PEOPLE AND THE ENVIRONMENT

I have really enjoyed this term learning about lens-based image making.  I believe my practise and research has helped me to develop ideas and my project on People And The Environment was based on the River Thames.

This stretch of the Thames is an area I have known for many years and have photographed but this term I have begun to look at it in an different light and wanted to create a project with a new view of the river.  Having visited photographic exhibitions I realise that photographers and painters view the ‘normal’ in a different aspect and I have begun to do this as well, trying to find a different aspect to what I normally see.

Experimenting with different lenses this term has also bought a new aspect to my photography.  Using a macro lens not only for macro photography but also portraits has shown some very pleasing photographs.  My use of prime lenses means that my new 50mm prime is now my lense of choice.  My 300mm lense has brought a new aspect to my sports and wildlife photography.

The wonders of photoshop are still a learning area for me.  I try to only make minor adjustments to my photos (sharpness, hue, saturation, black and white etc) but would like to progress to more abstract adjustments with clone tool etc.

My photographic journey continues, I am learning more and more through the course and my photos are improving and maturing as a result.  I am looking forward to the studio modules next term to add a new dimension to my photography.

 

 

 

M3, M4, D1, D3

Last week I visited Kingston Museum (whose building was funded by the Scottish American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1904) and among the Roman artefacts and Anglo Saxon relics was the an amazing exhibition of the work of Muybridge.

Edward Muybridge, was born in Kingston Upon Thames in 1830, moving away to make a fortune in America in 1852, before returning in his retirement in the late 1880s. When he died in 1904 he bequeathed a significant part of his photographic equipment and work to  Kingston Museum.

In San Francisco he begun to take photos of Yosemite and San Francisco Bay and sold them to the middle classes of the town. His collection of over 200 photos took several months to achieve and he travelled with all his equipment waiting for just the right lighting and conditions. His fame and fortune as a landscape photographer grew.

His fame brought him to the attention of a former governor Leland Stanford (and later founder of Stamford University) and he was commissioned to solve an old argument through photography – does a galloping horse have all four feet off the ground at any one stage in its stride?

At Stanford’s stud farm at Palo Alto between 1877 ad 1879 a camera shed was set up with 12 and later 24 camera each with shutters attached to threads. When the horse broke a thread as it passed in front of the camera, the shutter dropped and and instant exposure was taken.

 

Between 1884 and 1887 he worked at the University of Pennsylvania and created a huge series of photographs called Animal Locomotion.  This included running men, horses, animals and birds.

Zoopraxiscope

He created the Zoopraxiscope which was essentially al projector or ‘spinning picture disk.

He would take photographs in sequence – for example the horses breaking the threads as they galloped past the shed.

The prints were then slightly curved/folded over and rephotographed to gain the curvature required.

They were then put under the clear glass disc and an artistic would effectively trace the photo onto the glass disc so there were a series of images shown and the same intervals around the disc.

The disc was then turned on the zoopraxiscope and the movement projected through the lantern.

67 of the 71 known surviving discs are in Kingston Museum with early examples in the Smithsonian collection.

His innovation was only surpassed by the advent of the moving image.

 

 

 

The Atlas Gallery in Baker Street has a display of original photographs and prints by Ansel Adams.  He is well known for his iconic photos of the American Wilderness in black and white, graduating light and exposure. Exposing the nature patterns in the rocks and mountains.

The photos were beautiful but not printed on a large scale – probably A3 was the largest.  Some were limited edition prints – clearly printed recently but others were older and had  a sepia tone.  Prices for the prints were up to $90,000.

The 20 or so prints were framed with white mounts and with black frames.

I had gone to the gallery with great anticipation of seeing Ansel’s iconic photos but was hugely disappointed.  I believe the prints were not displayed in their glory and seemed insignificant.  I had seen a better display of his work from prints in a Forestry Commission Museum near Loch Ard in Scotland.

