Perception - Camera Position

What does a camera placement do?

1. Determine our position to the subject 
2. It is a code for how the audience responds to the subject
3. Is a photographic decision that determines how you want us to engage with the image
4. How will you position our ‘reading’ of the image? A photographer puts the viewer in a specific place from which the viewer has a relation to the subject.
   
   
   Therefore, when making an image, the following questions should be addressed;

- From where does a Photographer position oneself? 

Where would the camera provide a place upon which construct its image of the world

• Camera position not only determines position to subject, it determines how the audience sees the subject. How does camera position determine how the viewers engages with the image? It provides position, context, and relation.
• How does the photographer want the viewer to feel about the image? Whether distanced or up-close - forms, patterns, psychologies, moods, feelings, and emotions are created through the relative position of the camera to the subject 

War Photography - James Nachtwey

Not only by watching this documentary did I learn what it takes to be a war photographer but I learnt the type of person you may become afterwards or even during taking these brutal images.
You become strong as you know you are the only person who can give these people a voice, but it can turn you very emotional, witnessing such unpleasant scenes and moments in these poor peoples lives.

''It;s hard to divide your attention, emotion+energy, you have to be single minded''

- He is a mystery and a loner - sometimes you have to be to work that well and give so much of yourself.

Nachtwey decided in the early 1970's to become a war photographer during Vietnam - it affected him so much that he decided to follow on that tradition of War photography. 

The images from Vietnam were straight forward documentary images- powerful indictment the war and how unjust and cruel it was.  

However, for Nachtwey to go on with this he first had to convince himself that he could do this before even convincing others and also had to learn in taking pictures - how to develop a personal vision, how to express his own feelings. In order to do that he had to get in touch with his own feelings.

Natchwey states ''It was true photography though the discipline of the frame' 

It became the way he discovered himself and the world.

In 1980 he woke up one night with a very clear idea that now he's learned everything he can learn and now is the time to go to New York to become a War Photographer. 

Natchwey felt like he was witnessing history not from an academic point of view, not from a distance but really what happens to ordinary people in the course of history. 

He feels as if in a way this was a lot like theatre but instead of being in the audience, he was on the stage and the script was being written minute by minute as it went along and you had to understand and anticipate and connect with it emotionally+intellectually what was going on so you can follow it. 

''These photos would not have been made without the acceptance of the people and complicity. They understand that a stranger has come with a camera to show the rest of the world what is happening to them - it gives them a voice to the outside world that they otherwise wouldn't have. 

SOMALIA

In 1992, this child was feeling such a hunger as you will probably never feel in your life. Necked, with no hope for the future and born in a world that has no means to support him, this Somali child seems to have no reason to keep fighting. How many children must died of famine since then and how much food did we throw away last year? 

- ''FEAR is not important, its about how you deal with it. Not about the pain, its about how you manage it'' - JN

INDONESIA 

This photo of a one-arm, one-leg beggar washing his child in a polluted river is heart-breaking. Despite his poverty, despite his extreme handicap, he still finds the power to take care of his son. And we are complaining of not having hot water one day…

AFGHANISTAN

This beautiful yet, apocalyptic image is telling us the story of a war: The civil war in Afghanistan turned Kabul into ruins. On this background, the white image of this covered lady seems a ghost rather than a human being.

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What I learnt from Nachtweys images is that he channels his emotions into his pictures and that he tries to focus and pre-visualise situations he might get in and run them through his mind. It's very sub-concisious of how he prepares himself mentally. 

OBJECT SHOOT

Today was my object shoot and can safely say it went just about right, it could of been much better in terms of organisation with the props staying on the carpet.

I should of got them all attached on the carpet the night before, but I did think it would be ok for them to stick on with tape as tested before.

However, on the day it turned out that a new technique saved the shoot!

I had to cut holes in the carpet with a carpet knife and wrap inviable wire around my objects and up the carpet to tie a knot.

These things happen, but if only this came to me beforehand.. 

Preparation for Object shoot

Today I went into uni to get everything ready for my shoot tomorrow!
I had to make sure the carpet was the right size of the board it will be masked to and to also get all my objects to stick on the carpet!

Ways Of Seeing by John Berger

Today I got out 'ways of seeing' dvd from the uni library to get knowledge on the impact of Photography and to also look out the view of everyones appreciation of Art from the past.

This documentary gave me an insight on how paintings changed the world and then turned into photography. I learnt that the tradition of European painting was born in 1400 and died in 1900. It also makes us see paintings as nobody saw them before. But why do we?

If discovered why this is so, we shall also discover something about ourselves and the situation in which we are living. I learnt that the process of seeing paintings or anything else is less spontaneous and natural than we tend to believe.

*All large part of seeing depends upon habit and convention of perspective which is unique to European Art and perspective centres everything on the eye of the beholder!

