Assignment three : Monochrome piers

Monochrome piers...

For this assignment I decided to take seaside piers as my theme. I thought this might work well given the idea with this assignment is to bring out the monochrome image qualities of form, tonal contrast and texture. 

I always associate piers with  summer childhood trips to the sea  and even now enjoy spending the odd hour wandering around piers.The architecture and presentation of funfair rides and stalls always seem to vie with each other for attention and offer glimpses of a history stretching back to early Victorian times.

I wanted to capture a sense of place straddling the past and the here and now, using images of people using and enjoying the pier and then pier itself. And I always associate piers with  summer childhood trips to the sea  and so wanted to give a sense of the weather and season ..in this case, late summer.

I carried out a few test shots on Worthing pier to check out whether the theme would work
and what areas might be interesting to experiment with. Interestingly, my memories of Worthing pier like many childhood memories fell a little short. It did provide some very useful material ,for example, art deco architecture but lacked the 'old-fashioned ' fairground feel that I also wanted to include. For this I went off to Brighton which has a more traditional pier; one less sedate than its cousin in Worthing.

 
So the final selection of images are drawn from time spent on both Brighton and Worthing piers, taken on  a number of days in varying weather.

Pier people



P589: f2.8 @ 1/1250  ISO 80  4mm  AWB Cropped

Unlike these people, I didn't get a chance that day to enjoy the view and lovely sunshine from a deckchair perspective. I chose this composition to convey the timelessness of seaside piers. The horizon might have changed over the decades but the sight of people comfortable in deckchairs could come form any time over the last century. Shooting in monochrome enhances this timelessness. I adjusted the black and white mix to achieve a slight darkening of the sky to lend more interest in what was very much a uniform blue. I also adjusted the tone curve to bring out the pattern on the decking through increased contrast. 



P590: f10 @ 1/320  ISO 100  18mm  WB Cloudy

While I have never seen anyone catch a fish from Worthing Pier, it does not seem to deter fishermen. I like this image for a number of reasons; the puzzle as to what the fisherman is looking at; the weather coming towards us with the clouds lowering over the distant shoreline .. Here I increased the exposure to lighten the image slightly and then applied the tone curve to darken parts of the sky to bring out more the drama of the sky set against the calmness and flatness of the sea and decking.



P591: f2.8 @ 1/160  ISO 80  4mm  AWB Cropped

The intention here is to present the 'contrast' between the business man talking on his mobile phone and the 'timelessness' of the funfair decorations around him. The scene has a certain geometric feel coming from the angled roof lines and the patterned floor which I felt would come over well in monochrome. The challenge was achieving the right level of contrast. The image benefited from cropping and I decreased the exposure, decreased the shadows and highlights before adjusting the tone curve to achieve the final image above. I think it works well and delivers what I intended.




P592: f8 @ 1/400  ISO 100  55mm  -0.7exp.  WB Daylight. Cropped

I always find it difficult to take photographs of people going about their business ever since I was fiercely challenged in Portsmouth city centre when taking shots of a building (ironically) just as a man walk passed. So, given the number of folk out and about on the pier, I was perhaps rather wary of capturing people in any image, particularly children. OK, yet another 'back view' but following this elderly man down the pier gave me this  lucky shot of Frankenstein lurching towards an unwary passer-by. A contrast of the everyday image of the old man and his shopping basket and the fantasy creature. To improve the detail, I increased the blue and decreased the yellow in the black and white mix as well as adjusting the tone curve and cropped the resulting image. 

Around the funfair ...

I am always attracted by shape, pattern, architectural detail and abstract form. Brighton Pier had much to offer and what I found fascinating was the range of period style and fashion that could be found amongst the various funfair rides and sideshows.



P593: f5.6 @ 1/800  ISO 100  18mm  WB Daylight Cropped

This leaping figure in P593 reminded me of a Disney fairy tale character and was painted accordingly. What attracted me was not the colour of the figure and horse but the volume and line and how this might be enhanced in monochrome.

The figure stood guard at the entrance of a slot machine gallery; a strange juxtaposition of fantasy and fairy tale and gambling machines  - or maybe not, given gambling is often seen as a way of fulfilling dreams.

