On the Selfie..

Thought Russell Squires blog on the OCA site re 'The Selfie' fascinating ( http://goo.gl/IUSMFb  ).. I hadn't picked up on the term until I came across the recent media interest following Oxford Dictionaries inclusion of the word in their recent quarterly update. Mind you I have seen more selfies appearing in my Facebook news feed this year..many looking your typical friend/ family effort, some better than others depending on where and when sometimes.

The follow up comments from fellow students was very interesting and gave me food for thought.

What I hadn't thought about was whether selfies are, as some would say, a 'snapshot' rather than 'true photography'. Does this depend on why they were taken, what was photographed or the skill of the person taking the image? Is it more of more concern how we / people / society are seeking more and more to capture everything we do for public consumption? Narcissism or a real desire or need to show that 'we' are not alone or sad folk and have a 'real' life?

Followed up on the arty website which has some interesting articles mentioned by Pam Wright,  http://hyperallergic.com/93229/peace-to-the-selfies  and http://hyperallergic.com/94461/theory-of-the-selfie which I hadn't come across and which added another dimension for me.

On the whole my own view is to not dismiss the 'selfie' as just the new  'snapshot' courtesy of social media ..I think there is scope for photographic interpretation in its use ..Think I'll add it to my increasingly long list of photographic experiments as I'll be upgrading my mobile shortly.

Personal project ( Assignment 5 ) workplan

 

Personal project : work plan

This is my preliminary workplan for Assignment 5:

1) Research

·         Reading re concept of memory / trace / photographs

·         Site visits

·         Family image research

2) Test images

·        Challenge possibility re having central theme/focus running through each image e.g. image of Dad (maybe different ages) occurring within each or some images...

·        Explore whether reproducing past memory as a past image or reworked in today’s world and lifestyle would work best for which image …

3) Review

·         Decide concepts  to be portrayed

·         Decide exact approach for each concept

·         Revisit timescale

   

4) Shooting and follow-up workflow actions

5) Final collection

6) Reflective account

7) Assignment despatched to Tutor

 

 

Tutor's report : Feedback on Assignment 2

Overall Comments

Things are moving in the right direction.  I note that you are trying to find themes to link your image making for the assignments and I whole heartedly approve of this approach.  I would suggest that you think about the different ways you can do this, the possibilities of more conceptual themes some of which I indicate in the annotations but to reiterate, colour, mood, emotion, can be as much and sometimes more of a theme than location or absolute content.

A creative interpretation of the briefs, so long as the main aims are covered, is very much favoured by all us tutors and the assessors where possible and can sometimes help you to develop you own vision much more than taking a more literal approach to the briefs.

 

Feedback on assignment

In very many ways this has been a successful assignment.  The images you have come up with, particularly in part one, are all of a good standard in just about every way and although you have not produced a set of images on a single theme, as you intended at first, there are some themes emerging here and you might like to sort them in different ways to see what themes you can find.

I think that you have covered much of the intentions of the brief and the following remarks are intended to help you in the future rather than suggesting ways in which you might re-work the current set...though if you feel it useful to re-work any of them in light of these comments, re-shooting or whatever, do so and include the results and your thoughts on them with the assignment when going for assessment.  Re visiting and re-working assignments in light of tutorial input and future knowledge is always credited by the assessors and, rather more importantly, a valuable learning technique.  Of course you should always indicate what is re-worked and reflect on the results.

 

 







P540 amended 

P540 







 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P540 – you comment that you are not really satisfied with the way your image captures the intrigue of the Lanes.  I thought about the idea of a narrow and tall lane and cropped accordingly...what do you think?  Actually your image doesn’t miss by much if at all.

Like the amended version....the narrower  version does capture the feel of the Lanes  better.

I see a post on your blog concerned with shooting RAW vs jpeg.  I am not sure what conclusions you came to but equally I am not sure that you understand the difference so I hope this is not simply telling you things that you already know!

