Showing posts with label Topics defined by the student. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Topics defined by the student. Show all posts
Saturday, 27 November 2010
Friday, 14 May 2010
Lomography
Lomography - History
In the early 1990s a couple of students discovered a small, enigmatic Russian camera, the Lomo Kompakt Automat, and created a new style of artistic experimental photography with their first unorthodox snapshot cavortings. The approach: taking as many photographs (Lomographs) as possible in the most impossible of situations possible and from the most unusual positions possible, and then having them developed as cheaply as possible. The result is a flood of authentic, colourful, crazy, off-the-wall, unfamiliar and often brilliant snapshots. These are mounted on panels to form a sea of thousands of Lomographs which regularly astonish viewers with their sheer colourfulness, diversity and power of expression. Ensuing major exhibitions in Moscow, New York, Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Havana, Zurich, Cologne, Madrid, Cairo, Tokyo and many other cities, where up to 100,000 Lomographs were shown at a time, established an international reputation for Lomography.
Lomography as a brand is definitely about film and analog photography, in particular, photos taken with lomo brand cameras.
In the early 1990s a couple of students discovered a small, enigmatic Russian camera, the Lomo Kompakt Automat, and created a new style of artistic experimental photography with their first unorthodox snapshot cavortings. The approach: taking as many photographs (Lomographs) as possible in the most impossible of situations possible and from the most unusual positions possible, and then having them developed as cheaply as possible. The result is a flood of authentic, colourful, crazy, off-the-wall, unfamiliar and often brilliant snapshots. These are mounted on panels to form a sea of thousands of Lomographs which regularly astonish viewers with their sheer colourfulness, diversity and power of expression. Ensuing major exhibitions in Moscow, New York, Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Havana, Zurich, Cologne, Madrid, Cairo, Tokyo and many other cities, where up to 100,000 Lomographs were shown at a time, established an international reputation for Lomography.
Lomography as a brand is definitely about film and analog photography, in particular, photos taken with lomo brand cameras.
I do lomography because it's refreshing to go back to the basics of photography. Just to capture a moment or subject and not have to worry about whether the focus, camera settings or the lighting is perfect. I just want to have fun and make a creative image.
Photography for many people is now just about camera specifications and camera features. They are too focused on having the best camera with the best lens and have forgotten what photography is really about. To save a memory and have fun while you do it!
preserving Lomo's concept:
10 lomo's golden rules
1.Take your camera everywhere you go.
2. Use it anytime, day and night.
3. Lomography does not interfere with your life, but is a part of it.
4. Try the shot from the hip.
5. Approach the objects of your "Lomographic desire" as close as possible.
6. Don't think.
7. Be fast.
8. You don't have to know beforehand what you captured (forget LCD).
9. Afterwards, either (forget LCD review).
10 Don't worry about any rules.
Photography for many people is now just about camera specifications and camera features. They are too focused on having the best camera with the best lens and have forgotten what photography is really about. To save a memory and have fun while you do it!
preserving Lomo's concept:
10 lomo's golden rules
1.Take your camera everywhere you go.
2. Use it anytime, day and night.
3. Lomography does not interfere with your life, but is a part of it.
4. Try the shot from the hip.
5. Approach the objects of your "Lomographic desire" as close as possible.
6. Don't think.
7. Be fast.
8. You don't have to know beforehand what you captured (forget LCD).
9. Afterwards, either (forget LCD review).
10 Don't worry about any rules.
long exposure
Emotions Joy
the more, the better: multiexposure
Reference:
Slinkachu
Slinkachu has attracted a cult audience for his photographs of tiny, hand-painted figures in unlikely urban settings. The street artist’s tiny world exists for a brief moment before it is washed away, eaten by animals or trodden underfoot by the unsuspecting public. These tiny narratives are then photographed by the artist, providing evidence of their brief “lives”. Slinkachu’s recent book, Little People in the City (with an introduction by Will Self), has become a best seller.
Slinkachu leaving his usual urban setting for the first time and his photographs will show tiny day-trippers facing everyday dramas within the grounds of Belsay.
The “little people” project has seen dozens of the tiny characters left around the city in a variety of poses, with begging for coins twice their size, being senless by mini-muggers.
Slinkachu has inspired by graffiti artist Banksi and wants to hide his identity. Only admitting to being a 26 years old Londoner.
A lot of recent miniature-model-photography work that is similar to Slinkachu work done in the '80s and '90s, but Slinkachu had steps further and his work is really clever and fun.
