3 key aspects to photography, 20th September
In this lecture we learnt 3 aspects that all photographs should contain in order to be successful. These are:
1) Juxta position - this is having several layers to the photograph, stacking one thing in front of another. This is important because it gives the photograph depth, creating a realistic look about the image.
2) Visual irony - where the image is composed in a way to make your mind concentrate and work out what is going on in the image. Often this gives the photograph a comedic element.
3) Decisive moment - clicking the shutter at the right time, if a shot was taken before and after the shot wouldn't be the same.
The artist Matt Stuart uses all 3 aspects very well in these 3 photographs.
Weekly picture project - Week Two, 27th September
Every week we will be set a photo or series of photographs to take based on a theme or topic given by Richard. We will be given ideas and suggestions for settings, but the final result is down to us.
The first WPP brief was: Take 3 photos in and around Blackburn with the theme of "The Unexpected"
From this I took 3 photos of areas of Blackburn that although when the locations were looked at from a regular eye level the location or object would be recognisable, however I took the photographs from a variety of angles for example; close up, from above and from below. This, for me made the photographs fit into "the unexpected" brief because you don't expect it to be the building/sculpture that it is.
Camera information - Week Three, 4th October
In this lecture, we covered several things including different cameras and how each cameras settings can differ so it is important to understand and be confident with your camera, however it is also important to have a knowledge of what the settings look like on other cameras, especially if you are wanting to work as a studio photographer.
Also in this session we looked at 3 of the settings individually, these were aperture (the depth of field), iSO (light level) and shutter speed (how long the shutter stays open for). I learnt several things in this lesson which really helped me to understand how the settings work and the best way to use them.
1) Shutter speed and aperture are inversely proportional; if one increases the other decreases.
2) The bigger the F number/smaller the aperture, the more of the photograph with be in focus.
3) The 3 things that affect depth of field are:
* aperture size
* lense focal length (smaller focal length results in a larger depth of field)
* image size, film or sensor
4) The Aperture priority setting is where you set your own aperture and the camera selects the shutter speeds it feels is appropriate to match your selection. This is an ideal setting for portraits when a blurred background is desired.
5) Shutter priority is where you set the shutter speed desired and the camera selects the suitable aperture. This setting is ideal for capturing movement, by selecting the shutter speed it allows you to select whether you want to be able to freeze or capture the movement.
At the end of the session we briefly discussed what makes good and bad portraits, this was in preparation for our WPP2 which was to take a black and white portrait mainly focusing on the person's eyes.
An example of a good portrait would be Jane Bown's photograph of Boy George:
Weekly Picture Project 2 - Week Four, 11th October
This weeks lecture was the presentation of our weekly picture project photographs which had been taken that week. Our brief for this weeks photograph was for us to take a black and white portrait with the lowest aperture possible on our cameras, the longest focal length and try our best to achieve the bokeh effect in the background which is where all the background is a blur or a haze so you can't distinguish with ease what is there.
I took my portrait of my boyfriend and this is my chosen photograph:
For this photograph I had a focal length of 55mm as this is the maximum on my current lense, an aperture of f3.5. By not having as lower aperture as I would like due to my lense the background for my shot hasn't quite got the bokeh effect the brief asked for which results in you being able to see the sharp edges of the window frame where I stood him. Other changes I would make if I was to take this photograph again would be to try to position my subject in a place where there isn't so much contrast so the highlight isn't edging on over exposed.
Landscape theory in preparation for WPP3 - Week Five, 18th October
In preparation for WPP3, this week's lecture was theory based around landscape photography.
The brief for this week's picture was:
*Black and white landscape
*Use hyper-focal distance
*Use a tripod to control movement and blur
*Good, creative composition
Landscape photography is split into 2 areas; Aesthetic photographs, which are those that are taken for the fact they look nice and Documentary photographs which are those taken for a 'cause' or a point.
There are 4 different types of picture format:
1) Rectangle - this is the format which is most often used for landscape photographs and ranges in size from an aspect ratio of 4:5 to 16:9.
2) Portrait - this is most often used for portraits, however can be used in landscapes too when wanted to emphasise depth and the foreground.
3) Square - this format requires careful composition as it is important the image is balanced
4) Panoramic - this is most commonly used when a whole landscape is wanting to be captured rather than just a section. Panoramics have an aspect ration of anything upwards of 16:9
We then looked at some photographers from both sections of landscape photography; aesthetic and documentary. Firstly aesthetic photographers which happened to consist of quite a few commercial photographers as it is their job to take photographs of objects and make them look as nice as possible in order to get them to sell.
*Charlie Waite
*Joe Cornish
*David Ward
*Michael Kenna
Some documentary photographers are:
*Walker Evans
*John Davies
*John Blakemore
*Fay Godwin
*Paul Hill
I found this lecture really interesting as I have only ever really seen the landscape photography divide to be urban and suburbs but to see another divide is really interesting. Although I do find the purely aesthetic photographs very appealing and easy to the eye, I think i prefer the documentary style photographs because I like the way in which they all have a meaning whether it be political, historical etc. In some of these photographs the meaning may be more obvious than in others, I like the photographs where it is less obvious as it allows you more freedom in choosing the meaning yourself and contemplating what the image represents and means to you.