For example; like a beam from a light house - only instead of light travelling outward, appearance has travelled in, and the tradition of art called those appearances REALITY.

What Berger has stated is that perspective is the thing which makes the eye the centre of the world, however the human eye can only be at one place at a time. - It takes its visible world with it as it walks

-With the invention of the camera everything changed, as we could see things that were not really there in front of us. And this made appearances travel across the world!

Dzega Vertof - (Russian film director) - The man with the moving camera 1928

Vertof wrote;

*I'm the eye, a mechanical eye 

I the machine show your world the only way I can see it

I free myself from today and forever from human immobility

I'm in constant movement, I approach and pull away from objects

I creep under them, I rung alongside a moving horses mouth. I fall under eyes with the falling rising body's

This is I the machine, mouvering in the kayo tic movements 

recording one movement after another, most complex combinations free from the boundaries of time and space. I co-ordinate only and all points of the universe wherever I want them to be

My way leads to a fresh perception of the world

Thus I explain, in a new way the world unknown to you

^^ A powerful statement which does make you think about how the camera actually does allow you to photograph the world unknown to yourself and others. So, the invention of the camera has changed not only what we see, but HOW we see it. - which is very important.

Colour and Transformation!

In Todays lecture we looked at Colour Transformation and how your colour in objects transforms what the object means.   - An Emotional Signifier 

The colour pallet affects the mood of the image as it provides a code to how we should feel - Each colour represents something but with sometimes two meanings, for example - Green is connotations of jealously but also shows positivity - on the 'GO' (traffic lights) Red is a symbol of love and passion but can viewed as danger and fear.      

Photographers with colour ;

• John Paul Caponigro ;

'' Reality exists only through representation. There is no correct way to see things''

• ''photography is a medium, a language, through which I might come to experience directly, live more closely with, the interaction between myself and nature.''

  Robert Maplethorpe - 
• William Eggleston - The 'Father' of colour photography (high saturation+mundane images become important due to his lighting choices
• Stephen Shore - Photographs the everyday/mundane but makes them more through colour

John Paul Caponigro 

Born in Boston in 1932, Paul Caponigro is renowned as one of America’s most significant master photographers. When he was thirteen, he began to explore the world around him with his camera and subsequently sustained a career spanning nearly fifty years. He is currently regarded as one of America’s foremost landscape photographers. 

Acclaimed for his spiritually moving images of Stonehenge and other Celtic megaliths of England and Ireland, Caponigro has more recently photographed the temples, shrines and sacred gardens of Japan. Caponigro also inspires viewers with glimpses of deep, mystical woodland of his New England haunts. 

He approaches nature receptively, preferring to utilize an intuitive focus rather that merely arranging or recording forms and surface details. 

Music has always been an essential aspect of his life. Although he shifted from the piano to photography early in his artistic career, he remains a dedicated pianist and believes his musical training and insight contributes significantly to his photographic imagery. In his photographs the visual ‘silence’ becomes as tangible as ‘sound’.

Paul Caponigro has exhibited and taught throughout the United States and abroad. Recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships and three National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants, Caponigro’s images will be found in most history of photography texts and contemporary art museums.

http://www.independent.com/news/2008/feb/14/emmeditations-silver-photographic-studies-paul-cap/


Using shells, leaves, flower petals, stones, and other detritus from the natural world, Caponigro meticulously arranges found objects into compositions of intimate proportions. The inanimate models are often paired in curious partnerships: Abalone shells are propped against a cross-sectioned piece of wood, playing off of the silver gelatin print’s capability for high contrast. The deliberate positioning of photographic props are the result of a well-thought-out artistic process; for each composition, Caponigro took a week or more to find the perfect complement of light, texture, and shapes. “It would have been too easy to have a simple setup,” Caponigro said. “I would take my time setting up materials and putting them together so that they felt right.” The artist is a naturalist at heart; it is that sensibility, matched with his innate artistic intuition, that allows him to see the potential in these 

Print Information: All photographic prints are archivally processed gelatin silver prints made from original photographic negatives by Paul Caponigro. Prints are dry-mounted on 4-ply, acid-free mat board. They are window matted and signed in pencil on the front of the overmat at the lower right corner of the print, and are ready to frame. No digital manipulation is used at any stage of the process.  Jerry Uelsmann, photographed by Capaigro. http://pdngallery.com/20years/20mostinfluential/uelsmann.html Photographer, Ryszard Horowitz, states ;

I have been aware of Jerry's work for 40 years. All my life, I was very much interested in making pictures as opposed to taking them. Back in Poland, I saw a magazine called Ameryka, a beautiful color magazine. In this issue they showed the work of Art Kane, Ernst haas and Uelsmann. What struck me about his work was that he was doing a lot of darkroom work and in-camera manipulation, and I was extremely taken by the fact that there was someone in another part of the world who thought the same way as me and wanted to do that. His work appears in every history of photography. Also, he has generations of students who spread his gospel. Certain of his images, because they are so strong and so personal and use such bold symbols, once you see them, you cannot forget them. He knows who he is and what he is doing. His work transcends fashion. He 
doesn't give a damn about fashion, and there are only a handful of photographers who are like that.