The landscape patterns in his prints are also a favourite topic for my photos.  These were taken on rocks in Devon last summer:

 

In black and white –

Ansel Adams inspired photos from Iceland:

But some photos are better in colour as they show the landscape in greater detail:

Steve Mccurry

Afterwards I went to Selfridges Department Store on Oxford Street and found an amazing Photographic Section in their Book Department on the Lower Ground Floor, including  anthology’s of Ansel Adams’ photos.  They have the most amazing collection of large scale photographic books on a huge number of subjects.  It you have an hour to spare their photographic book department is well worth a visit.

I bought a copy of Steve Mccurry’s book ‘Untold – the story behind the photos’ which is the story of his main photographic journeys and how he captured the photos.  He started in 1979 having left his job working for an american newspaper and travelled to India with rolls of black and white film and two cameras (as developing black and white photos were cheaper than colour).  During his time in India he met refugees from the Afghan war and was asked by them to travel to their villages to document the destruction of by Government forces.  This was the start of his ‘war’ documentation and over the years he has travelled to many such conflicts.

https://stevemccurry.com

Perhaps his most famous photo is “the Afghan Girl’ which was published on the cover of National Geographic Magazine and whom he traced again 17 years later.

 

He has a portrait style where the subject fills the frame.  The eyes of the subjects are the most important part of the photo and are always looking at the photographer.  Mccurry says that while lighting and composition count, the best photographs are those that create a connection. ‘McCurry, known for his heartfelt photographs of citizens around the globe, knows that in capturing universal human elements, his work remains timeless’ – National Geographic.  His photos have a real vibrancy, they feel alive even when shot in black and white.

 

 

 

 

 

Trying to capture the red moon I had seen the reality of the moon was rather different –

 

Used 300mm lens with a cropped sensor giving a 1.5x higher focal length.  I tried the recommended 100 iso, 1/250sec at f/8 but thought the higher iso of 250 gives a better result. I shot in full darkness but will try again in twilight when the moon is lower in the sky and I need to frame the composition but I have to may trees in my neighbourhood! I will work it as a project to photograph over different locations.

 

 

The Thames River at Eel Pie Island in Twickenham is tidal but its water level is also controlled by locks and sluice gates at Teddington and Richmond.  Each year these locks and sluice gates are left open as part of a maintenance programme and the river can fall to its ‘natural’ tidal levels.

This means that on the lee side of Eel Pie Island the water falls so low that the river bed can be walked across to the Island. It also reveals all sorts of items hidden in the mud of the river bed that are usually hidden from view and shows the debris of mankind and what we are prepared to throw into the river.

Philip Lorca de Corcia’s photos straddle truth and fiction by combining real people and places but not necessarily people and places that go well together. His images are carefully constructed – he arranges the objects of each scene and devised precise lighting and framing – his work is often described as cinematic. His photos suggest rather than elucidate a full narrative.

Trying to recreate the photo, MARIO 1978, I took photos in the evening when it was dark outside but all the lights in the kitchen were on.  The flash lite was placed on a shelf in the fridge and the fridge door light was on. The light on the worktop at the back right of the photo was meant to come from the bright fish tank light but in the event the only light that was captured was from the flash lite.  I tried different strength of the flash.  Decided I needed studio lights at the back to creat the same effect.  Maybe reposition the flashlite down slightly to illuminate more.

HIGHLIGHT ALERT can be used in camera and also in photoshop, lightroom and camera raw to show the overexposed areas in a photo.  If shooting in Raw you can then improve these overexposed areas.

The Highlight alert is a very visual representation of any over exposure in a photo.

Photoshop has two triangles in the top of the histogram which are the shadow alert, on the left hand side and the highlight alert on the right hand side.

Photoshop Tutorial – When you’re making changes to your images in Camera Raw, it’s important that you keep your eye both on the image as well as the histogram, because if you’re making changes, you don’t want to be pushing any of the values in your shadow and your highlights to pure black or pure white.  Or if you do do that, you want to make sure that you know that you’re doing it. But because it’s hard to look in both places, there are two icons that will allow you to see your clipping. So if you toggle on the one on the left, that’s going to show our clipping warning in the dark shadow areas, and the one on the right is going to show the clipping of the highlights, or the light areas of the image.  The keyboard shortcuts for this are the U key toggles on and off the one for the darks, which is the underexposure and the O key toggles the highlight warning for the light areas, which would be the overexposure. You can then adjust using the black and white sliders.

