Rembrandt Lighting
Rembrandt Portrait Lighting – Rembrandt lighting is a name given to the lighting effect that the old master used to use for the lighting effects in many of his paintings. It’s basically short lighting where the shadow from the nose connects with the shadow on the side of the face, thus creating a triangle of light on the short side of the face. If the nose shadow does not connect with the cheek shadow, it’s not considered to be Rembrandt lighting, just short lighting.
When Will This HDR Fad End?
Personally I love the look of HDR images, the photographs look more like paintings than photographs, however there are times when they are not suitable, but that's for another time. I would argue that they are no different to loading say Velvia 50 into your camera and getting a different look to the average consumer colour film. Finally what could be more abstract than Black & White which is universally accepted in the world of photography?
Photographers rights: When, where and what can I shoot?
This is an interesting article on what the rules are on what you can and can't photograph. With some links to case studies and videos and model release documents.
Photographer: Henri Cartier-Bresson
Sometimes looking for something original to photograph prevents us from photographing altogether. The following is a excerpt from the book, "The Mind's Eye" by HCB (1976)...
"...as far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which can not be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's originality. It is a way of life".
Photography in Film - Lecture: La Jetée
- My notes: transitions vary in length, dissolve and quick cuts, fade to black, pan around the photo, strong commentary, diagetic sounds, non-diagetic sounds, real voices in German? Backing music, heartbeat. Ancient animals - dinosaurs?! Many different angles of the same thing
- What is owed to photography and what is owed to cinema and what crosses over
- Photography - still images (pan, rostrum), duration & time, sound
- Cinema - strong narrative, soundtrack, eyes moving - illusion of present time
- Chris Marker (1962)
- author, movie maker, journalist, animator (documentary film maker)
- French resistance (formative experience to attitude to world)
- Informed by torture at Auschwitz (plus Algeria)
- Politically motivated
- Time/memory
- Low profile - rarely interviews
- Weaves his thoughts into films
- Cultural history - what forms us
- La Jetée - only entirely fictional film
- Deals with fears of the future
- New Wave - low budget films
- Artform - pushing borders, experimenting or dead!
- Left Bank Group
- Saw New Wave as mainstream!
- Alan Resnais/Agnes Varda/Chris Marker
- Marker worked on Resnais' holocaust film 'Night & Fog'
- Films to educate as well as entertain
- Fictional & Documentary
- Melancholic/Nostalgic - Hiroshima - Sans soleil
- Giving voice over influences image
- Stills enhance haunting film narrative
- Photographs are an excellent way to time travel
- Raymond Bellour
- Substituted themselves for my memory
Photographer: Jane Bown - "Henri Cartier-Bresson"
I am still exploring the work of photographer Jane Bown. This photograph is of another inspirational photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson.
The following are quotes from the book "Unknown Bown".
"Some people take pictures. I find them"
"I love train stations and airports, places with lots of people where I can blend into the crowd and work unobserved"
"I was obsessed with textures and patterns—hair, cloth the grain of a piece of timber, the print of a fabric"
"I'm a one-shot photographer, I work quickly and hate fuss, always have done"
"I honestly think that all my best shots were taken on holiday"
"Sometimes I can see the picture immediately and then the first exposure is often the jackpot one"
"For that moment when I look through the lens, when absolutely everything is exactly right, love is the only way to describe what I feel"
"I can't really feel the excitement I felt when I looked down into that viewfinder, twisted the knob and everything came into focus"
"These pictures are the real me"
ACPP - Photographer: Marcus Doyle
- Tutorials will be brought forward (ideas & research)
- Marcus Doyle
- Started photography at 12 and did GCSE
- Influences - Weston & Evans B&W
- B&W printing (funded his projects)
- 1996 switch to colour
- Meyerowitz, Misdak, Shore & Egglestone
- Large prints needed larger camera
- Looking for the unusual and quirky
- A picture should be about and not of something
- Never be put off by places that are over photographed
- One project has led into another
- The size of the work is important and so is the camera
- Sheer amount of work (90 min exposures!)
- Times of day (late or early)
- Production values, sharpness and exposure
- Visually appealing
Martin Parr - How to Take Stunning Photographs
The final part of the series featured photographer Martin Parr. The series was more of a "how not to take crap photos" rather than take stunning photos but this last episode had a slightly different take. Firstly Parr asked them to take a 'series' of images rather than 'go and get a stunning image'. In the master class Parr taught the aspiring photographers the art of engaging their subjects. In his summary Parr stated "...by concentrating on one thing, coming in closer, exploring it better, making sure it's something you can identify with, that's when you can really reap the benefits of going to a place and trying to take away photographs that tell you something about your relationship to that place."