Raw images are simply the unprocessed information captured by the sensor, some information such as selected white balance is passed on but the image is ‘as is’.  All cameras, whatever the output, in fact capture a raw image but if jpeg of tiff or whatever (not the proprietary raw output though) output is chosen the camera applies post processing of a variety of sorts depending on the settings chosen by the photographer before compressing the image.  The original, unprocessed image cannot be obtained from the jpeg as the information and pixels are deleted.  Therefore it is generally considered more sensible for the photographer to shoot and output raw images and apply their own post processing rather than rely on some generic answers dreamed up by the camera designers.  This allows for a variety of different post processing solutions to be tried and at different times, leaving the options open.  Obviously this assumes that the photographer downloads and stores the raw images for posterity rather than deleting them after initial post processing, rather in the same way that film photographers will store the negatives for future reconsideration.  It is inevitable that the raw image looks different from and often much worse than, a jpeg of the exact same subject if looked at before processing in a program like Lightroom, Camera Raw or the raw conversion software that the camera manufacturer issues with the camera.

You should answer the questions I ask in my annotation, or in the tutor report in your learning blog.  They are put there to make you think about it and not so much for you to send me answers.  If I want a direct answer I will say something like “Let me know what you intend etc....”  I want to encourage you, and all students, to use their logs and blogs as a vehicle for this sort of thinking, musing and exploration.

I am not convinced that the module notes have entirely explained to you the way that a light meter works so I will try to give a brief outline of what I think are the important considerations.  The problem that a meter is trying to solve is, of course, what exposure we should give the sensor, film or whatever.  Given that all subjects are different some sort of baseline needs to be establishes and in the days of monochrome photography the solution was based on tonality and this seems to work just as well in colour and digital as well as analogue.  So what to do? Measuring the absolute amount of light reflected from a particular subject is fine but complex and difficult to interpret so it was decided to pick a reference colour and tone and this was (to be a bit over technical) 18% reflectance neutral grey, usually referred to as ‘mid-grey’ because although it only reflects 18% of the light falling on it it looks about halfway between black and white to our eye (Logarithms and things enter here!)  So all light meters assume that they are looking at mid-grey and suggest an exposure that will render the subject as such.  This means that if you take a spot reading off a white surface the exposure will be too little to render it as white in other words it will under expose it.  As it happens (well, this was a part of the decision to use mid-grey and the particular sensitivity range of light sensitive materials in reality), an average, naturally lit scene (the sort of thing that is most often photographed in fact) averages to mid-grey (a tonal range of about 127:1 and so on) so pointing a light meter in the general direction of the scene and taking in as much as possible (and average reading) we tend to get an acceptable result.  However, we want to be able to do more than get just an acceptable result and so all sorts of systems of exposure estimation have been devised over the years and the one that has been most often adopted and abused to be honest, is the Zone System of Ansel Adams.  This can be extremely comprehensive and complex and the three volume series of book he wrote on the subject of exposure (The Camera, The Negative and The Print) have become something of a holy text for some photographers and go well beyond the current discussion.  However there are a few gems to be extracted that can help in explaining how to judge exposure in every day situations.  His splitting of the scene into up to ten tone ‘zones’ from pure white with no detail (pretty much the point of highlight clipping in our day) to pure black with no detail (the point of shadow clipping) is not a bad way of thinking about a subject.  So if you look back on the way you took your readings in the light of this information you might be able to be more specific in understanding how you got the results that you did.  And what you might have done to either make your life easier or simply been more predictive of the results.  It might help to make sense of some of my comments and questions.  I have included a link to one of the many sites that discusses the Zone System in a supposedly simply way, take a look and see what you make of it. 

Explain in you blog why you chose the particular points you did to measure and In the light of the above, whether they were the best to achieve the results you were after.