I took shots from different angles around the figure to see what might work best in bright sunlight and how I might use the shadows to best effect. Try as I might it was not possible to get a shot that conveyed this fairy tale /gambling juxtaposition. That said, I like the angle I eventually chose for P593.
Increasing the exposure, contrast and clarity helped to crisp up the detail to the level that I wanted. I darkened the sky slightly using the tone curve.




P594: f8 @ 1/250  ISO 100  33 mm -0.7exp.  WB Daylight  Cropped

I know from previous experience of photographing  carousel horses in colour how hard  it is to capture the traditional, excessive but attractive fairground decoration they carry. I thought it worth a second try in black and white though since I had good examples of volume, texture and geometry in front of me.
 It does work better in monochrome - helped by increasing the contrast significantly.




P595: f5 @ 1/160  ISO 100  38mm WB Daylight

One of the fairground stalls closed and part shuttered gave me a great abstract image with a real retro feel ( P595). I did wonder how the bright red seats would translate into black and white and decided to increase the red within the black and white mix and decrease the yellow to make the yellow stripe on the floor stand out more. I am pleased with the final image.



P596: f8 @ 1/250  ISO 100   21mm  WB Daylight 

  

I like the dramatic impact of this picture. The dramatic feel of the blue and yellow  'Turbo Ride' was heightened by darkening the sky and lightening the cloud within the circle of the ride.



Robert Capa's voice...

Amazing to hear Robert Capa this morning on Radio 4 today programme describing how he shot the
famous picture below in 1936. Seems that the International Center of Photography managed to get hold of a copy of this rare interview broadcast back in October 1947. Fascinating to hear his description today of how he held his camera above the trench where he was located as another wave of fighters went over the top into machine gun fire and just took the shot not knowing at the time what he had actually captured on film. I hadn't realised that many thought the shot was stage managed but from what he said on the recording it was in a sense just a lucky shot - a lucky shot, an iconic image 'Death of a Spanish Loyalist' that made him famous. Staged or not, could it be argued this didn't matter if the image worked in representing the 'anonymity and impersonality of war' 
(Reuel Golden : Masters of Photography ,Carlton )?

The comment of the interviewee from the Photographer's Gallery,whose name escapes me, about photographers back then going out to capture reality leapt out at me - this remark set against the view many held at the time that the image was staged felt like something of an  'appetiser' for the next part of this course - real of fake?

Tutor report : Assignment 1

Tutor feedback on assignment one

It seems to me that you are following a very reasonable workflow for the shooting part of the work but that you might find better ways to organise your post-shoot workflow as time goes on.  The ideal is to settle on one that works equally well for all the different work that you might do.  So think about what are the common tasks; importing from the camera, saving the digital files so they are easily retrievable later, backing up, selection/editing (key words, metadata, tags etc) image adjustment, printing/publishing etc. And what are the tasks only applicable to the job in hand.

I have found that using Adobe Lightroom has made my life very much easier in these respects and in its latest incarnation it is capable of doing a lot of the things that I would have done in Photoshop in the past but in a non destructive and rather more controllable way, not to mention that corrections that need to be made to a selection of images, a white balance adjustment, input sharpening, exposure correction etc can easily be applied to multiple files and even saved as presets.  Additionally the ways that Lightroom allows for adding keywords, metadata, tags etc and searching by these helps enormously in organising my digital files. 

You might like to look at the current offer to students here (I get no commission!)

I note that you sent me jpegs.  Are you shooting jpegs or raw?  The usual advice is that raw is preferable as a shooting format and tiff for the format to which you convert for editing, only using jpeg for final export when no further changes are to be made.  You may well be following this procedure already but if not you should think about it.

If you haven’t sorted out your problems with PS Elements and your hard drive, e-mail me about it, I can’t promise to be of any help but I will try!