Slinkachu work reminds me of the Italian artist Olivo Barbieri a photographer of urban environments .He is recognized for his innovative technique creating a miniature still photgrphy from actule landscape by simulating shallow depth of filed via the use of the til-shft lens photography.
Belsay Hall, Newcastle
Reference:
Gregory Crewdson
Is one of my favorite photographers the way he planned his scene and how he choose the perfect time to creat the magical moment in the image. Every detail of these images is meticulously planned and staged, in particular the lighting. In some instances, extra lighting and special effects such as artificial rain or dry ice are used to enhance a natural moment of twilight. In others, the effect of twilight is entirely artificially created.
All the images propose twilight as a poetic condition. It is a metaphor for, and backdrop to, uncanny events that momentarily transport actors from the homeliness and security of their suburban context. Crewdson has drawn inspiration from the town of Lee, Massachusetts, where his family has a cabin: it was the setting for his Natural Wonder series (1992-97), which fused the natural and domestic worlds in surreal, vividly colorful images.
In some of my I images I have taken in the twilight I achieved in some of my images without a crew it’s by me and my camera, its not easy to capture what I really want to be in my frame because its not been planned like Gregory Crewdson but I’m trying to capture the best twilight moment that I’m looking for to be in my frame.
“I think I always have been drawn to photography because I want to construct a perfect world. I want to try to create this moment that is separate from the chaos of my life, and to do that I think I create enormous disorder. And I like that craziness because I think that it creates almost a sort of neurotic energy on the set, and through that there is a moment of transportation. And in all my pictures what I am ultimately interested in is that moment of transcendence or transportation, where one is transported into another place, into a perfect, still world. Despite my compulsion to create this still world, it always meets up against the impossibility of doing so. So, I like the collision between this need for order and perfection and how it collides with a sense of the impossible. I like where possibility and impossibly meet.”
Gregory Crewdson, from an interview on Egg (pbs.org)
Gregory Crewdson
Untitled from the series 'Beneath the Roses'
2004
References
Friday, 5 March 2010
Madame Yevonde
The Machine Worker in Summer, 1937
Permaprint day-transfer print from original negative.
Madam Yevonde She setup her own portrait studio in Victoria, London establishing a very different approach to photography by placing her sitters against dark background with faces well lit but turned slightly away from the camera. It is however for her mastery of the VIVEX process for which Madam Yevonde is best known. This process used three glass quarter-plates for the cyan, magenta and yellow separations, Which were proceeded separately and then brought together at the printing stage to produce an image with full color range. As the process used pigments and not dyes and could be manipulated at both the exposure and printing stage it led to vibrant color with a destiny and richness unachievable in other photographic processes of the day.
Madame Yevonde was born inCumbers in 1893, to a wealthy family in Streatham. At 16 she was shipped off to stifling convent schools in Belgium and France, which left her with a desire to be as independent as possible and a passion for the suffragette movement. But on her return to Britain, Yevonde studied with the London society photographer Lallie Charles, turning down an apprenticeship with Lena Connell, the suffragette photographer. At Charles’ Curzon Street studio Yevonde spent an apprenticeship cajoling Edwardian ladies into insipid poses on Empire chairs and bearskin rugs while they clutched bouquets of silk roses. After a year she transferred to ‘The Works’, the production side of Charles’ studio, and learned printing and retouching.
Round about 1925, she also began to undertake advertising work and other commercial assignments for magazines and started exhibiting her work at the annual exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society.
The rich colour resolution obtained with the process, with strong luminous reds and yellows and vibrant highlights, ideally matched her own extrovert personality. By 1932, Madame Yevonde felt sufficiently confident of her mastery of the new medium to rent a gallery and hold her first full-scale exhibition of her work consisting of no fewer than 70 images, half of them in colour. When Madame Yevonde called in with her portfolio, they were completely bowled over and commissioned her to supply four images of artists and craftsmen at work decorating the interior of the ship.
Madame Yevonde continued working almost exclusively in colour right through to the end of the decade, despite the looming threat of war, resonances of which crept increasingly into her work. For Madame Yevonde, this was a bitter blow, bringing to an abrupt end a period of the most intensely dedicated and uniquely creative pioneering work in the whole history of colour photography. At the end of the war, she moved back into London again and continued to work at the Berkeley Square studio, with all its memories of happier times. VIVEX, however, was dead and buried, and although other colour processes became available in time, Madame Yevonde very rarely used them, deeming them all far too crude in comparison with VIVEX.