WPP3; Black and white landscape - Week Six, 1st November
The tried for this week's picture project was:
*Black and white landscape
*No camera shake
*All subjects in focus
*Good composition
*Interesting location
For my photograph I went on a drive on a long country road from Lower Darwen on the way up towards Tockholes in Darwen. It has just gone dark and from where I was stood you could see over the whole of Darwen and due to it being dark you could see all the street lights and the car headlights. I wanted to try and capture this and try and get the correct shutter speed to make the car headlights appear as light trails as in college I did some light trial photography and really enjoyed doing it and the outcome.
Below is my final photograph for Weekly Picture Project Week 6:
I also took a photograph of Blackburn Cathedral, however I couldn't get the hyper focal distance in this photograph and it was heavily over exposed. Even though this was the case I still find the effects in the photograph really attractive.
Still life theory - Week Seven, 8th November
This week's lecture was a theory lecture given to prepare and inspire us for this week's picture project which is a photograph of a vase of flowers, this photograph can be in colour or black and white and we have the flexibility of doing whatever we want with this image.
First, we looked at a few photographers who we can take inspiration from for our brief:
Robert Mapplethorpe:
Mapplethorpe is a New York based artist and photographer who started his career photographing nudes and gay men. His work then progressed into 2 strands: flowers and sexuality; however it is said that a lot of his flower work is symbolic of sexuality work and links can be seen between them both.
Paul Gaugin:
Pablo Picasso:
Andre Kertesz:
We also looked at the white balance chart and the colour temperature charts as it is very important to consider both of these technicalities not only when taking this photograph but any photograph as getting it wrong can totally change your image.
Weekly Picture Project 4 - Week Eight, 15th November
Our brief for this weeks picture project was 'flowers in a vase', no specifics were given for this project it was more about using out creativity to take a photograph that stands out from the crowd. The photograph could be taken in black and white or colour and in whatever environment you wanted.
When taking my photographs I used both artificial and fresh flowers as I wanted to compare them in firstly which was easier to take photographs of and which was the most effective.
For my fresh flowers shot, I found the lighting of the flowers and composing of an interesting shot quite difficult; due to the huge variety of shapes of the flowers it created different sized shadows and the light to fall on the flowers in different ways which didn't come off well on the camera. I struggled to compose a shot that didn't look either like a cliche flowers shot or one that was boring and not appealing to the eye. This is the best shot out of my fresh flowers series as I think the light falls on each of the flowers in a way that compliments the flowers and outlines the shape of them, without them looking to over exposed and flat.
Although they don't necessarily look like it, these are the artificial flowers. I found these much easier to photograph as they were much more of an even shape so light was easier to fall on them. For this photograph I started off with just the flowers in the vase on the table with spot lighting on it; this looked too plain and flat so I decided to place them on some granite slabs in order to get the reflection then to try something more creative with the lighting I turned all the lights off and just lit 3 tea lights behind the vase itself and changed the settings on my camera to a long exposure, the lights behind the red vase gave the pink glow and the long exposure created the light effect behind the vase.
After viewing the classes photographs we covered some photographic laboratory theory, as a follow up from a lecture we had from David Farnell, a laboratory worker the previous week.
There are 2 types of film processing:
- E6 Process: this is for processing colour transparency film, also known as slide film. These are known as positive prints.
- C41 Process: this is for making colour negatives and is a print process.
There were some very interesting and important things that were said during both lectures that are important for us to know if we were wanting to send some of our work off for print in the future:
- Digital prints comes from a digital file which is then turned into a photographic print
- A Giclee print is another name for an inkjet print
- It is important that when sending files to laboratories to print they are sent in as an SRGB rather than an ADOBE; this is because ADOBE has too many colours for the printer to deal with.
- Files must be 300 DPI (dots per inch) and preferably saved as a TIFF format.
On this course it is heavily advised by the tutors that we shoot all our photographs in RAW or RAW and JPEG. Although RAW files are better due to the fact you have all the information and are better for editing, they also have their disadvantages.
- Images take much longer to open which can be a pain when trying to do a quick editing job.
- Images are much larger file types which is a hinderance to storage and opening times.
- The image is less sharp as there is no in camera software to sharpen the image when needed.
The final piece of advice we were given for preparing our files for sending to a photographic laboratory for print is:
If you want your image printing on any size up to A3 a JPEG file of about 8GB is suffice, however if you want it be printed on anything A3+ a TIFF file of 15MB is preferred.
Weekly Picture Project 5 theory - Week nine, 22nd November
This week's theory lecture was based of the brief for WPP5 which is 'Great British'.
