ZOOMING INTO DEPTHS

For this exercise I had to use different focal lengths of a zoom lens – attached to my camera ,a Pentax K-30, was a 18-135 Pentax lens. I had to zoom down a scene with depth and I managed to get permission to shoot a long corridor in the Ulster Hall, Bedford St., Belfast where I attend the Alzheimer's society's Singing for the Brain with my mother.

I was asked to decide which of the focal lengths was the closest to someone's normal field of vision and it was definitely the shortest focus(below) which was 18mm and this is why standard lenses have a short focus.

18mm

24mm

40mm

Exercise

for ths exercise I have to comment on the pixelated images of Thomas Ruff in the light of two reviews by Colberg (1) and Campany (2).

Colberg as well as writing his review has since then also had a go at pixellation himself (3). Ruff's images were created in response to 9/11 – he was actually in New York at that time but all his negatives were blank. He still felt he had to do something and so the idea of deliberately making photos pixellated occurred to him. Colberg's pixellated pictures are also in response to violence – he found that explosions from US military websites were the best subjects.

I was very glad to see pixellation as part of the course as you see I have tried it myself and I thought perhaps it wasn't a good photo but I liked it and again it was in response to 9/11. I wasn't in New York at the time but it is one of my last memories of my late father – he was lying on the sofa and I came in and put the tv on and the first tower had been hit and they came with their camera and kept it rolling and then the second tower was hit – I watched this for hours. BUT I was in New York just after the exterior of the new World Trade Centre was finished and that time it was the opening of the new Ground Zero Museum also. One of my brothers now works in New York and his apartment block is directly opposite across the Hudson in Jersey City – he has vivid memories of 9/11 too as he worked in Reuters in London at the time. So here is my pixellated photo of the new WTC shrouded in fog plus another photo of the new Manhattan skyline in which I used duotone in Picasa to give a spooky effect.

References


(1) http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/2009/04/review_jpegs_by_thomas_ruff/

(2)http://davidcampany.com/thomas-ruff-the-aesthetics-of-the-pixel/

(3)http://jmcolberg.com/american-pixels

Other work I read and viewed :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rg_Colberg

http://www.thefirst10000.com/joerg-colbergs-photography-after-photography-considered-or-a-response-to-a-provocation/ :

“But if we reframe photography (pun only partly intended) – what it’s for, how it works, and what it’s capable of doing – we might move closer to something that’s always changing, growing, and evolving, that is capable of being intuitive and responsive rather than limiting or dictating possibilities. In the meantime, the rest of us will fumble along as best we can, looking for and trying new ways of seeing and new ways of creating until, by sheer stubbornness and persistence, someone somewhere arrives at something truly new”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLyOSkokn_4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRRPd5NcGkc

The history of photography in Northern Ireland exhibition, Ulster Museum

I attended this exhibition whilst a sitter was looking after my mother.

The Ulster Museum has a large archive of photographs taken in Northern Ireland from the very beginning of photography in the 1850's. Recently they re-examined the archive in the light of the digital age which allows copies of very fragile and light sensitive photographs to be exhibited.

They also have a good selection of old cameras. So it turns out my 2 Olympus Trip 35 cameras are museum pieces now! I bought one in the 1980's after an uncle lent me his to take photographs of my friends during my last days at school. I took photos with it for a few years and then there was a long gap when I was very ill and by the time I woke up it was the digital age. One other type of camera they had I found interesting – the concertina type used by John Hinde for his iconic Irish postcards(some of which were on show too). I did a project on Hinde for my Btec level 3 in photography.

The  photos are exhibited chronologically. The first photo of Belfast which shows old buildings being demolished was a calotype taken in 1854 and it is a digital copy of a now very delicate image which had deteriorated a great deal - it probably had acid in the paper in my opinion. Nowadays people can spend a lot on specifically acid free paper when actually these days most paper is acid free anyway since that is the cheapest method of producing it – so save your pennies!

Next ''cartes-de-visite” were very popular from the 1860's to the 1900's – on one side of the little card was a portrait studio image and on the other side there was an ad for the photographer – these ads which were intricately designed were works of art in their own right.

Then “cabinet cards” which were bigger than cartes-de-visite became common.

After that portrait cards arrived and subjects were often soldiers who were about to go off to fight in the Great War so they posed together with their families often. The subject matter of portrait cards was also more varied – it could be eg an athlete and unposed shots were tried for the first time as more people  owned cameras.

Following this there was a selection of John Hinde and others' souvenir postcards. Hinde is well known in England for his pictures of Butlin's holiday camps. Here is one card from my own collection – the lake in Glencar (immortalized in The Stolen Child a poem by WB Yeats) - to give you an idea of his vivid colours. There was no saturation in Photoshop in those days (they were all processed in Italy – many's a blue sky in Ireland was actually Mediterranean).

 

Next the photos on show enter the modern era – there are exhibits from  the BBC  and the Radio Times for example.

I thoroughly enjoyed this exhibition and afterwards I relaxed in the very good and busy(half term) cafe downstairs which had free wifi.

References

http://nmni.com/um/Visiting-Information/Find-us

Repairing an old photo

An uncle of mine asked me yesterday to repair an old family photo of my grandparents - I am the 'go to' person in the family for photography problems. I now have a qualification in the service they require - a City&Guilds level 2 award in digital image manipulation - distinction . It was not a particularly difficult job - I only had to use one Photoshop Elements 9 tool - the  spot healing brush. Then I sent the photo to be printed by Photobox - they are the best printing service on the Internet.

Other things I have been asked to do include dealing with red eye or white eye flash problems. Again this is not difficult - you change the background to black, zoom in and use the eraser tool.