When the lease on the Berkeley Square studio ran out in 1955, Madame Yevonde found other premises just off Knightsbridge, close to Harrods' store. Other work featured in a Royal Photographic Society exhibition devoted entirely to women photographers in 1958. Around this time, Madame Yevonde also started experimenting with solarisation, while an exhibition at her Knightsbridge studio in 1961 entitled 'Dove or Predator?' featured a series of portraits of women in which she attempted to divide them broadly into these two categories. Pride of place went to portraits of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, photographed at the Jubilee Palace in Addis Ababa, as well as portraits of other members of his family, and some of his pet lions.
The 1968 exhibition 'Some Distinguished Women' featured some of the famous women she had photographed over the course of her long career, but also included a number of portraits specifically taken for the exhibition. To celebrate Madame Yevonde's eightieth birthday and her sixty years in portrait photography, the Royal Photographic Society mounted an impressive retrospective exhibition consisting of about a hundred of her best images covering every aspect of her vast and memorable output. The exhibition and the interview were a fitting tribute to her as an artist and a champion of women's rights, as well as a great pioneering spirit.
Despite failing health, Madame Yevonde continued working to within a few months of her death in December 1975.
Reference
www.madameyevonde.com
http://www.users.waitrose.com/~felice/
Melanie Manchot cyprus street
Whitechapel Gallery
.JPG)
Artist Melanie Manchot creates and documents her own 21st century street party. presents the first part of her new project ‘Celebration,’ commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella. The exhibition brings together archive material portraying the rich history of public street celebrations in London’s East End, forming a poignant commentary on the changing demographics and social climate of east London’s communities. These documents form the basis for a major new film, which will depict the construction of a group portrait that takes an east London residential street as its setting and involves its residents as active participants. Capturing the persons best facial features and creates beautiful photos that have a lot of truth in them in the shot and the way subjects in the frame. The way she used the light in her shooting had a nice stand positioned above and next to the model's head, with the light pointing as close to straight down as she could, in order to catch the highlights of the hair. Using the street and the people in East London to document the event and display it at the gallery as that I was with them in a very move. Showing the multicultural community how happy and friendly they are, the colors and sun shine in the images makes me feel worm.
reference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSyqm2tt1I0
http://www.fvu.co.uk/projects/details/celebration/
.JPG)
Artist Melanie Manchot creates and documents her own 21st century street party. presents the first part of her new project ‘Celebration,’ commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella. The exhibition brings together archive material portraying the rich history of public street celebrations in London’s East End, forming a poignant commentary on the changing demographics and social climate of east London’s communities. These documents form the basis for a major new film, which will depict the construction of a group portrait that takes an east London residential street as its setting and involves its residents as active participants. Capturing the persons best facial features and creates beautiful photos that have a lot of truth in them in the shot and the way subjects in the frame. The way she used the light in her shooting had a nice stand positioned above and next to the model's head, with the light pointing as close to straight down as she could, in order to catch the highlights of the hair. Using the street and the people in East London to document the event and display it at the gallery as that I was with them in a very move. Showing the multicultural community how happy and friendly they are, the colors and sun shine in the images makes me feel worm.
reference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSyqm2tt1I0
http://www.fvu.co.uk/projects/details/celebration/
Sunday, 28 February 2010
HDR Photography
Many people find the resulting image in HDR attractive and these effects are interesting like a painting or like a cartoon. Some people believe that the results stay too far from realism, or find them unattractive because it looks unreal and it is reproduced a scene in a photo which is subjective.
“…Ansel Adams (the famous landscape photographer) developed “The Zone System’ to deal with the high-contrast vistas he encountered in California. By careful exposure and processing he found he could extend the film’s ability to record high-contrast landscape and create a black and white print with full detail. I’m attached to this kind of photography because it have a dream like quality that remind me of scenes from movies its make the photo unreal or like paint, the difference between sense the reality and illusion in a image and give it a fantasy magic look, Anything can be depicted as a art about taking fascinating photos and making them even more fascinating.Its funny how much controversy there is on HDR. Just like David Macdonald said. It’s a new technique that takes photographs to a different level. Of course it’s not the end all of photography. But why go all against it?
90% of the people aren’t photographers, they don’t care how the photo is done as long as it leaves behind an emotional impact.
Just like color photography didn’t end black and white, neither will HDR end standard photos.
Ansel Adams
http://www.anseladams.com/index.html
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