The Word Becomes Art

Whereas the previous exercise looked at the different qualities of daylight, this one considers artificial light.  I took a series of photos of small compositions using my macro lens and a table-mounted tripod. Some of the photos are of small ‘message in a bottle’ altered art pieces that came from an art swap in which we each created a series of artworks from small medical bottles. Following that, I photographed an award I won in the form of a glass prism. I thought the glass in each of the compositions would be interesting to observe in artificial light because of their transparent yet reflective qualities. I discovered that manual mode doesn’t work with a macro lens so I used either aperture priority or shutter priority for these shots. As can be the case with close-up photography, even with a tripod, and especially in low light, some of my images were blurred. I deleted these as the first step in my selection process.  I used a variety of light sources: two lamps, one at ei...

Before the exercise on light, there was an optional task involving the histogram, which I chose to do and found very informative. The premise is that, left to its own devices, a camera will average exposure to the mid tone. This can be a problem. First we took shots of objects of a dark, middle and light tone: I had a navy top, a grey top and a white sheet of paper. Looking at the histograms for these (the top row below), they were all similar, with a spike in the mid tone which quickly fell away on either side. For the second row of photos of the same objects, we were to set the camera to manual and use either the aperture or shutter speed to even out the histogram. Having observed the difference, the exercise itself called for a number of photos exploring the quality of natural light. I decided to take a range of photos through the span of one day, beginning in the early morning and continuing until evening, in order to sample the way the light changes through the day. I set the came...

The exercise asks us to stand somewhere relatively high up with a wide view and look deeply at what we can see, looking at the background, midddle ground, foreground and the image as a whole, including the sky. Having looked, we are then to take one photo which sums up our observation.  Exercise 3 actually only wants one photo but I’m sharing four. This is why. After having learned about the photographers with Parkinson’s turning their impairment into a technique, I considered the ways in which I would see the scene differently from people with full sight. There are two features of my sight which seem relevant. Firstly, as my eyes don’t work together (binocular vision) I have a limited depth of field. Secondly, I don’t see blur  I have nystagmus, and my eyes move constantly. One optician described it as being as if my focus is like a target. My eyes keep trying to hit the target but nine times out of ten they miss. My brain filters out the unfocused images so I only see the sh...

There are two parts to this exercise: research and photography. As with Exercise 1, the focus is on recording movement in a still image, however, where the previous task was to freeze a moment in time, for this exercise it is to capture the sense of movement within the two dimensional frame. I began by following up some of the references from the OCA material. I was particularly interested to learn more about the photography of the person who used the tremor of Parkinson’s disease as a photographic technique to show both the effect of the condition and the sense of movement of traffic at night. However, the OCA hasn’t referenced the image and my attempts to search for it drew a blank. I did find information on other photographers with Parkinson’s desease though. I was particularly struck by this image from Jay Zuckerkorn’s series, “Movement Disorder”, which is a series of photos of people on the beach, with the blur from tremor being the primary approach. Jay Zuckerkorn, “Movement Diso...

The course materials looked at the historical development of photography, and I researched a few of the practitioners mentioned. I was particularly interested in the work of Deguerre, and how the daguerreotype came into being through changes to a printmaking process. During my HND in Fine Art I did a lot of printmaking, and while my preferred approach was collagraph and intaglio, I did do some etching on metal - copper was expensive so only used occasionally, but other metals were available to the process. I can imagine the excitement of producing an image from light rather than etching by hand. For this first exercise we are looking at time in photography, and the task was to take still photos of a moving object. For this entire project we are using shutter priority, and all the images were taken at 1/100s. I began with my normal lens but quickly moved on to using my macro lens in order to be able to take close up images. The flowing water wasn’t prominent enough in my first batch of ...