HISTOGRAM is a statistical representation of the greyscale.  It shows how the pixels are distributed by graphing the number of pixels at each of the 256 brightness levels in an image. These brightness levels include black and white.

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Black                                Shadows                                 Exposure                                   Highlights

The photo is underexposed if the histogram touches the Black end of the line, and overexposed if it touches the highlights end of the line.

Some photographers view the histogram on the back of their camera LCD screen after each shot – mostly to check whether there are any tones at the extreme edges (black/underexposed or white/overexposed) as this will indicate a loss of detail in dark or light areas.

There is no right or wrong histogram – it is quick reference to tonal references.

Definition – An image histogram acts as a graphical representation of the tonal distribution in a digital image. It plots the number of pixels for each tonal value. By looking at the histogram for a specific image a viewer will be able to judge the entire tonal distribution at a glance

LIGHT METERING measures the middle grey of an image and uses this measurement as the mid point for the exposure. Very important to ensure that the image is correctly exposed.  Use a grey to se the light meter.

COLOUR CHANNELS RGB can be switched off in photoshop to get different hues.  In same way that Sergie Gorsky developed his three lens camera and James Clark Maxwell 1855 discovered the three light spectrums to create the first colour photos and his cameras effectively do the same as DSLRs today.

In the photos below you can see how the three images are overlaid and produce the colour image.

 

RAW vs JPEG – in nearly all circumstances (apart from high speed shooting) all photos should be taken in RAW.

Raw will capture the greyscale  – white and black

1 Bit colour =2(1)  = 2 Black and White

2 Bit colour = 2(2)  = 4 black and white and 2 greys

3 Bit colour = 2(3)  = 8 black and white and 6 greys

8 Bit colour = 2(8)   = 256 black and white and 254 greys.

etc

higher numbers = more greyscale = richer photos.  Use 8 bit colour for black and white photography to ensure richer greys and better black and white printing.

RGB channels = each channel has 256 scales so when you add them all together

Red 256 x Green 256 x Blue 256 = 2  = 16384 greyscales so much greater detail in RAW.  JPEG only 256.

When working in photoshop choose higher BIT channel as more details are recorded in the the image.

open – image – mode – channel

Can only adjust colour and tonal range

Cannot print in 16 bit – have to save as 8 bit

To print big size prints save RAW to TIFF – as TIFF will print better tonal values and keep the quality.  TIFF files are very large in size compared to JPEGs because no compression is used.

Lossy Compression: Lossy means with data loss. JPEG compression does discard some image data based on the amount of compression used.

 

 

Don McCullin’s career as a photographer of conflict has covered much of the latter part of the 20th Century. He photographed his life in Finsbury Park in 1950s, construction of the Berlin Wall, wars in Cyprus, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, Beirut, London Derry, and famine in Bangladesh.

All this photos, despite the desperate circumstances, are photographed with compassion, allowing us to glimpse the unbearable, documenting human conflict and its attendance grief.

Undeniably a brave man, wounded several times whilst photographing conflict,

McCullin, an artist at school, combines the elements in his photography with the eye of a painter. He has a trademark of darkness of printing and of black and white but he creates a mood,

Harold Evans describes ‘decisive moments’ which should be reserved for those few photographs that offer both a story and a picture, that provide a dramatic and a visual climax in the natural co-ordination of shapes, lines and values. McCullins’ photos have these desivive moments – a US army medic comforting a wounded two year old, the line of a Turkish boy’s arm and hand reaching up to his mother on news of his father’s death.

Luck may come into decisive moments. Coming on a father and two sons lying in their blood in a house in Cyprus, he writes, ‘I felt as if I had a canvas in front of me and I was, stroke by stroke, applying the composition to a story that was telling itself.  I was, I realised later, trying to photography in a way that Goya painted or did his war sketches’

The shot of solders running along the Derry Road would have been dramatic on their own but with the woman at the doorway the shot is shocking.

McCullin’s photo of a shot Marine helped onto his feed by two friends, was McCullin said, resembled a painting of Christ being taken down from the cross.