Harowitz was amazed and struck by the fact that there was someone else out there similar to himself, in
regards to photography. 

Seminar on Florian Maier-Aichen

Today I was asked to analyse Aichen's Landscape image - Inferred Landscape 

Initial Impressions

- High saturation

- Bold+ striking colours = blue+red = Toxic!

- Good contrast between the two shades

- definitely has been altered - photoshop - shadow tool

- Taken from high view point - across landscape

- Instantly think of lava and roses when I see the red landscape

Research - video on youtube - Aichen describing the image 

- His work addresses issues of globalisation and virtual perception

- view of luxury homes

- he uses a combination of traditional photographic techniques and computer imaging

- good combination of american west and los angeles industrialises landscape.

Aichen is not interested in natural landscape because theres nothing going on, so he has used inferred film to make it look science fictional

- His perception of Beauty - the red represents fear

- Aichens made it unique - By his mistakes.  

Environment Shoot - Skip Yard in Feltham+Pastiche in Richmond Hill

PLAN FOR TODAY;
-Environment series shots around 9am and Pastiche shot around 11am
-Purchase objects for Object shoot on 28th (Friday) - by 1pm
- Buy carpet for object shoot

I took out the Bronica on Friday as well as a small tripod- however there was a problem with getting a light metre out as they were all booked! -- Thank fully a peer in my class lent his light metre for the weekend

This was the only skip yard that allowed me to take images first thing in the morning, I guess it was due to the fact that I only live round the corner to them?

Here is an image taken on my phone of the viewfinder on the Bronica camera

The shooting went really well, although towards the end the workers did need me to leave.

I was lucky not to be rushed through the process of shooting as I had to consider carefully the camera position and change the standard lens to close.

I did two shots each for the mattress and TV, so I could take them at different angles

MATTRESS- second shot

TV - first shot

My FINAL series of THREE images of 'Throw away Culture'

Pile of mattresses - F4.0 + Shutter 500

Shredded paper and Tyre - F4.8

Stacks of TV/Computer screens - F4.0

- The way people just throw away things without thinking twice is natural to almost everyone now, but is it totally a bad thing?

Research shows ;  (on this website http://www.recycle.co.uk/throw-away.html )

I guess it's up to the viewers how they feel about throw away culture!

The UK does have the lowest percentage of 34.5% of Recycling

- Few more images from the shoot!

Pile of Metal - F4.8

Rubbish - 4.8

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For my Pastiche in Richmond Hill - I came here the night before as I was in the car looking around for the perfect tree, and this is the one that caught my eye as it was near enough like the one in Adam's image.  

Shutter = 360 Aperture = 8.0

By looking at Adams image of the tree, I wanted to capture the same atmosphere and emotion that you get from the landscape and structure of the tree.  However, I failed to capture the city landscape but I’m pleased with my outcome as I think the lake landscape behind the tree gave the photo meaning and a feel of calmness.

Environment Tutorial

(As I missed the tutorial due to illness, I'm posting my idea and thoughts on the shoot)

Environment Project Idea


This brief aims to develop contextual critical knowledge of environments.

I've looked at several artists to get an insight on their work and inspiration for my own

-Mitch Epstein
-Guy Tillim
-James Crotty
-Edward Bertinsky
- Keith Arnatt - rubbish

The work of James Crotty and Edward Bertinsky stood out for me as it linked with my thoughts on my idea of throw away culture - how people tend to chuck away things instead of mending/repairing them
- The idea of not fixing but fishing out on the new.

• First step is to ring up skip yards to ask for permission to photograph there in early morning 
• Second is to visualise what they may bring out - what I would want to photograph 

- Edward Burtinksy Photographs

James Crotty Photographs 

Colour Printing Induction

Today I was introduced to colour printing, and as soon as entering the pitch black room I knew it will take time getting used to. My first attempt to the printing was difficult as the colours were not coming out as expected. - Practice makes perfect.

I printed two images today - one from my Perspective+Focal workshop and the other from my Key Lighting workshop.

The charts for colour printing!

These are very useful as all you have to do is compare your image closest to the one on the chart

Test strips.

From my test strip I was able to decide how many secs exposure would be best for my final print and as a result I went for 17secs.

Final Print

Print of 20secs - F8

Double exposure repeated like in black and white induction, but in my opinion I think it looks very unique and artistic. 

Final Print - professional.