That’s All Folks….

Well, almost, for another year.  The moderators have been and gone, some marks got lowered, some got increased, and in some cases I don’t know.  Results out I think the 18th August. If that’s a Thursday.

Will carry on posting matters photographic on here again quite soon, but in the meantime if you want to pursue Photoshop a little more you might be interested in a course I am starting this week with the Communication Workers Union in Poole on Wednesdays for 10 weeks.  3 different class times throughout the day, and I expect a range of levels within each class.  If you’re interested (and you don’t have to be a member of CWU or work for Royal Mail), then give the organiser a ring to check out spaces – Barry Underdown on 07782367568.  This has nothing to do with Adult Ed – price is slightly dependent on numbers attending, and last year worked out at £2.50 per hour.

cheers

Richard

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Photo Competitions

Always worth a try…

This one is promising – part of a stock photo library, and you don’t seem to totally lose copyright if you enter – but do check the details?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/istock-britain-is/istock-photography-competition

And an article on Infra-red photography at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/photoblog/2010/01/on_a_different_wavelength_100_years_of_infrared_ph.html

Bob Dylan 1968 - Elliott Landy/Magnum Photos

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It’s not the kit, but…

Technology just keeps going, doesn’t it?

It really doesn’t matter what sort of camera you have to make good photography – but some subjects do need special equipment.

What does this say about photography’s role in revealing detail not just to scientists but to the rest of us?  Painters hated the specificity of detail that photography brought along – just at the point where they were starting to paint again in near perfect detail.

“These incredible images show dazzling Las Vegas from the sky at night.

For the first time, incredibly detailed pictures depicting the glitzy location – using technology that has only been developed in the past 18 months – have been brought together in a book, called Las Vegas At Night.

The stunning series was taken by renowned aerial photographer Jason Hawkes, from Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, in March.”

Etc. – Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1229539/Lighting-Las-Vegas-Stunning-night-time-pictures-Sin-City-gaudy-glory.html#ixzz0XXOG6NMn

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DIY film processing

Photography is technically very simple.

It has to be – people don’t suddenly invent complex processes – they start with simple ideas that get refined over time and use to be complex.  Fox Talbot was a country gent experimenting with very basic equipment and ideas – by our standards.

We have already looked at how simple a camera can be – the processing the film uses very basic ingredients too.  How basic? How about processing both B&W and colour film in caffeine?

I looked these site out this morning for an ex-student who is now at the AUCB – thought you might be interested.

http://www.shutterbug.com/techniques/film_processing/0903sb_coffee/

http://www.lomography.com/magazine/tipster/2009/03/21/diy-c-41-film-coffee-process

http://www.foundphotography.com/2009/05/receipe-for-processing-film-with-coffee-aka-caffenol/

Have also dug out some links for older processes – it may seem irrelevant, but some of these vintage techniques have a great sense of style, and many of them are coming back. Easy enough to recreate the feel of many of them digitally, too.  Some reference to older and experimental processes also useful in your workbooks…  If nothing else, you should be aware of Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre.

A really good site is part of the V&A website -  http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/photography/ – I often subject new classes to this, so you may well have got off lightly.   It isn’t just historical – some good contemporary work too, but it does include brief explanations of historical processes.  If you are tempted – and some, like cyanotype – are very easy and safe to do, and for which the materials can be bought in kit form – many of the processes are described at http://www.alternativephotography.com/index.html.

Kits for processes like cyanotype (seaweed, anyone?) can be found here.  Have a look for Anna Atkins in the V&A website.  (Susan Derges and Adam Fuss for more up to date work).  Photogrammes can be created with digital scanners too – just remember to clean the glass afterwards!

Anna Atkins

Next week – making your own scanning electron microscope for those really quite close up shots….

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Text Portraits

Remember that newspaper advert last week? Don’t know who created that, but Ralph Ueltzhoeffer works in this arena – mixing portraits created by other photographers with biographical data on the subject drawn from the internet. Their life is writ large not just on their face but is their face…  Their is a computer element to what he does too – a deliberate play upon the potential of the digital medium to go beyond the mere removal of the need to have a film processed.

Identity, anyone?

Ueltzhoeffer Ralph -Textportrait - Jenny Holzer

There is an English version of his website if you look hard.

Jenny Holzer, whose portrait this is, also works with text – projecting ‘truisms’ onto scenes and then photographing the result.

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Markus Amm -Photogramme meets Vortograph

I was taken by Jeff’s comments on Alvin Langdon Coburn and his later Vortograph photos – I tried to work out how these had been done last year, and failed – so well done.

Then, in one of those serendipitous moments i really enjoy, this popped up today.  Markus Amm isn’t creating anything like a Vortograph, but i think there is the sense of a parallel road being followed…  See what you think.

