Week 4- 360 Degree Photography & Digital Studio Copying

An artist that although does not use a pinhole camera fits in well with pinhole photography is Sam Taylor wood as she produces 360 degree images within her body of work. A good example of this is a piece called ' Looking Out' which is shown below, it is done by c type colour medium. It is not as big as most of her work being only 50cm x 60cm.

 

In the afternoon we did studio copying using the canon 5D. Here is how we set the lighting up to take the photographs:

As you can see this is a fairly basic set up using 2 light boxes for natural lighting with a board on the floor to put the small objects and camera above to capture the photograph. We then used a light meter to check the lighting was correct. 

The objects were meant to be objects which represented yourself which was hard to doing as most of things that are important to me are back at home. Below are my final studio copies ready to use in a later workshop.

Necklace- Sentimental value as was a family members 

Ipod- represents my love for music and also showed it was the cover as i shows my love for cats.

Hand Cream- An essential that i could not leave the house without. 

Jersey Stamp- A little bit of insight of where I live.

My converses- Something I wear often.

Charm Bracelet- Each charm is individual and shows lots of information about a person the more charms collected. 

Sources:

Book: Sam Taylor Wood, Fondazione Prada

Journal Portfolio No.35

Week 3- Constructed & Pinhole Photography

Southampton is well known for being the place were titanic took off from on the 10th of April 1912. We felt as this was something significant Southampton was recognized for throughout history that we would look into staging this. We began by looking up about the titanic to gain a bit of general knowledge about it.

Define Titanic:   Something of exceptional power and strength.

A photographer that interested me was Alex Bailey who is a film photographer. He fits very well into our work as our photograph is a staged image from a film. I found his work in a book called 'Movie Photos by Alex Bailey' on page 212-213. This particular image was from a film called Atonement about a man that chooses to be a soldier instead of stay in prison. Here is the photograph of his work shown below:

The poppy's in this photograph are something that even now are something used to in memory of soldiers in the war. This connects to Titanic as although not soldiers there were still many people that died on that boat and families who miss them so it is a similar concept. Another artist we looked at was Cindy sherman who did 'untitled film stills'.

Digital version of  people going around the one person making her feel trapped like you would have when the titanic sunk.

  We were able to capture the movement we wanted very well around the still subject however decide it was missing something so we added another subject in the middle. We had the 2 still subjects hold hands to give a sense of hope together and emphasis the worry with their closeness. Below is the second digital image we produced:

When shooting our pinhole we had to sway slowly due to the long exposure. Our image however did not come out so maybe the bin was not sealed properly. We re-shoot it on another day for about 20 minutes

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Sources:

Book: Movie Photos by Alex Bailey, page 212-213 

Week 2- Staged & Pinhole Photography

During week 2 we looked at staged photography and experimented with our own pinhole cameras. Staged photography takes planning and is well thought out and constructed.

A prime example of this type of work is the work of a photographer called Jeff Wall. Wall is a Canadian photographer who became well established in the 1970's and is best known for his large scale colour transparencies which he mounted in a light box hung on the wall. This approach gives a cinema screen glow and a 3D dimension to his work. Below is an example of his work title 'Passerby- 1996'


This photograph can be interperated in many ways by the viewers depending on how they view the world. Some could view it as a photograph of luck taken as two people talk pass one another and nothing more however a different view is that it was purposily taken at night and that the man in the right hand corner is planning on hurting the other passerby. either of these views of it could be true however you can tell it is staged as there is a cleardark and light side of then photograph which would never have happened in natrual lighting. The lightings creates contrast in the image which emphasises the atmosphere making it even more deliberate.

In the afternoon we then did a workshop on pinhole photography in which we made our own pinhole camera using a bin. In this web link are steps and a guide on how to make a pinhole camera:
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-To-Make-A-Pinhole-Camera/?ALLSTEPS

 Negative result of this exercise:

 Positive result:

Week 1- Deadpan Portraiture & The Wet Collodion Process

During this week I learnt about deadpan portraiture and a method in which it was used called the wet collodian process

Deadpan is something which is purposely impassive and has a lack of expression. In this case it is applied to a subject in a photograph however it can also be referred to in many other study areas such as in music where you could have a 'deadpan tone'. The reason in which they look so gloomy in the photographs is due to the long exposure times of an image. The subject will tend to appear detached however the image will be sharp and have clarity.

A good example of deadpan portraiture is the work of Walker Evans who is seen to be a forefather of deadpan documentary. Below is a photography of his of a women called Allie Mae Burroughs.


He is well known for working during the depression years of 1935-36 doing something known as straight photography. Straight photography is photography that attempts to show the scene as realistically as possible without manipulation of lighting and such. Evans describes his work as "literate, authoritative, transcendent".




I am interested in his work for the fact he uses real day people and documents what he sees not what he wants us to see. I also like that he uses available light as aspose to studio lighting as i feel it takes alot more skill.

We did our own deadpan imagery however we did this using strong studio lighting when taking the image. We used the wet collodian process, this is an old darkroom process in which u take the image on a piece of glass. The steps in how to do this are in the web line below:

http://www.alternativephotography.com/wp/processes/wetplate/the-wetplate-collodion-process

After following all of those steps we finally produced a successful image shown below:

Sources:
 http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm

Book: The photograph as contemporary art, Charlotte Cotton, Chapter 3:Deadpan

Book: Walker Evans, Aperture masters of photography, number 10, Copyright 1993 aperture foundation ink.