ADI - Image & Text I
- Bill Owens & Taryn Simon
- Looking at established photographers
- Bill Owens lived in the suburbs. Wasn't voyeur (outsider looking in)
- After Suburbia book he took break for 20 years until digital photography
- Captions that accompany his photographs make social statement
- Some photos have no text - unusual to mix and match
- The captions are what he hears in suburbs while he photographs although not necessarily matched up
- Website is very user friendly (links all there)
- Taryn Simon - text states the facts
- Detailed website
- 90% research, phone calls etc
- Multiple truths - artists intent, viewer, context
- Invisible space between image and text
Photographer: Bill Owens - "Suburbia"
Bill Owens' photographs have accompanying text when presented in books. The text often makes a statement rather than state facts.
Photographer: Taryn Simon - "The Innocents"
The Innocents documents the stories of individuals who served time in prison for violent crimes they did not commit. At issue is the question of photography's function as a credible eyewitness and arbiter of justice.
The primary cause of wrongful conviction is mistaken identification. A victim or eyewitness identifies a suspected perpetrator through law enforcement's use of photographs and lineups. This procedure relies on the assumption of precise visual memory. But, through exposure to composite sketches, mugshots, Polaroids, and lineups, eyewitness memory can change. In the history of these cases, photography offered the criminal justice system a tool that transformed innocent citizens into criminals. Photographs assisted officers in obtaining eyewitness identifications and aided prosecutors in securing convictions.
Simon photographed these men at sites that had particular significance to their illegitimate conviction: the scene of misidentification, the scene of arrest, the scene of the crime or the scene of the alibi. All of these locations hold contradictory meanings for the subjects. The scene of arrest marks the starting point of a reality based in fiction. The scene of the crime is at once arbitrary and crucial: this place, to which they have never been, changed their lives forever. In these photographs Simon confronts photography's ability to blur truth and fiction-an ambiguity that can have severe, even lethal consequences.
Photographer: Jane Bown - "Samuel Beckett"
Presented here uncropped and in their full glory, these photographs show why Jane Bown has been hailed as the natural successor of Cartier-Bresson and as one of the UK's preeminent portrait photographers In this new collection, Jane Brown's astonishingly candid photographs are artfully presented, and behind-the-scenes unpublished pictures that hit the newsroom floor are finally revealed. Working almost exclusively in black and white and with natural light, Jane produces images that reveal the private side of her famous subjects. She works quickly, unobtrusively, and decisively, often snatching great pictures under impossible circumstances. She has an unerring instinct for capturing the telling moment, even in the midst of a media assault or rushed in mid-interview. At every shoot, Jane takes numerous wonderful studies, but the "definitive" image is usually chosen by the "Observer" picture editor, sometimes on the basis of something as arbitrary as how much space was available on the page. Here, Jane's photos finally get to speak for themselves.
Photography in Film - Seminar: Memento
- Memento questions 1 & 5, then 2
- Actively engaging
- As movie - proof is disproved
- Berger p192 Understanding the photograph
- The Cinematic p135
- Sontag p5
Documenting the Real - Form & Type
- London Trip/Berlin Trip
- Exhibiting at the Old Lookout - experience
- Funding for time, framing and printing
- Offer something above and beyond an exhibition
- Project or studio space availability
- Preparing for a workshop
- Critically engaged
- Documentary - avoid cliche
- Constructing & mediating our images (not window on the world)
- Layers of complexity
- Our role in photography production
- Creative treatment of actuality - ties in with Environmental Portraits
- Moving someway down the subjective line, far from objective
- Robert Adams - geography, metaphor, biography ('place & space', '?' , 'bit of yourself')
- Rare to find unique form - genetic hybridisation
- Abstract - compelling, seductive, making-strange, making us stop and look
- Rhetorical - constructing an essay (an argument), visual essay (keno-fist not keno-eye), political change
- Categorical - categories, to type or chart, denotative, formation of a society
- Associational - spiritual, tinereti
- Form or Type - Documentary Blends
ACPP - Photographer: Angus Fraser
- V&A - Shadow Photography
- After 'Reading Week' will be photography in general
- Angus Fraser
- HCB, Capa, 'The Decisive Moment' - not my thing
- Hockney from different perspective
- Hands-on at college, not fine art
- Nadar Kander - simple landscapes and documentary
- Own style/own niche
- What is my style? (portfolio not unedited mess)
- David Stewart
- AOP assistant awards - Building
- Photography that we are passionate about
- Keep working on your portfolio
- Ideas - Created cohesive body of work
- Landscape & Portraiture on location
- Creativity for advertising
- Start playing with your equipment, learn light
- Try to do it all in camera
- Diversify - gallery in whitstable
- Doing what I thought the art buyer would want
- MA - idea of pilgrimage - Lithuania
- AOP awards, Newspaper
- Raising Profile
ADI - Colour Management III
- Profiling, Soft-Proofint & Printing
- The Printspace - download print profiles
- Also hahnemeuhle.com > Digital Fine Art > ICC Profiles > Style Pro 3800 > Photo Rag duo
- Print profiles .icc
- System > Library > Color Sync > Profiles
- Photoshop > Show > Doc. Profile - Adobe RGB
- Window > Arrange > New Window For… > Drag
- Window > Arrange > Tile
- View > Gamut Warning - grey areas will not print
- View - Proof Setup > Custom > Device to Simulate - Working CMYK + Relative Colormetric + Black Point Comp.