You have used the lighting to draw the eye to the elements in the image that you want the viewer to concentrate on, the main point of interest, what Barthes (see suggested reading) might have termed the punctum in many ways. This has been successful and is a very worthwhile technique to use but you should also consider using it in conjunction with, or on occasions to substitute it with differential focus.  By this I mean focusing specifically on your main point of interest often throwing the other elements more or less out of focus.  With modern small sensor cameras the depth of field is generally quite large so that the point of absolute sharp focus may well not be that different from the rest of the image but it can be enough to work almost subliminally and pull the eye in.  The depth of field is dependent on focal length (the longer it is the shallower is the depth of field); the aperture (the wider the aperture the shallower the depth of field) and the point of focus (the nearer it is the shallower the depth of field) so even with a crop factor of 1.5 or whatever we still have some control over it.  Look at your images and discuss in your blog if and how you could have used differential focus and/or depth of field control to make your images even better.

I am pleased to see that you seem to be using the histogram and so on to evaluate the success or otherwise of the exposure but it can be all too easy to simply concentrate on the info regarding clipping and ignore the rest of the placement of tones.  Quite often we are better to let one or even both ends of the tonal range to block up in order to arrange the important tones where we want them and it is important to get used to looking at different colours in terms of tones, the spot meter setting can help here.  A yellow can look lighter than a blue of the same tone!

 

Learning Logs/Critical essays

Your blog is coming along reasonably well. I an glad to see that you are recording your visits and so on not just the exercises.  However I would like to see you using the blog more like a free ranging journal, recording you thoughts, reflections, questions and so on about all sorts of issues that inping on your study and photography. 

Perhaps if you think of it as having a sort of conversation with yourself about your engagement with photography and the arts and life in general (it doesn’t have to be Proust length!) you won’t go far wrong.

Happy to give this a go now that I have a feel for what is needed here..

Suggested reading/viewing

Have decided to set up a different part of the log to keep all suggestions received together with any comments that I want to make about what I've read etc..

Barthes introduces us to some interesting ideas about the way our attention is affected by photographs (amongst much else) in:

Barthes, R., 1993. Camera Lucida: Refections on Photography. London: Vintage Classics.
Take a look at this site

http://photo.tutsplus.com/tutorials/shooting/understanding-using-ansel-adams-zone-system/

for more information on applying the Zone System to digital photography, it might be more information than you think you need but information is never wasted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Go for it ! Personal project (Assignment 5)

I sent off my outline thoughts for my Personal Project ( Assignment 5) to my tutor and have had encouraging feedback and ideas for reading around the idea :

'Briefly, it looks very interesting and highly current.  You should look around for as many references to photographers and other artists doing something similar and contextualise your work, that is work out and write about how your work relates to similar projects by others.  The fact that others are/have done something similar is no reason for you not to try your own take on it, everyone will be different and looking at what they have done and what people have written on the subject of images, memory and family should make a good research portfolio.  The current issue of the Photoworks annual is titles Family Politics and might well be worth a look and if you can find a copy (library interloans or a good university library as it is out of print) of the Spence, Holland Family Snaps it would be well worth the look.  Of course you should look up the Richard Billingham iconic Ray's a Laugh and of course, the whole discourse surrounding the image and real and constructed histories and memorial  was central to post-modern theory.'
 
Have already tracked down 'Family Snaps' and  hope to get a copy of the Photoworks Annual shortly. Just need to ensure reading time doesn't get overtaken by Assignment 4.
And also taken some preliminary images around the war theme...Really excited about the getting to grips with the concept of conceptualising my work ..a new area to get to grips with..

The final image : starting to think about Assignment 5

The beginning...

Over the past few months I have been thinking about a possible subject for this last assignment.

My mother in law was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s recently and this brought back memories of my own personal experience of coping with my mother’s senile dementia. I remember her looking at a collection of photographs that I had brought together to help trigger her memories of family times past. Studying a picture of my father taken before he died twenty years earlier, she commented that she hardly remembered him and what he looked like. But she did recognise him.

