degas: After the Bath (1896) Photograph & painting
- Uncomfortable beginning
- 1837, mimicking of paintings what is already there, poses, ideas (specifity missing)
- Degas - part of methodology is a photo to help painting
- Early C19, painter did portraits
- After early C19, middle class could afford photographs
- Mimetic way, more lifelike
- Degas, impressionist and not middle of the road
- Too radical to be art. Codes and conventions
- Oil was mixed as needed and difficult to use out of studio
- Photography allowed capture of fleeting moment
- using a photo could help see unusual poses etc
- Preparation for painting
- Caillebotte: Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877)
- Aaron Siskind: Chicago (1948)
- Abstract expressionism, texture and form
- Jackson Pollock huge canvasses
- Gerhard Richter, paintings that look photographic
- Joel Peter Witkin: dead body
- Raft of the Medusa: metaphor for George W Bush
- Gregory Scott: paintings in his photos
- Michael Fajan: Zero Sum Game
- Environment that is predominently mixed-media
- Chance to experiment is now as an Undergraduate
Inspirational Quote
"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." Soren Kierkegaard (Danish Philosopher 1813-1855)
Polaroid Workshop
- What's the big deal?
- Montage & Panoramic Image
- Image-making as opposed to image-taking
- We have taken the fastest process of image-taking and gone through really slow process
- Unique transformation of one image into another image
- Polaroid in a mixed media form - Stephanie Schneider
Assignment 2: Possessions
- Not cliched (out of the box)
- Use of Critical Journal
- Responding to Light
- Digital Capture
- Post Production
- Get in right in camera and don't rely on Photoshop
Photography & Ethics
- Self-reflective
- Own ethical code (which might change)
- Boris Mikhailov - Ukraine series (1998) Pays venerable people to pose in certain ways, decline of body and mind
- Germaine Greer quote on Diane Arbus
- Arnold Newman - Alfred Krupp (1963), subjective and how Newman wanted Krupp portrayed
- As a developing practitioner I need to decide what to do
- Is there a universal code or are they subjective
- Can i look in the mirror?
- What might the consequences be?
- No such thing as a simple checklist, honesty in gradation of photography
- Bert Stern - Marilyn Cross (1962), some images were crossed through with lipstick by Monroe but used after her death
- Paparazzi - hounding Ami Winehouse
- Mike Urban - Crowd Picture, handed to police
- Russell Sorgi - Buffalo suicide (1942)
- James Nachtwey - 9/11
- What you are prepared to photograph might be different from what you are prepared to print
Self & Identity
- developing ideas
- journey
- to help photography
- visual research book
- explore ideas for myself
- valuing process & research (what's in the sketchbook)
- have your own ideas generator, edgier stuff, not portfolio, not critical journal
- look at other artists work
- rather than portrait of self; what's there, how about what isn't there?
- other ways to remove objects
Photography & Conflict
- Conflict is a broader term than war (Berger - agony)
- Handout - John Berger
- Image by Don McCullin - Black & White - Black Blood
- Not truthful because its B&W
- "I only use the camera like I use a toothbrush, it does the job" (Cited in Wells L, 2003:289)
- When was technology available to record agony?
- Susan Sontag - Regarding the pain of others
- Photography shows what war does - mutilation and ruin
- American/Mexican War, newspapers - "show me don't tell me"
- Early conflict photography was "staged" because camera speed too slow
- Daguerreotype - "General Wool & Staff" was long exposure
- We don't see active warfare, we see staging or we see the aftermath
- Roger Fenton: "The Valley of the Shadow of Death" (1855)
- Photographers often have famous artists in their heads when they stage images
- Fenton's work reported back an oppositional image (imotive) and not the "official" image
- Canonball offers a terrible suggestion but does not show the war itself
- James Robertson was far more explicit (1856)
- Alexander Gardner, strewn dead bodies (1863) - horror and reality, political point, making a point that previous photography was putting a veil over the truth
- William Rider: Passchendaele (1917) first major conflict where newspapers could reproduce images easily at relatively good quality.
- No longer Kings Shilling, no longer elitist
- Images start to be censored by government
- Press works with government (self-censorship)
- Press do not want censorship so they show what they can
- Could not show dead soldiers in Britain
- Public didn't really see the soldiers experience of war
- Technology still not great
- Battles were in trenches so photography very difficult
- Night photography almost impossible
- Ernst Friedrich "War Against War" (1928) Compilation of images by other photographers
- Sontag - shock therapy, drawn from German archives
- The face of war, facial injuries. Book banned ten years later
- "The Fallen" by unknown photographer/soldier
- We start to see that those taking part in the war are taking the photographs
- Robert Capa: D-Day Landing (1944) Taking images of the battle itself
- Henri Cartier-Bresson - POW - Leica
- Eugene Smith - WWII
- Lee Miller: Buchenwald (1945) Conflict shown through subtle images and not metaphor
- Lee Miller gives official version
- Sontag - non polished images are welcomed - "I've got to show them"
- Larry Burrows: Vietnam (1966) No heroes, complex and contradictory
- Burrows lost Capa's photos in lab
- Images are now placed on the internet, leaked images, we all feel complicit
- Don McCullin now takes landscapes - Antithesis
- Inherrent contradiction
- What is the photographers aim? Strike concern in the viewer
- Aim was to politicise us into action
- Berger - photography of war doesn't affect human behavoir
- Tyler Hicks - triptych made front page of New York Times
- Sontag - What are we not seeing if we are seeing this?
My Conventions
- Font Trebuchet Normal
- My Notes Extra Large
- Inspirational Quotes 570p x 380p Original Size Left Align
- Photographs Large
- Video 560p Max Width
- Title & Photographs both link to Original work
- Photograph image size increased in Photoshop to 300dpi (For Printing)
- Photo ideal size 200KB (100 to 250KB)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)