- Relative Colormetric v Perceptual, first keeps tones
- Select Color & Saturation
- Image > New Adj Layer > Selective Color (need to delete alpha channels)
- Flatten Image & Save
- Edit > Convert to Profile
- Profile has changed (little arrow at bottom)
- Prepare for Print - 8 bit
- Image > Image Size > 300 dpi
- If you need to interpolate do so in 10% increments
- Leica M8 13x8 print
- Allow for border
- Last job is to Sharpen
- Save as High Res JPG or TIF
- If you have your printer, no need to soft-proof
- A4 on A3 gives a nice border
- Canvas 42cm x 29.7cm
- File > Page Setup - make sure paper size ok and orientate
- Check color management in top right corner
- Color Handling > Photoshop Manages Color
- Printer Profile > (select the one you need)
- Rendering Intent - Always - Relative Colormetric
- Check Black Point Comp.
- Presets > Print Settings > Media Type > Color Adjustment - Turn Off
- 1440 or higher
- You can save the print settings as a preset
- Test Strips
- Crop Tool > width 3cm, height is same as image
- Crop the part you want
- File > Print > Position Left 1 (for Landscape) then left 6, then left 11
- Sharpening is always done last (otherwise creates halos)
- Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask - Amount 100%, Radius 1.0 - test strip
- Sharpen in small increments
Documenting the Real - Pioneers
- Look at the beginnings of archives of photography
- Jacob Riis
- 'The Photograph' by Clark G (1997) p145-166
- Authority & Significance - challenging these
- We can not make any assumptions
- Our proposals, less slack, less assuming - ie scholarly
- We all have subjective stance inherent even though we try objectivity
- What is your position, what are your beliefs and values?
- When something doesn't seem comfortable, challenge it. Explore it further
- Your project could be your perspective
- As photographers we are not neutral, we are intervening, we are active (capturing the moment is an intervention)
- Jacob Riis - project - active - NYC - director
- Documented dreadful living conditions in the Lower East Side
- Acute poverty, social depravation, uncontrolled immigration
- Systematic (not artistic), factual, extremely authoritive, image as evidence - the image becomes evidence - special locale
- Form of naturalism, seduce the viewer - window of the world
- Realistic (political attitude) explore in depth
- Riis wanted social reform - camera used to fight
- Great photographs, however Riis not a great photographer
- Tool for reform
- Lewis Hine - photography as political tool (not art)
- Mass image
- Kids at work
- Quote - Alan Trachtenberg (1977)
- Rhetoric in photography is putting forward an opinion
- Rhetorical - Documentary
ACPP: Environmental Portraits - Statement of Intent
ACPP – Environmental Portraiture
Statement of Intent
Having witnessed the diverse range of customers that visit my families business, a small marine business that is located in one the old arches at Ramsgate Marina I have decided to investigate the diversity of the customers through photographing the customers, individually, along with the item that they puchase.
My intention is to seek permission of the customer to accompany them back to their environment, where possible, and photograph them along with the item before it is used. I will explore the transition of the physical item as a commodity to an element of necessity and to show the relationship to its new owner through photographic juxtaposition of the the item, the new owner and the new environment.
I anticipate meeting fishermen, wind-farmers, engineers, firemen, council operatives, and many other tradesmen, along with cross-channel swimmers, boat owners, cyclists, and both British and foreign tourists. Due to the year round fluctuations to the customer base I plan on making this an ongoing and long-term project.