From his early photos of photographing people in Finsbury Park against their wallpaper – he does not invade privacy, they are not preyed upon, he involves them in his photos..  His subjects look into the lens – the man working in the iron foundry far from his native Bangladesh, the African father holding his starving child.

McCullins portraits have a deceptive simplicity. They are sympathetic but not sentimental.  They do not make political points. They feel the subjects price, their sorrow and their terror.

Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures

— Don McCullin

 

 

In modern society, photographic images are the principal access to realities of which we have no direct experience.

For a war, an atrocity, a pandemic, a natural disaster to become a subject of concern, it has to reach people through the internet, television, magazines, newspapers.

The upsetting photography have the quality of being memorable – that is, unforgettable.

The photo is like a quotation or proverb – easy to retain.  All of us mentally stock hundred s of photographic images, subject to instant recall. Don McCullin’s image of the shock shocked marine from the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.

Photographs identify events.  Photographs make events important and memorable.  Narrative makes us understand but photographs make us remember.

In photojournalism, sometimes labelled ‘concerned photography’ or ‘the photography of conscience’  no-one has surpassed in breadth, directness, in intimacy and unforgettability the work of Don McCullin. He brings back news from Hell, he wants to sadden, he was to arouse.

There is thought that images no longer have the impact that they once had.  Michael Ignatieff has written that ‘war photography, thanks to TV, has become banal.  We are flooded with images of atrocity on a daily basis and they become transmute.   But it is also essential to enlighten the world, to make people aware of what humans are capable of .  The atrocious images should haunt us. They may only be snap shots of the full reality but they perform an immensely positive function.  The images says ‘keep these events in your mind.’  the image is an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn.

They provoke questions – Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is it an event we should be challenging?  Photographs can start us on our way to asking these questions.

Camera Basis Equipment

Camera body, case, choice of lens, shoot in RAW and jpeg (as a backup), always carry spare batteries, and extra SD cards.

SD Cards

Use cards with a smaller capacity or don’t completely fill a large capacity card.  Choose a card with a high ‘C’ rating (processing speed – essential for shooting bursts or sport) and the highest ‘U’ numbering (most recent models).  The transfer rate MB/S it the image transfer rate – again choose the highest available.

Recommend: smaller memory cards, simply use more and catalogue their storage.

Lens Choice

Ideally shoot with a prime lens.  You will then really learn how to use your camera and

‘learn what the camera sees’

Perfecting shooting with a prime lens will create sharper, clearer pictures.  Zoom lenses have sweet spots and therefore work better at certain distances.  You have to learn where these are for your lenses.

Mimium focal length of 14-24 otherwise the lenses can create too much distortion of the image.

Filters are essential for landscape photography. MD filters for digital and polarising filters for shooting water, mirror, metallic surfaces as they reduce reflection.  Use an ND variable filter to allow for changes in the intensity.  Colour filters are not important as shooting in RAW colour is added in post production.  Filters will slow down the exposure eg when using flash outside on a sunny day, and help the clarity of water.

Camera Settings

Manual or Aperture settings should be used.  Choose the lowest aperture and the fastest shutter speed combination.

White balance: set to auto.  Can change in post production

RAW files – only records ISO.  JPEG embeds all information immediately into the file so the options for post production are limited.

Bracketing: use for under exposure/normal/over exposure.

Light metering: there are 3 types 1) environment – tests all areas. 2) central – central 25% of the image 3) spotlight – pinhole metering. To set the light meter – focus on a neutral grey using the central light metering, exclude any highlights, keep the settings and take the picture. Can use a light metering app.

Under exposure use for photographic silhouette

Histogram: should how much is over/under exposed.

Histogram Alert: blinking shows the over exposed area.

Focus: autofocus (Nikon AF-S), Lock (Nikon AF-L), Continous Focus (Nikon AF-C), single focusing.

Drive set up: single shots, bursts, continous

Vibration Reductions: VR stabilisation. With off if you are using a tripod as the camera may compensation for a shake that is not there.

Depth of field preview button: product, close up.  Can use a depth of field calcuator app.