I think the biggest job I had to do was of my baby twin nephew and niece - I had two photos - one was smiling in one and the other was smiling in the other so I had to remove the head of one twin and place it on top in the other photo. I used selection tools and copy then paste.

 

 

Print making at the Alzheimer's memories cafe

I attend the cafes with my mother and today's activity after our coffee and biscuits was printmaking as the facilitator who had been booked cancelled and at the last minute an artist's collective from Bangor(County Down) stepped in.

Actually it wasn't the first time I had come across this particular printmaking technique as I had done a day long workshop last year whilst I was studying for a Btec Level 3 in photography. I was inspired by Andy Warhol's shoes (1)square book where the same shoe is depicted in different colours – I didn't want to do something too similar to his very well-known Marilyn Monroe(2) images. So I took some photos of a plain white stiletto shoe and traced its outline on a sheet of plexiglass with a sharp scribe, rubbed ink on to it, put a sheet of paper on top and put it through a press – a gadget a lot like a mangle. That is what I did last year. Yesterday it was very similar although we only had time for one colour – black. I traced the outline of a rose and added shading – here it is below – a Dutch student artist offered to take my print of my hands if I didn't like it – very amusing.

References

(1) Shoes, Shoes, Shoes: The Autobiography of Alice B. Shoe

Warhol, Andy

Published by Bulfinch (1997-05-01)

ISBN 10: 0821223194 / ISBN 13: 9780821223192

2. http://www.moma.org/collection/works/61239

Exercise 1.1

These are photos taken a minute or two apart with the same camera set up (I used a tripod). The object of the exercise is to show how the histograms change even within a short period and these are caused by changes in the light. I used Picasa and the Snip tool from Windows(i e a screen shot).

The subject is a display stand for jewellery which I make occasionally .

My camera and lens are worth a mention. Pentax their manufacturer did not change the size of the hole for their lenses (k mount) when they switched from film to digital so you can easily get cheap secondhand Pentax lenses and build up a respectable collection (ebay, Oxfam – I remember once I bought an old Pentax film camera plus lens just because I wanted the latter ). Sometimes the lens will work straightaway or you might have to adjust your camera which is relatively fiddly (see here from youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUE0aQBy2D4 ). The lens I used was an Auto Chinon 50 mm prime (good for portraits – a prime lens being better than a zoom lens for sharpness).

Note below nice large photos! Finally figured it out when I read this http://malborkmalbork.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/how-to-make-your-photos-larger-than.html . I am quite happy with 'extra large' though.

Exercise 2.1 The distorting lens

The subject of my photo was the court house in Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. This was the target of the Omagh bomb and there was a warning to the police who evacuated the area but the driver of the vehicle had panicked and left it at the other end of the town where the evacuated people went so it exploded amongst a crowd of people and 28 died.

Initially a car blocked my view of the court house but as I zoom in gradually it disappears. The first photo's focal length is 18mm and the final one's is 88mm. My camera was a Pentax K-30 and my zoom lens was a 18-135mm DA weather resistant one.

HOLLYWOOD HAS NOTHING ON ME

Yesterday I spent doing a Adobe Premiere Pro video editing course – it was fun but very hard work and definitely not for beginners. I hope to do a film making unit as part of the degree which is why I did this course. It took place at the premises of Digital Arts Studio in Belfast and only cost £45 – other training providers are for profit and very expensive. I had been desperate to study this and had seriously considered a part time course in Ballynahinch which isn't far and is not very part time at all involving 3 whole days a week for a year and who would look after my mother?

My three favourite parts of yesterday were opacity, matte and vignetting.

Opacity involves layering two clips on top of one another so that both are partially visible. Here is an example I made. One clip is a waterfall I got at the course yesterday and the other is a flute player I filmed at Chinese New Year celebrations here in Belfast. I did it for the practice.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0Feu0YQPaVpTlZTeXUtdnlYQnc/view?usp=sharing

With matte you can insert a geometric shape in one clip which has another video inside.

A vignette involves an oval or circular area any colour you like surrounding the video clip playing in the middle. I did a lovely experiment of a pink vignette surrounding a clip of a bee feeding on a flower – I saved it to a USB stick but it wouldn't play at home so I had to do a the opacity video mentioned above as an example for this blog – it took ages to download Premere elements 13 and then the clips were very jerky and also I couldn't get the adobe creative cloud to work but I think it's ok now. It kept me up very, very late.

Trip to Omagh

Yesterday my sister who is visiting from America took us down to Omagh from Belfast in a people carrier and so while the rest shopped I disappeared with my Pentax K-30 to do some of the exercises for the degree. I did four different ones - I was happy with the camera parallel to subject pattern task and the distorting lenses one but not with the depth of field or focal points exercises so I will redo those.

Exercise1.3 (2) Line

To get abstract patterns I took shots of 3 different paving stones in Omagh with the camera pointing directly down wards – these were the most aesthetically pleasing.

Exercise 1.3(1)

I also included shots not parallel to the ground so people can see the difference and this first one also has leading lines to fulfill the first line task also.

This is the entrance to Market St, Omagh at the junction with Bridge St. I do not know how old the cobblestones are but the paving to the left is recent. The following 2 photos show the results of the camera pointing directly downwards.

Lastly photos of Islamic style paving in  my uncle's garden, Killyclogher, Omagh and the first one also fulfils leading lines exercise 1.3 (1).

I have used 'feeling lucky' in Picasa with the photos I took in Omagh as it was very dark and raining. My camera – a Pentax K-30 DSLR - is weather resistant fortunately and I have had it out in a torrential downpour in Bundoran, Donegal(it needed to dry out for several days in the hotel bathroom under a heated towel rail though)

Framing

Framing

Framing is the next topic and I have started to research it - I came across this great video featuring Steve McCurry.