We started off by looking at what we have to be proud of in Britain and things the Britain is known for:
Sport - football, rugby, cricket etc
Language - widespread throughout the world
Culture - film, TV, literature and pop music
Industry and invention - steam engines, jet engines, electric light bulbs, computer science
Within the television industry we can be extra proud of the BBC a national broadcasting service which cause jelousy throughout the world; whenever a major news event has happened, the BBC is the channel that the majority of countries will turn to.
We were then given several photographers names that have iconic work based on Britain and the British; by giving us photographers names it both gives us some inspiration and allows us to look at the kind of work that works for this subject.
Tony Ray Jones
Mark Power (The Shipping Forecast)
Mark used a Hasselblad camera, medium format, square and black and white.
He invented the term INTERTEXTUAL which is when a project is indexed in some way (scietific)
Martin Parr
National analyst and commentator through photography
Magnum photographer
Don McCullin
Paul Wakefield
National characters through portrait and landscape photographs:
- Scottish
- Welsh
- English
- Irish
- Full english breakfast
- A pint
- Punk rockers (icon for foreign visitors)
Creative ideas for this week's project:
- Landscape that is typical of the country
- Documentart images
- Semi-staged documentary eg cafe table
- Environmental portrait or landscape
Techiques to consider:
- Juxta-position
- Visual irony
- Depth of field
- Composition and suggestion
- Opportunity searching, going in search of images, spontaniety
Weekly Picture Project 5 Presentations - Week 10, 29th November
As soon as we were given the theme of 'The Best of British' for our fifth weekly picture project, I straight away thought of pubs; pubs are seen as a very british thing and are well known within britain for their homely feel and good british food. With me working in a pub, it was a perfect opportunity. I went into the pub when it was shut and took a selection of photographs that I thought best summed up British pubs.
My favourites out of this selection are the picture of the pumps because 3/4 of the bitters on the pumps are brewed in britain, the picture of the bar tabs because this is a very not only british but local thing in pubs.
Weekly picture project 6 theory - Week 11, 6th December
The theme for this weeks picture was to be any image but we have to have photoshopped it with a minimum of 10 of the below processes:
- Cropping - improving composition or reformatting
- Levels - adjusting image brightness, shadows and highlights
- B&W conversion
- Creative borders
- Feathering - softening the outside edge of a selected area
- Cloning tool/Healing brush - repairs/removes unwanted marks
- Curves - adjusting image contrast
- Image size - images dimensions and resolution
- Dodging and burning - for lightening and darkening areas of an image
- Sharpening - making an image appear sharper
- Layers - so actions can be separated for control
- White balance - to create or remove any bias
- Image mode/bit depth - duotones, changing the bit depth
- File types - Different file types for different functions
- Gradient tool - give a sky or similar a smooth tone
Once we had been given the brief we then moved on to being given a brief outlook and tutorial on the above tools; where to find them and how to use them.
First histograms (important when analysing whether to adjust white balance);
A histogram is effectively a bar chart which is a graphical representation of the tonal distribution in a digital image, an image can be over exposed, in which case the histogram would look something like this:
On the other end of the scale, an image could be under exposed which means it hasn't been exposed to the light for long enough which has resulted in the image containing a lot of dark colours and the histogram for the image looking something similar to this:
An ideal image which isn't over or under exposed and has just the right distribution of colour.
Levels:
image>adjustment>levels>move the white tag to the end of the curve histogram
> middle slider changed the contrast/brightness/intensity
IT IS IMPORTANT NOT TO ALTER THE CONTRAST AND BRIGHTNESS AS SEPARATE EDITS, INSTEAD USE LEVELS OR CONTRAST.
Layers:
duplicate layer - allows you to edit a duplicate of the image rather than the original but then you have the option to go back to the original image without your edits having to be removed.
Cropping:
It is best to always make a proportional crop and set restrictions for the crop at the top of the page where is says width and height. For more flexible cropping the rectangular marquee tool is best.
Feathering:
First select the lasoo tool>select>modify>feather - this graduated the selected area to another area (max. 250 pixels)
Creative borders:
Viniette
Filter>blur>gaussian blur
B&W conversion:
image>mode>grayscale
OR
image>adjustments>channel mixer
Weekly picture project 6 photoshop image presentation - Week 12, 13th December
For my photoshopped image I used one of the photographs I had taken for WPP4 (flowers in a vase) but it was one that I chose not to use as my final photograph.
As I have never really used photoshop, I wanted to use this as an opportunity to be able to learn the basics, and in order to do this I wanted to uses that processes on the list that I thought would make the most impact on my image then I would be able to look at the image, remember the stages I went through in order to get it to look like it does and have learnt from it in order for me to be able to do it again with other images.
For my image I used 10 of the stages:
- Crop
- Levels
- B&W conversion
- Creative border
- Feathering
- Clone
- Curves
- Image resize
- Burn
- Sharpen
Although the photoshopping is not subtle, and I don't necessarily think it has improved the original image in any way. I have most definitely learnt from this and feel much more confident in using photoshop.