I also remembered at the time, colleagues who used to conduct reminiscence sessions for elderly people in care homes telling me how the sense of smell triggered memories much longer than visual impressions. Had we had more time together I would have brought together an ‘album’ of scents and smells to trigger our conversations of things past.

All of which brings me to the matter in hand, the personal project for Assignment five.

My father died nearly thirty years ago very suddenly and we were left with our own personal memories and the shared photographic memory captured in family photo albums. More recently  have been researching my family history, I realised that there was very little trace of my father other than a few black and white images from the early days of his marriage and fading colour ‘snaps’ taken over the years to record family events rather than my father.

Is it possible to ‘conjure’ up memories of my Dad through photographic images that trigger more than a visual memory? How to conjure up the memory of someone not there? There are a number of issues, for example:

-         Finding traces left behind that could be used for this project i.e. physical evidence of having made an impact

-         Using places / people/ objects that trigger personal memories that have no meaning to an outsider

-         Achieving images that give a ‘sense’ of a person to those who never knew them

Project brief

A collection of 10-12 images on a personal theme drawn from my interest in family history.

Aim

To explore the concept of memory via photography and my interest in family history.

Outcome

A collection of images that give a sense of who my Dad was …Ideally photographs that also create a visual ‘memory’ that can be experienced by ‘outsiders’ and maybe trigger other   family memories of their own though this perhaps is more a challenge .

Concepts to be explored / represented

-         Memory - here and now or referenced by old photographs?

- Shadow on the wall effect

-         Family – father  ( died in 1922 –no extant photograph but sibling- step sister still alive )

-          Workplace – greengrocer/ nursery man/ gardener

-   E.g.  There is a black and white photo of my Dad taken in a greengrocer’s shop which could be revisited by taking the same kind of image today using a willing greengrocer in same pose

-   Smell of hot sun in greenhouses full or ripening tomatoes

-   Autumn colour of chrysanthemums ( Dad grew these commercially as well as tomatoes)

-          Wartime  - RAF / Army ( Burma ) –memorabilia

-          Character – artistic / creative/ introspective

-   The artist using acrylics/ sketching trips /

-          My childhood memories – cigar smoke, Satsumas , pomegranates at Christmas

-          Sense of place - where does he fit in?

-  Referencing his father

Images

The plan is to use colour or monochrome as appropriate to the intended outcome. The images are likely to be a mix of representational/ still life/ interpretative / photo journalistic again dependent on the best way to achieve a particular interpretation.

Working title: In the footsteps of Dad…..

Project timescale

January – April 2014

Submission date: 25 April 2014

 

 

   

 

 

How lucky can you get - Lee Friedlander's 'America by Car'

During an amazing birthday weekend with friends in Amsterdam, I had tremendous luck in coming across an exhibition of Lee Friedlander's 'America by Car. I always try to  check out whether there are any photography museums / exhibitions in cities visited on holiday and I struck gold in Foam, the photography Museum in Amsterdam.

I really like his work and to come across such a comprehensive collection of hos photographs was fantastic and particularly timely as I have just completed my monochrome assignment.

America by Car is Friedlander's great road trip..a series of images where he is looking out from cars as opposed to the earler body of work that he did for Harpers's Bazaar in 1060s.

This earlier assignment commissioned in 1963 by Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler was all about photographing a fleet of next year's car models for a preview portfolio to be published in the November issue. They asked only that Friedlander produce his work on time.
This was the era of very memorable classic car design; cars were coming off the factory line symbolising 'American cool' - sleek, smooth curves and elongated bodies. So not surprisingly, Friedlander's take as someone who could not be called an car enthusiast in any way and who pushed the cars well into the background almost relegating them to very subsidiary roles did not go down well with Harper Bazaar's editor, Nancy White. She pulled the feature concerned at how the car companies might react.

The reason for mentioning this is that looking at the exhibition before me in Amsterdam, I could see his provocative approach again.. juxtaposition of the ordinary and regarded by some as awkward intrusions encroaching on the composition.