Marcus Amm - Untitled, 1999

Don’t forget you can create photographic images without a camera, and digital photogrammes with a scanner.

PS – I found him from a mention in this article – you might look up the Wolfgang Tillmans  ‘Mental Pictures’ too.  They are better than you might expect…

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Paris, a city of pixels

Street photography is a dying art compared with the 1940s and 50s when you couldn’t move in Paris, New York and London for snappers taking brilliantly spontaneous shots of everyday life. Michael Wolf has created what might be seen as either a joke about this, or a tombstone for the romance of city photography, or even – maybe – a new way of discovering the urban adventure….

Michael Wolf 2009

There is always another way, a new idea, a subversion of a technology…

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More Art/Science – 35 years of Microscope Photography

You might need to look up some of the techniques used to achieve these photos – more importantly, is is art as well as science?

my money is on the Doxorubin…

Pleurosigma (marine diatoms) (200x), Darkfield and Polarized Light. / Michael StringerWestcliff

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Night Photography

This is partly for Ross – a website dedicated to photographers who work in very low light levels, including painting with light…

http://www.thenocturnes.com/gallery.html

And now for something completely different…

I think old toning processes have a lot going for them – I particularly enjoy platinum or palladium toning (we looked at a Photoshop action that goes some way to replicating this).  Kerik Kouklis has a nice line in this.

http://www.kerik.com/pt_roads/index.html

This is very nice too – http://www.emilschildt.com/___Stines1/ME-in%20order.htm – Stine Krogh

This is a Bromoil print.  If you want to explore some of these older techniques, if only as research – some need an interesting collection of chemicals, have a look at http://www.alternativephotography.com/index.html.

Don’t forget to come in Thursday (and next Tuesday) with the images SELECTED you want to print for the Disintegration theme – and that means the files ready to print, not a small jpeg – just in case you have worked them up at home.  If the image is only 800px across, you won’t be getting an A3 print.

And BAL have agreed a catch up day – in theory half a day per class, but I’ll be there all day and it’s fine by me to treat it as drop in or stay the day - Saturday 23rd May from 10 – 4. We won’t be in the art room, so won’t have access to the A3 printer, but you will be able to work on your images in Photoshop, discuss ideas or problems with me, do research on line or im my small library, or just start assembling your workbook for Sanctuary.

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Charting the Canyon

I wasn’t sure about this at first, but the more I think about it, the more I enjoy it – as much for the element of discovery and the need to really get to know the landscape in question as for the finished work.

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe set iconic landscape images of the Grand Canyon national park – from William Bell to Ansel Adams – back into their wider context, often showing how images we know as individual, separate, are in fact adjacent, taken from the same spot at the same time…  I wonder to what extent that is a factor of the equipment used? I am finding that once set up, you don’t tend to travel too far from one spot with a large format camera (think bellows, etc), and do tend to look around for other shots from where you are.

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe's "Rock Formations on the Road to Lee's Ferry, Arizona, 2008" incorporated (left) "Plateau North of the Colorado River Near the Paria" and Headlands North of the Colorado River," both by William Bell, 1872.

http://www.phxart.org/exhibition/exhibitionklett.aspx

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World Pinhole Camera Day – DIY Camera

Here I go again – pushing more film based content into a digital course…

You might find this fun – and a good reminder of just how far we have come from the very hands-on nature of photography as a craft at its inception.  I also think it’s hard to develop a playful experimental approach with the sort of modern kit we all use – too many buttons, too much investment, no direct contact or intervention…  Image making is simple and direct even though it is technical – I think a lot of the learning curve is about making the equipment transparent so you reach for the image you see without having to fight the kit.  so why not build a perfectly serviceable camera from cardboard?

If you want to have a go, let me know – I can find some empty 35mm canisters in the Institute.

http://www.corbis.readymech.com/en

And if you’re not taken by that, have a quick look at the competence that produces images like these:

http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn16648-sony-world-photography-awards-2009

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Next sessions – to end of term

Hi All

could you all get into the habit of bringing what you have as portfolio/workbook/etc to next sessions please? [both groups].  It’s about time to start putting things together.  We will start after half term with a look at the marking schedule, so you have a better idea of what gets you marks and what does not,  and we will spend some time looking at colour and printing.  The rest of this is really down to you – think of it as tutorial time where you get a chance to talk to the person who’s marking your work about the work you plan to submit.  I will also organise a group crit – a chance to get support and advice on the work in progress that might further help you refine your ideas.  Expect that for the second week back after half term.

There will be more Photoshop bits, and the occasional reminder of technique as and when it seems appaproriate – which might be useful for those who started late or missed some of the early sessions, but the emphaiss now is on you refining your work so we can get the course theme signed off at the end of term.

I had intended to show you this  last month -  http://gardeyphotoart.com – i’m not enormously convinced by it, but there are plenty of examples of using Photoshop to play around with colours to enhance mood.  You could try to work out how some of them are done?