You say that your prints weren’t as good a match to your screen image as you would have liked...they seem a bit lighter and slightly more orange/red than my screen displays them...and this is not unusual!.  Monitor calibration (what do you use?) is the first and essential stage but printer calibration is the next step, at least you need to be using the proper profile for your printer/paper/ink combination...and that is where the trouble starts. You haven’t said what printer you are using but the print you have sent suggest that it is a capable one so I will assume that it has at least six colours (if not I am surprised at the quality) which is a good start!  Printers do not print as accurately as might be expected at least in part because different papers will react differently to the inks and so produce different results from the same information.  So one needs a small file (ICC profile)  to tell the printer driver what corrections to make.  For consumer printers that are manufactured to no better than adequate tolerances the generic profiles that some manufacturers supply are not entirely satisfactory, but probably better than nothing and only available for a restricted paper/printer combination.  To achieve the best results one needs a custom profile made with your printer for a particular paper and with the inks you will use (particularly necessary of using third party inks).  Some paper manufacturer/retailers offer this service free for their own papers but otherwise they can be quite expensive.  Do they work?  Well, up to a point, Lord Copper!  If you are using a paper from a manufacturer/retailer who offers a free service you might as well go for it, if not I doubt it unless you are using a high end printer and selling work.  If you are using a profile then the colour management on the printer should be turned off and the option to ‘Let Photoshop manage colour’ selected in the printing dialogue.  To fine tune the prints, or instead of a profile (but more of that in a moment) there are a number of possibilities; one is to adjust the monitor settings so that the image on screen (a test card type image is much the best for this) matches a print made using the profile as closely as possible, another is to adjust the colour in Elements to get a test print as close to the screen image as possible, note the adjustments and then apply these to all images just before printing.  The alternative is to get closer to the film/wet printing paradigm and make test prints, these need to be the same dimensions as the final print but don’t need to be of the whole image (a test strip in the old way) or to make a print and adjust the monitor as close as possible to the print then you when you adjust the digital file to look righ on the monitor it should print correctly...this does away with monitor calibration of course but as the point of calibration is to get good prints, you are in effect calibrating your monitor just to the printer not to some other standard.  Your prints are pretty close and as it is almost impossible, even on professional printers, to get an exact match I would do some playing around with the colour settings in Elements to get the print the way you want (test prints/strips) and not the difference from the setting when it looks right on the monitor and add/subtract this just before printing all images.

Choice of paper is an important issue and a matter of personal taste.  However, cheap papers are a snare and delusion.  They are not usually consistent and can be almost impossible to colour match.  High gloss papers don’t work terribly well with pigment inks (problems with the blacks in particular) and if using pigment inks you really need a different one for gloss (this includes semi-gloss and lustre) as opposed to matt (including semi matt) papers, often referred to as photo black and matt black.  Dye inks don’t have these problems but their prints are not guaranteed to last as long as pigment ones. 

I have given up using high gloss papers as the inks seem to change the glossiness of the paper depending on the colour.  On the other hand some papers show a difference in sheen where there is no ink on the paper (extreme highlights) and some people make sure that there is some density even in the highest of highlights.

Ok, enough about the technicalities.

There are so many ways that you could organise the order that this set is looked at.  What you decide on will depend on what you are trying to say with the images as a whole and you should think about the images submitted for each assignment as a coherent set. 

If we take the order that they appear in the document there are a number of issues raised. 

 

 

P488 :f3.5 @ 1/400  ISO 200 +0.3exp.  18mm  Cloudy WB






P489: f5.6 @ 1/50  ISO 100 55mm Cloudy WB cropped

 

 

 It is possible to see the first two (P488, 489) as being odd ones out in that they have little relationship to the idea of fishing that is apparent in all the rest, if you are trying to show a variety of uses perhaps you need more such images.  However, there is a strong, changing, colour link running through the set and this first image sets blue as the initial colour, picked up in the cable and the red/orange as the second colour is established

 

 

P490: f4.5 @ 1/320  ISO 100  148mm cropped Cloudy WB



P491: f4.5 @ 1/80  ISO 100  18mm Cloudy WB

 

 

 

 




This continues to P490 with the red/orange giving way to yellow and the swan tying the second and third image together.  Yellow becomes the dominant colour in P491and P492 then red with increasing amounts of blue in the next three. 