Lee Friedlander California 2008

Trying to work out what I like about his images here has been a real test. On one level, I just love the idea of looking at the view from inside the car where the car interior shapes the outcome as much as the camera. We usually look out unconsciously ignoring the 'car frame' to see the view but here the car is part of the view. Reading about the exhibition it seems that Friedlander often chose rental cars according to the pictorial potential of the interior door panels, centre consoles and steering wheels. On the other hand I like the use of the wing mirror to add a 'second layer'; an extension of and contribution to the image . And then there are the visual jokes...

Lee Friedlander Montana 2008

I was interested to learn from the exhibition notes that in the early 1990s, Friedlander began to use a Hasselblad Superwide camera. This produced a square negative  more than four times the size of that yielded by his 35mm Leica. What seemed to result here was a larger field of vision and the camera's ability to compress space so that things both very far and very near could be rendered in the same frame with the same clarity.

These are beautiful monochrome images. I like the compositions; I like the 'architectural dynamism of the images. I admire the creativity and skill that produced such work.. Shall be definitely looking to discover more of Friedlander's work. 


Footnote:   Would recommend anyone visiting Foam while in Amsterdam. One of the other exhibitions there was Cristina De Middel's 'The Afronauts' ; again a fortunate discovery as I had been telling a friend travelling with me all about the Borse Deutsch Photography Prize 2013 the previous evening!  

Foam
Keizersgracht 609
1017 DS Amsterdam
www.foam.org

Reflection on Assignment three

'Processing the Image ' has been another steep learning curve for me; particularly the technical side. I feel that I have a much better understanding of processing images although I know that I need to work really hard at this to develop real confidence; I have begun to usefully work with RAW  and to find my around Lightroom. 

Looking back  after completing a section of this course and the assignment is always a salutary experience - what do I feel about the course and  last few months of work?
 The highlight was getting to grips with black and white photography - a new area for me and something I really enjoyed. I have always appreciated black and white images starting looking at early family photos to moving onto the work of famous photographers. in books and at exhibitions. Now I really know how hard it is to conceive and deliver a good black and white image. I can see and feel that composition is the key and being able to judge a potential image in terms of creative concerns of contrast, geometry, texture, volume etc...must inevitably be a question of trial and error to start with. 

Re the assignment -choosing the theme of seaside piers was I feel a good subject for monochrome.It allowed a good degree of creativity though my developing technical ability at this stage did not always deliver the sense of past summers that I was looking for. Partly due to how to handle light and shadow to suggest late summer warmth without over exposing the scene or bring in too much colour saturation into the black and white mix.  With hindsight I also feel perhaps I could have done more in terms of experimentation - something to bear in mind in the future!

I tried harder this time to develop and stick to a particular theme; this was partially successful but should  have been developed more in terms of people enjoying and using the seaside pier. The two images below were originally part of the assignment but dropped to keep within my subject brief. That said, I thought them worth processing and including them within my reflection; firstly, because I like them and secondly they represented an interesting processing challenge.






P597: f8 @ 1/100  ISO 200  22mm 
WB Daylight cropped

 



What drew my eye here was the brightly multi coloured building behind the motorbike and the patterned sunlight in front. How would this work in monochrome? I experimented by adjusting the colours in the black and white mix to increase the colour  differential so that the tones were more pronounced and then increased the contrast using the tone curve. I am happy with the result as I can see the difference in colour in the background..




P598: f5.6 @ 1/640  ISO 100  55mm  AWB

P598 is less successful as I was looking for a way to enhance the movement here by bringing out the contrast between the foaming waves and the surrounding sea. Her I increased the contrast and decreased the shadow; the increased the red/ blue and yellow colours in the b/w mix  to draw out the 'water bike' . The end result is disappointing and I'd welcome ideas as to how to improve the image.


Lastly, am I developing a 'personal voice' ? Still a long way to go...