ACPP - Photographer: Rob Ball
- Rob Ball - A look at his work
- Physical print is the quality we are after
- Inspired by vernacular images in 'A day for Life'
- Interests, music & photography
- Fanzine written by friend, Rob took the pictures
- Wrote to Evening Standard for a job
- Runner for the NOTW (but took same photos as the pro)
- Press-Photographer course in Sheffield
- News job in Essex
- Staffer - Assistant Football Photographer
- Madrid?! Nottingham - free paper 'Topper'
- Article in Amateur Photographer on crime photography
- Weegee Exhibition 'Cruel & Tender - MA part-time
- Andres Serrano - NYC Photographer - morgue work
- Moved to B&W, available light only
- 'Pacemakers', serial number, about somebody!
- 'Guns', as opposed to pacemakers, both machines, but different
- Joel Sternsfeld - Large Format (2 sheets a day!)
- August Sander
- Bill Owens - Suburbia
- Sunday Supplements - Gibraltar - British
- NPG of a sculptor
- Interested in you and what you want to do
- 'In Silence' permanent ongoing project
- 'The Great Eastern' - biographical work
- Wet plate collodium
ADI - Colour Management II
- Consistency of Colour
- Gamut? Calibration must be done
- Soft-Proofing an image RGB/CMYK
- Printspace - help with profiles
- Calibration
- Gamut 2.2
- Bit Depth - 8 bit for printing
- DPi - printing (300)
- PPi - monitor
- Histogram - avoid gaps/spikes - lost information
- Remove default sharpening from Camera Raw before editing
- Photoshop > View > Gamut Warning - Grey can't be printed
- Window > Info - Original value
- Shadow/Highlight Command - Best for keeping information
- Levels are very destructive, curves less so
- Image > Adjustments > Shadows/Highlights
APDP- Medium Format
- Bexhill Exhibition - Egglestone - Colour Prints - Dye Transfer
- Absence in the Photo
- Fast film reacts to light quicker, Larger Grain, More Contrast
- Pushing Film 400 to 800 (in camera) develop as 800 (longer dev)
- Increases contrast and grain drastically
- Pulling Film - over expose, less dev time
- Less grain and less contrast
- 5 minute minimum dev time?
Photography in Film - Lecture: Memento
- Assignment 1 - Essay Memento or La Jetee
- 'Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts' by Susan Heywood
- 'Photography & Cinema' by David Campany
- 'The Cinematic - Documents of Contemporary Art' by Davis Campany
- 'Classic Essays on Photography' by Alan Trachtenberg
- Christopher Nolan - Director - Memento - Film Noir
- Memento - flashbacks are in B&W
- The current is played out in reverse
- 'Neo-Noir' - Nino Frank
- Neo-Noir - Chinatown, Taxi Driver, The Long Goodbye
- Anti-heroes - who do we trust?
- Can't trust anybody!
- Zooming into photographs (Blade Runner)
- Form of truth
- Sontag - Most of the photographs
- Objectivity - truth, unbiased, factual
- Subjectivity - personal feelings, beliefs & desires
- Godard Quote
- Polyscenic - multiple interpretations
- Polaroids from Memento - William Egglestone Style
- Sontag - Fragile Proof
- Essay Tips - Notions of Proof - Subjectivity - Memory & Identity
Documenting the Real - Approaching Documentary
- Conceptual & Intellectual step-up
- More confident
- Want to do - Compelled to do
- Don't ask lecturers - Convince them!
- Must work from a diary (work back from deadlines)
- Being organised allows 'time off' without feeling guilty
- Assignment 1 - Essay HCB
- Assignment 2 - 10 prints 'Open Brief'
- Naturalism, Realism & Truth
- The best essays are in fact 'Arguments'
- Genuine crossover of work but not a duplication (from one module to another)
- Critical Journals for every module (A5 is suitable)
- Depth of Research (NOT breadth)
- Be Creative (ie Walker Evans hidden camera)
- John Grierson Filmmaker 1920s and 1930s Documentary Films
- "The creative treatment of actuality"
- What do I bring to the shot? Different view point?
- Constructing a viewpoint
- Naturalistic - a surface reality
- Eastenders offers us a 'Naturalistic Aesthetic'
- Naturalism in style - representation - re-presentation
- Realism of attitude
- Truth? Ansel Adams WWII Photos of Nisei
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)