P492: f4 @ 1/125 @ 1/125  ISO 100  28mm Cloudy WB cropped





P495: f5.6 @ 1/50  ISO 800  27mm Cloudy WB  cropped



P494: f13 @ 1/25  ISO 400 -0.7exp. 24mm  AWB cropped



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P495,6 and 7 establish fish as the dominating image and ‘fishy’ colours in P496 and 7.  Circles dominate the last two P498 and 9 and bring us back to blue.  Alternatively you can think of a narrative starting with P490 through to P497, the boat coming in to the fish on the slab.  


P499: F4 @ 1/160 ISO 100 114mm Cloudy WB
 

So you see that there are numerous ways of ordering and selecting the images.




P497: f8 @ 1/30  ISO 100  37mm  AWB

The visual quality of the images is good, you have a compositional sense, the low viewpoint and diagonal composition of the pleasure boats conveys the potential for speed or at least movement and excitement; the judicial use of close up on the fish works well and in general I agree with your conclusions about the virtues of your compositional decisions etc in your notes.

All in all I think that you have learned a lot from this section even when it is things that need addressing in your workflow.  The images show promise as a set and are all good images in their own right.  A good start.

As you are aware, this assignment does not count in the assessment but you should send it along with the rest to help the assessors see where you start from and give them the whole, err, picture.  I know that they like to see all the work.

 

Learning Logs/Critical essays

Your log is doing the job(s) that it should and I think that your self assessment is very honest.  Make sure that you include comments on all the books exhibitions etc that you explore and try to talk about how and if they affect your own work and/or attitudes to images.  Try to get to shows of all sorts not just photography and don’t miss out on the shows at colleges in your area (Bournemouth has a high reputation and shouldn’t be missed)

 Suggested reading/viewing

  Short, M., 2011. Basics Creative Photography 02: Context and Narrative. AVA Publishing.

If you haven’t already got them the two Liz Wells books are worth having and dipping into:

Wells, L., ed., 2002. The Photography Reader. London: Routledge.

Wells, L., ed., 2004. Photography: a Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.

 

Pointers for the next assignment

This assignment brief is quite detailed and complex.  Make sure you read it through carefully and plan out what you are going to do and how.  Make sure that you keep notes on all your thoughts and changes of mind, changes to planning and any problems that arise and how you solved them.

 

Post assessment reflection :

 

'I understand the comments about post -shoot work flow and do need to focus more on this ..I've decided to give  Lightroom a go so watch this space!
 

Re Raw ,I haven't used raw as yet but know that I need to move to this approach ..friends keep telling me too so again will take that on board.  As far as calibration of monitor and printer go I've been using Colormunki ...is there anything out there that is better and not too expensive? Interestingly, my printer is a very cheap HP Deskjet bought in Tesco so maybe I got lucky there ! '

 

 

 

 

 

 

Assignment three Monochrome - preparation

For this assignment I had to choose a theme or subject that I thought would be good for black and white images and able to enable me to bring out the monochrome image qualities of form, tonal contrast and texture.

As I worked through the preceding exercises, I spent some time thinking about what might work as a subject for the assignment and planned a few trial runs to different locations. I also looked at various sources of black and white photography to try to develop a sense of what compositions and treatments worked particularly well for black and white images. I came across the magazine 'Black+White Photography published by GMC Publications in the Photographers Gallery a while back and have since found the various monthy editions very interesting,stimulating and helpful here. Early on remembering and being, if I am honest, influenced by Chris Killip's submission for the  Deutsche Borse Photography Prize 2013., wondered whether the Hollycombe Steam Museum would present  a number of good opportunities. It has a wide range of steam engines ranging from farm and railway to fairground rides all driven by steam.I was thinking along the lines of texture and form. Interestingly however, a photo visit did not produce exactly what I was looking for and it was then back to the drawing board.

Eventually I decided to base my assignment on seaside piers. Part of the reasoning here was to see if I could capture the beauty of local piers and engender both a nostalgic and current look at how they are used and enjoyed by people. Secondly, I knew two local piers well from childhood and adult visits. Both had interesting architecture and traditional pier entertainment and were still well used by people. There was also the attraction and advantage of open skies and water to build into the equation.