Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese artist who is well know for his seascape photos. There is a long standing relationship between Japanese artists and the sea, with one of the most famous pieces of art from Japan being 'The great wave off Kanagawa'. The seascapes from Sugimoto were taken over many years and in many places around the globe with varied weather conditions. For obvious reasons I could not travel to the same level of places as Sugimoto. So I made due with what I had and travelled to as many places as I could, I went to Essex, Swansea and Norfolk to take the photos.
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Bill Armstrong is photographer who is famous for his photos of models. These photos are blurred and brightly colour, usually only containing one subject. I attempted to recreate his style using a projector and some images that i had made in Ms paint that were brightly colour and interesting. I then had the models stand in front of the projector and I used the manual focus on my camera to take away focus from them. After doing this series I decided to move away from the camera lens as the centre point of the series, as the both this series and the previous one were focused on using it.
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1: Load the image into photoshop and crop away some of the mess to create tighter and more organised images
2:Use the blur filter and varying intensities at create the blur effect. 3:change the saturation to make image brighter to match Armstrong's style better. |
Francesca Woodman was a abstract photograph who used long exposure to take abstract photos of models. She worked in black and white and her photos are often are emotionally negative. This reflects Woodman's personal life, in which she faced a battle with depression until she tragically killed herself in 1981. She often took photos of the model engaged in fast movements, which gave the effect of after images blurring behind each model. After responding to her works myself, I found that I liked working with long exposure and wanted to take it further.
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Graham Owens is a photographer who often focuses on nature and take high resolution detail images of flowers using a macro lens. This photos are often vibrant aswell as technically complex. I was interested in the technical process in creating these photos and decided that I wanted to attempt it myself. To get photos on the skill level of Graham Owen seemed like it would be quite a technical challenge so I bought a macro lens and ring light to account for the loss in light that such a zoom would produce.
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I initially started wide aperture (3.2f) for the photos of the whole flower but when I decided to take closer photo I used a small aperture (11f) to increase the depth of field. I used the LED ring to evenly light the flower and have no dark spots. If the petals looked slightly overexposed, I would lower lower the exposure by 2 thirds of a stop. I also had my camera set to take photos after a 2 second timer, i did this to prevent camera shake. For the very close up photos, i used a macro lens. I took the photos in front of a black or white board to draw the eye of the viewer away from the background and towards the flower's centre. I also used the super macro function on my camera for the very close shots.
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Michael Bosanko is a light painting photographer who uses long exposure and light to draw stunning images out of light in his photos. Light painting is a subject in photography that I found very interesting to do, as it require a more technical method than my previous series and I enjoyed seeing the vibrant shapes that came out. After this series, I decided I wanted to move away from using models and try to work with inanimate subjects. Although I was certain that I wanted to continue with long exposure.
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Tillmans creates abstract images by using the dark room and photogram techniques. By doing this he creates surreal images with a strange sandlike aspect and waves like the viewer is looking at dust. Tillmans' work is always connected to a wider issue, and his Greifbar series is no different. He began the series a few years after his partner died due to AIDs and Tillmans' discovered that he had contracted the virus. Tillmans' often talks about the impact that the epidemic had on the gay community and how they recovered, so it is easy to see this reflected in his Greifbar works. They often show a duality between the harder dark colours and the smoother lighter colours, perhaps commenting on the community's steady movement out of the darkness of the past and into the future.
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1: Load your light painting image into photoshop.
2: Then invert the image to create a dark misty version of the original image. 3: Use the Hue and Saturation tool to change the colour of the image further. 4: The final image should have a certain dark vibrance to it. Tip: I recommend upping the Saturation to full first, as any colour change will be more vibrant and interesting if you do. Also try different Hues to create a different image. |
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Michael Kenna is a landscape photographer who uses many techniques to create surreal and strange images. The type of photos I will be responding to will be the ones that have used long exposure and water to produce abstract photo. He has taken many of his more famous pieces in japan but due to the fact that I do not have access to Japan easily, I will use water in closer proximity to me.
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Nadev Kander is an Israeli photographer who is known for impressive and large scale landscape photography. Kander's work is somewhat similar to some of Michael Kenna's photos. Both of them favour smooth and flat ground, with landscape as the central style. Both artists have used long exposure with water in their photography to produce the smooth effect that I was attempting to replicate. A noticeable difference between Kenna and Kander is the use of colour. Kenna often works in black and white and usually takes his photos with a 2x2 aspect ratio, while Kander seems to prefer colour and works primarly in the standard photo ratio of 3x2. Personally I found that I like the interesting and subtle colours that are present in some of Kander's work, the God's Country series was the primary example of this.
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I used it with Google maps to work out where would be the best place for taking Kenna-esque photos with the light being varied enough to produce some Kander-style colour. After some time I narrowed it down to a somewhere on the East coast of England. I chose it as it had some of the best light as it would be directly in light during the morning and afternoon. The next step was to work out places that would have interesting object to take photos, it would have to fit to a certain criteria. The objects would have to be somewhat submerged in water but would also be not entirely solid. I investigated ship graveyards as an initial idea but found that they would be too uninteresting to take photos of. I then moved on to checking out sea forts but found that many were to far out to sea or to collapsed to be useful. It was after this that i found mention of some structures in Essex Dovercourt called the 'Dovercourt Lighthouses'. After some more research I became sure that this was the place that I needed.
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The goal of this final series of photos was to respond to Michael Kenna's work using all of the knowledge and practice that the previous series had given me and to build on it with my own ideas and to produce photos with similar colour palette to Nadev Kander's work. It required planning and equipment to create these images. Initially, I used an app called 'The Photographer's Ephemeris' which is a sun and moon calculator that tells the user how the light will appear in almost anywhere on the Earth. It accounts for atmospheric refraction and height above the horizon.
After working out where I needed to go, I began to plan my process when I was there, as i would only have a short period of time to take photos as the light would change to much for me. I started this by studying how other photographer's on Instagram had been able to do certain photos. While doing this I discovered a feature in most DLSRs called BULB shutter speed, which is a function that allows the photographer to open and close the shutter to their own chosen length After finding out about this, I noticed that if I took BULB photos, the image would blur when I closed the shutter due to camera shake from me touching the camera. To get around this I purchased a external clicker that would allow me to take the photos without shaking the camera. During planning I also encountered another app called 'ND Filter Timer'. It was specifically designed to help photographers take long exposure photos with correct exposure while using an ND filter. As I knew I would be using the BULB feature and an ND filter I also knew that I would need this app to work out the time lengths. Due to the time sensitive nature of the light, I wouldn't have to trial and error the right time for each photo. I also prepared a tripod so that I could take these photos, as for obvious reasons I would not be able to take them free hand.
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