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Smoke Photography

Glad you all enjoyed the trip to the Art Institute – if you missed it, i would encourage you to go… and to any other show where you can see work first hand, rather than through a website, darkly…

I will post some material on panoramic and pinhole photography soon – in the meantime this might be worth a look for a couple of you – might be a similar technique for that bubble photo too.

Smoke Photography by Graham Jefferey.

His website is here – http://sensitivelight.com/smoke2/?image=1

and a second article about his work – both with discussion of techniques – is here – http://photocritic.org/artsmoke-photographing-smoke/

The articles explain fairly well how to both light and photograph the smoke, and how to clean up the image in Photoshop, as well as approaches such as inverting the image to give a negative effect like this one (he photographs against a black background).  The trick is really to use strong light from one side, and to shield the light source so that no light falls on the background or the camera lens.

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Drew Gardner

Oh go on then…

While we’re looking at Photoshop manipulation (some of us), take a look at Drew Gardner…

www.drewgardner.co.uk

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Archimboldo

I said i would track down this painter -”Renaissance Mannerist  — Giuseppe Arcimboldo, (also spelled Arcimboldi), royal painter and imperial party planner to sixteenth-century Italian emperors; Ferdinand I, Maximilian II, and Rudolf II” – it says on this website

And yes, of course photorgaphers have tried to do the same.

here’s one – Carl Warner – go to ‘website’ then ‘fotographics’.

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Antony Crossfield

And while we are at it, here is one of my favourites from last year – if you aspire to Photoshop mastery, this could be a test of your skills…

Foreign Body 3, 2005

Lambda print – 122cm x 127.38cm

website – www.antonycrossfield.com and of course many other places thanks to Google Images.

And before you ask -

1 – i have no idea

2 – make your own mind up.  But do look closely – the images are set in deliberately stark backgrounds, which bring to prominence the carefully placed objects – here a camera, there some shoes…

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Painting with Light

This came from a sudden thought to suggest to Jane she tries light painting with her flowers – dark room, long exposure, using a torch to paint in the shape of the subject – and i started to look through what I could find.

And i found this.  I think Adrian had something along these lines in the last week or so – the Abbey Road idea.  This does it in spades.  If you think the world is dull and dark at this time of year, go add your own light.

I think this guy may have had help…

Eric Staller

I found the images at www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/01/painting-with-light.html, a blog which often has good art stuff.  Staller’s own website is pants.

Oh go on – try this page too – www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/08/sublime-sensual-smoke-art.html

and www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/11/liquid-art-droplet-photography.html

and my favourite, from last year www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/06/vertical-grass-art.html

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Photogravure – Delicate Tones

I was pursuing a thread of research this morning – i am much taken with the quality of ’surface’ in the photograph – and cam across this site explaining and promoting the photogravure process.  I had heard of it as a printing process, but had no great understanding of the complex craft skills needed, or that some still used it.  This is is a way to print images using fine art print techniques, in a printing press – not through a photographic process.

So what is the relevance to your digital processes?  These are monochrome images, generally warm, subtle blacks, with a sensitivity at the other end of the scale from the hard black and whites of say Bill Brandt.  This rendition softens the image, making it mysterious and imprecise, making the viewer work harder to get below the surface.  Some of the photographers currently using the process do work that haunts the imagination anyway – the printing complements the content wonderfully.

Marlene MacCallum- Strange Chambers: Stairway

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison  – The Sower, 2002

Eikoh Hosoe  -  Awakenings, Barakei #29, 1961

Have a look at the website The Art of the Photogravure – perhaps just the contemporary practitioners – and think about the effect created by the process.  Do you have images that would work with this sort of treatment?  I’m sure somewhere on the internet there will be a Photoshop recipe to get this sort of effect.

(This is the closest I could find – www.alternativephotography.com/articles/art051.html – let me know if find anything, please – or post a comment here.)

Ross – can we have a proper look at your Meatyard image next week – thought it looked fabulous, would like to see how you did it….

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Jason Francisco

If you like good black and white street photography, this might be just the thing.  A range of works, if you plough through the site – the link drops you into the middle.

Think about the format – what can you deduce about his working practice?  Think about depth of field and focus.  What sorts of skills and approaches do you need to do this sort of work? What is it about black and white photography that seems to give this type of work more presence, more power?

Jason Franciso – Time in San Franciso series, untitled.

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Boyd Webb

Lung II – Boyd Webb (click for more images)

A New Zealander who trained in the UK, I’m including him just as a counterpoint to the straight photography of Yousef Khanfar that some of you seemed to enjoy.  This is modern art photography too – the construction of an imagined reality, preserved through high quality photographs.

I was quite surprised to find he photographs flowers too…

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