Studio Photography

Today in class we got the opportunity of going into the studio to practicing using the lights and learn a bit about how to adjust the camera settings to get different results. Me and Anna took photos of her horse toy. Here are just a few from the bunch I took. With these images we can now use mask layers and filters in Photoshop to combine the images by choosing the best sections from each photo.

Further Research into Children's Photography

The Ecstacy of Cecilia

Sophia's Mercurial Waters

Saint Barbie

Nurse Sue

Night Visit
Magic Circus

Little Boy Blue

Just the Girls

Jessica's Hope

Girl Eaten by a Tree

Clear Hearts Grey Flowers

Allegory of the Four Elements

These images are by Mark Ryden. I was shown his website in year one here at CPIT and fell in love with his work. I've always liked art that is a little bit twisted, and these certainly are. I love how these strange little kids are put into crazy environments. Although this is all illustration, I thought they were good to look at for inspiration. Creating these images as photographs would be really fun.

Airplane

Rose Garden

Walk

These photos were taken by Loretta Lux. I think these are quite relevant to what I am interested in doing for my theme. The girl in "Rose Garden" looks very grown up in the pose she is in and her clothing. It almost looks slightly inappropriate for her to be standing in such a way. The two girls in "Walk" also look quite grown up, and also a little possessed. I like the subtle colours used.

Three Witchery Sisters

Two Fluffy Kitties

Alice Descending

I have always been a fan of Jasmine Becket-Griffiths work. She paints creepy characters such as gothlings, fairies, fairy tale characters, mermaids and animals. I chose three images here that deal with children. I really like the first image, "The Three Witchery Sisters." I like the slightly evil look they have.

Researching these artists has made me start to think more indepth as to what I want my photos to eventually look like and say. I would like to create a slighlty twisted atmosphere to highlight my theme

An Email that was Sent to Me

The best natural exterior picture: 88.6% votes

The best natural interior picture: 90.7% votes

The best urban picture: 87.8% votes

The best "human" picture: 86.2% votes

The best "on the spot" picture: 86.3% votes

Special Catergory for best "human landscape": 87.7% votes

Special Category for best "animal world": 89.3% votes

Special Category for best "pets (dogs)": 83.6% votes

Special Category for best "pets (cats)": 82.7% votes

Special Category for best "urban painting": 88.9% votes

Special Category for best "body paints": 86.6% votes

Special Category for best "adventure sport": 80.9% votes

Special Category for best "transport": 86.7% votes

Special Category for best "public display (masculine)": 86.7% votes

Special Category for best "public display (feminine)": 86.7% votes

Special Category for best "public display (general)": 86.2% votes

The special mention: 86.7% votes

And finally the prize that leaves us with the last word: 92.6% votes

This email was sent to me by my sister. It is a look at the Top Internet Images for 2008. I thought that these images were really amazing. My favourites are the waterfall, the human landscape and this last image here of all the dolphins swimming with the wave. The animal ones are really cute too.

Brief Notes from Class

Photoshop: (for effects, colour correction, etc)
- Channel Mixer Filter, used to create better effects on photos
- Change photos from 8 bit to 16 bit. More colours in your images
- Masking: Using web colours makes it a bit easier.
White: Brings erased sections back, Black: Erases sections
- You can use gradients from white to black instead of masking to merge two images together softly. You can also use grey instead of white and black to slightly reveal images
- Use Levels to lighten, darken different layers

Mask Pro 4.0: (for easily eliminating sections of an image)
- Pen tool works like scissors
- Brush tool works with colours. Good for transparent images
- Keep/Drop eyedropper can be used for hair, transparent images
- Copy image in Photoshop and work on top image
- Open up the Mask Pro plug-in
- Highlight inside the outer edge you want to keep with the green marker, hold option alt to erase where you've highlighted or Apple Z which will go back in tiny steps if you make mistakes
- Use red Highlighter just along the outer edge of the area you want to erase, do not touch edge
- Options for Brush tool, tick "use tool decontamination"
- Use the brush tool to paint away the unwanted areas.
- Eyedropper: select colours you want to Keep (colours from inner areas) and areas you want to Drop (colours from outer areas)
- Save/Apply, will pop straight back into Photoshop
- Save as .tiff

Noise Ninja: (for removing noise from photos)
- Open file
- Profile Image
- Sharpening better than Photoshop

Lightroom: (for adjusting photos and easily exporting them in different ways)
- Never change shapening radius more than 1 pixel

Bridge: (for categorising images, adjusting them, etc)
- Metadata: use Keywords. You can go to Edit, Find and locate specific images (ie. sky images)
- RAW Files: a separate file is created which has all the edits you've made to the original, the original isn't effected
- You can open any file in RAW in Bridge or save as RAW in Photoshop

Research: Photographing Babies and Toddlers

Because I am considering taking photos of children for my photography project, I thought it would be good to do a bit of research into taking these photos. Here are a few pieces of information that I thought might be useful:

- Occasionly it is worth including a scale object in a show which you can measure the child against. This makes it easier to tell what age they are.
- For the most natural-looking shots of babies, it is important to get the camera down to their level.
- In some shots it is worth including more of the scene so that the viewer gets a real idea of just how small the toddler or baby is.
- Although it is best to shoot from the child's levelo, clutter in the background may make this impractical. A simple way to manufacture a plainer backdrop is to shoot from high up so the floor becomes the background.
- To get the baby looking towards the camera and in a good humour, you will need to help of mum or dad, who can coax and comfort the child from just out of shot.
- Babies can not sit up on their own for the first few months, but from a few days old they can be propped carefully on a chair.

