Documenting the Real: The Photo Essay Seminar

  • Agee - Photos were later printed as part of book
  • HCB text? Always some text
  • Equality text & photos
  • Henry - Vietnam - TV War
  • Contemporary -Different types of medium. Diegetic sound

ACPP: Portraiture

  • Portrait Prize - No-one smiling - Criticism
  • August Sander
  • Structured way of recording
  • Recording different types
  • Grouped - Professions/Artists/The Last People
  • 'The face of our time' - started 1904
  • Dead-pan style
  • Photographic inventory - 'Science & Art'
  • Available light only
  • Photographed the people who were on the periphery
  • Circus performers/Disables - Not popular with the Nazis
  • Published after the end of Nazi-Germany
  • Treated everyone the same, not just poor or rich
  • Charlotte Cotton - deadpan aesthetic
  • Sander work was reaction to expressionism
  • Rineke Djikstra
  • Photographed subjects at times of change
  • Nothing for the viewer to work our
  • Similar pictures, difference are highlighted more
  • 'On editing' - video, photographs of friends
  • Simon Roberts - 'Motherland'
  • Avoids cliches
  • Subtle
  • 5000 images edited for book
  • Website for feedback and new ideas
  • Joss McKinley
  • Ability to interpret light
  • Exposed only for highlights - mood to image
  • Don't be afraid of too much shadow
  • Deliberately under-exposes film

ADI - Aperture II

  • Import
  • Import Settings
  • Export Settings
  • Create a Preset for our metadata
  • Preview Prefs > Choose Asterisk
  • Working with RAW images
  • RAW fine tuning
  • F = Full screen, H = HUD (Heads Up Display)
  • View > Hot & Cold, do not remove completely as image will flatten but use recovery and black point to balance them
  • Color Clipping - Yellow = Clipping in Red & Green
  • White = Clipping in All channels
  • Lift & Stamp - apply adjustment to all selected images
  • Back Up, Back Up, Back Up
  • Vault > Add Vault

APDP: B&W Filters

  1. No filter - 1/4 @ f/11 
  2. 21 Orange - 1/2 @ f/11
  3. 23 Orange - 1s @ f/8
  4. 15 Yellow - 1/2 @ f/11
  5. 11 Green - 1/2 @ f/11
  6. No filter - 1/8 @ f/11
  7. 11 Green - 1/4 @ f/11
  8. 23 Orange - 1/2 @ f/11
  9. 21 Orange - 1/4 @ f/11
  10. 15 Yellow - 1/4 @ f/11
  11. 11 Green - 1/4 @ f/11
  12. 11 Green - 1/8 @ f/11 Underexposed
Using Ilford Delta 125 (@ 100 iso)

Photography in Film: Documentary I

  • Sally Mann Film - 'What Remains'
  • Annie Leibovitz - 'Life Through a Lens'
  • Produced by allies!
  • Acutely visually aware
  • How does filmmaker remain auteur or does the subject take control?
  • Rather than looking at them we are looking through them at the world
  • Show from viewpoint = Take the viewpoint
  • Less critical of the subject
  • Leibovitz - highly cinematic
  • Biography
  • Commands & manipulates the subject
  • She has a vision. She is an auteur in her own right
  • Life & work are inseperable
  • Prolific docementation
  • Simple ideas
  • Deep breath and move on
  • Vanity Fair cover - her work
  • The Edward Steichen of vanity Fair
  • Talent - she provokes people
  • Susan Sontag - complemented each other
  • Sometimes you just get a persona

Documenting the Real: The Photo Essay II

  • Margaret Bourke-White - 'Louisville Flood' 1937
  • Life Magazine front cover
  • Knowingly constructed the image
  • Dignity & Order as opposed to disorder
  • Political, Keno-eye to Keno-fist
  • The Decisive Moment - HCB
  • Knowing with intuition - HCB
  • Tyler Hicks - the decisive moment?
  • Manipulative sounds
  • Image & Sound endorse each other
  • Magnum in Motion
  • Bruce Gilden - Hybrid - Sound carries us through

Kodak D-76 Developer


Started using Kodak D-76 developer today. Negatives look good with more contrast, will makes some prints tomorrow.