(These pieces of information were gathered from the book Photographing Babies and Toddlers by John Hedgecoe. Published by Collins and Brown Limited in 2002.)

Ideas for my Final Project

After I did a bit of researching, I began to think of ideas for my final project that will be due in at the end of the year. Because I love Jill Greenberg's photos of crying children, I am interested in taking photos of children myself. I know that this could be challenging, but if done right I think my phots could be quite beautiful.

Firstly I started to think of children I knew that I could ask to be photographed. I have:
- Aaliya who is just 2 months old
- Sisters Aerika (5) and Taylah (7)
- Suzannah (10)
- Sara (14)

I like the fact that these children (and teenager) are all at staggered ages, so if I chose to photograph all of them I could use my photographs to kind of tell a story ofver the years. However I will have to ask their permission, and their parents permission before I settle on who will be on my final list.

The idea that I have come up with could be a bit controversial, which I will need to describe to the parents of my models. I would like to focus on the theme of children, more importantly girls, growing up too fast these days. It makes me sick to see ten year olds wearing makeup and getting piercings, or 13 year olds having their first child. To put across this message I would like to photograph girls being subjected to certain situations, however do it in post-production so I am not being the cause of such destruction. For example, I would like to photograph the 5 year old reading a book that is titled something like, "Dressing for your body type." I would give her a book with a blank cover for the photograph, and manipulate it later on to include the title. I think this theme could work really well with the lighting effects that I have seen in some of my research, such as the lighting that Jill Greenberg uses. This idea would involve taking photos in the studio with props or photographing individual environments to bring in afterwards.

I have not yet thought of the different scenarios that I would like to play my models in, but this will develop over the course of this year as I learn more about photographic techniques.

Reseach: Blink

These two photos were taken by Abelardo Morell. The first image is Camera Obscura Image of a Building Inside St. Panoras Chambers Room, 2001 and the second image is Camera Obscura Image of Umbrian Landscape Over Bed, 2000. His photographs feature themes such as science, art, topography, landscape, architecture and now in more recent works, colour.

"The initial idea for the work came out of Morell's demonstrations to his photography students at the Massachusetts College of Art in the mid-1980s where he turned his classroom into a Camera Obscura. The exercise was designed not only to elicit a sense of awe and wonder, but also to connect students to the precursive roots of the medium. It was not until 1991, however, that Morell decided to document the process on film, and he began by taking pictures in his own house in Brookline, Massachusetts. In order to capture the elusive projections, the exposures had to be about eight hours long, but the initial results charged Morell with possibilities. The play between the inside and outside world, the tension between the right way up and upside down, the surreal contrast of buildings and beds, trees and walls, formed a miraculous and original vision of a magical but still real world."

I really love how the two different types of images in his photographs merge together to become one. It almost makes you question which part is reality and which has been projected. It is interesting that the projected image is upside down, so you almost want to flip the picture upside down to see if you have it the right way up. Nice attention to light and contrast.

* quote from blog titled "The Year in Pictures" by James Danziger.
http://pictureyear.blogspot.com/

These two photos are by Jean-Pierre Khazem and are from the East of Eden series created in 2000. These photos feature models wearing oversized 3D masks and creates a somewhat childlike fantasy experience.

I couldn't find much information on this photographer, most of it was in foreign languages. I think these photographs are really eye-catching, in a kind of spooky way. The masks make the models look almost demonic and unstable, however there is something quite pure and innocent about them.

These photos are by Fran Herbello and are from the series A Imaxe E Semellanza (In Our Own Likeness) 2000. His work plays with themes of consumerism, fashion and advertising.

"I like to play with everyday elements creating new situations that break the usual way of seeing the familiar. I carve on the skin, I make ephemeral interventions which I document with truthful, scientifically rigorous black and white images."

"There is the possibility of moving through virtual spaces with an adopted and idealized body.
The reflexive verbs which describe actions made on the body itself lose their quality.
It is no longer I the one who moves my body, the one who moves."

I really like his work. We have a man's back that is transformed into a t-shirt, a chest into a zipped top, a foot into a shoe and a hand into a glove. They look so realistic; they really look connected to the skin. I think this approach is a really unique way at looking at his themes. I like that these images are in black and white, a good way of merging the human skin with manufactured object such as clothing tags and zippers. Really nice dramatic contrast.

* quotes from the artist himself on http://www.alternativemuseum.org/ 2009.

These two photos are by Naoya Hatake Yamas and are from the Underground series of 1999. These photos were taken on the photographer's journey below the surface of the city following the route of a hidden river beneath Tokyo.

I didn't manage to find any information on this photographer. However, I really love these images: the colours, the reflections, the pure black areas, the shapes created by the light. They almost look like a painting.They are simply beautiful.

These photos of the famous model Kate Moss, were taken by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott who worked together on this series called Satin Doll, March 2001.

Mert and Marcus, as they are more commonly known, are famous fashion photographers who are well known to to Hollywood. They have shot many celebriteis, such as Natalie Portman, Madonna, and here, Kate Moss.

I have never really been a big fan of Kate Moss, but I think these photos are really edgy and have creative angles which make them really dynamic. I like how the lighting is used to capture her bright blonde hair and how her body complements the environment. I also think her clothing supports this. These photographs remind me that clothing, makeup, etc is very important to the overall look of the photo. This is definately something I will go over when shooting people, if I choose to.

(all of these images are from Blink: 100 Photographers, 010 Curators, 010 Writers. Phaidon Press Limited, 2002.)