Thursday 30 January 2014

People and Place Assignment 5, Shoot 3

Shoot 3: Simon, writer, 29/01/2014


Simon Whaley is a talented writer and photographer, so taking his picture seems a little cheeky.  However he's very friendly and approachable, so I hope these don't offend him too much!

Location

I most of these pictures in his office.  He took me for a walk and I hoped to take some pictures in the countryside, since one of the topics on which he writes is the outdoors and walking.  However, I made the rookie mistake of believing the battery state on my camera, and negected to take a spare.  The weather was dull and drizzly, which is no excuse for not being properly equipped.

Poses

Portrait
 And in monochrome
 At his desk
 And close-up
 Simon's a landscape photographer, so his Mac wallpaper's suitable spectacular
 Even in monochrome
 I failed to take the expected outdoor photographs, but here's Simon, posting off another submission

 Simon's a teacher of writing too.  Here's a shot from a workshop a couple of weeks ago. 

Lessons Learned

Don't assume that the battery will last for just a few more shots: if you've got a charged spare, take it with you!
Pay attention to backgrounds.
Have a plan, or at least an idea of the views you're going to take, and seek variety.  I hope I've photographed Simon's 'best side'!

People and Place: Assignment 5, Shoot 2

Shoot 2: Diane, writer, 27/01/2014 

Location

Diane lives in an old miners' cottage.  She's fond of unicorns and dinosaurs, and also keeps chickens.  She has a cosy writer's office in the attic and a long garden for the chickens.

Poses

With unicorns
In the office.
 At her workstation.
With her library as a background
 The same, cropped
 A streak of sunlight came through the skylight and I asked her to move so it cut across her face.
Here it is in monochrome 
 Diane smiles a lot, it was a change to see her in a more serious mood
 So I cropped in close
And, in monochrome
We moved into the garden
Backlit, with the reflector
They say never work with animals.  The hen usually doesn't mind being picked up.  Perhaps it was the presence of the camera, but she at first she resisted Diane's efforts to catch her, but eventually succumbed.
 Diane has a lovely cloak with a hood, and I took these romantic shots
Firstly without the reflector 
Then introspective, with the reflector 
 And probably the most attractive shot of the day 
 Also in monochrome 
 
Thanks to Diane my model, and to Suki for assisting - and map-reading!

Information

Assistant
Suki was again useful, because she could talk to the model and also hold the reflector while I took photographs. I found it easier to talk to the model this time, but I was glad of Suki's presence too.
Technical
800 ISO; f5.6-7.1, 1/50 indoors. 200ISO, f8, aperture priority outdoors. 18-55 mm lens, reflector.

Monday 27 January 2014

People and Place: Assignment 5, Shoot 1

The Brief

To produce a portfolio of images of writers and artists in their natural habitat for use in magazine/newspaper articles on the creative people of Shropshire.  By ‘natural habitat’ I mean the places where they work, or find inspiration, or which express aspects of themselves and their lives.  The locations and times are to be agreed between model and photographer.

A by-product of this will be to provide the writers and artists with images they may use in their own publicity material.

The Photographs

Selected images will be posted on my learning log online and a smaller number of selected prints will be forwarded to the OCA for evaluation.  Each participant may if they wish receive prints and .jpg files of themselves.

Shoot 1: Sue, writer, 23/01/2014

Kit
18-55 mm lens, reflector.  I took my studio flash outfit but didn't take it out of the car.  It's bulky and would have dominated everything aand inhibited movement.  The reflecor was useful, though white-painted doors worked too.
Assistant
Suki was very useful, because she could talk to the model and also hold the reflector while I tok photographs.  Talking and relating to the model is one of my weaknesses and I was glad of her presence.

Technical

800 ISO; f5.6-7.1, 1/50.  Where there was a big lighting contrast I used manual rather than my usual aperture priority.  In future I'd hope to stop action shots with 6400 ISO or flash.  I took 99 photographs, some of which were for exposure testing.

Images

I was excited at seeing Tony Ray-Jones's contact sheets so I decided to run off my own.  It's a failing of digital photography that there are normally no contact sheets to provide clues to the photographer's thinking.  Photoshop can produce these without needing to have the images converted from RAW first.  Advantages for me are that I can review pictures in print and in my armchair; I can record my thoughts and decisions, and review them later on.  It enables me to capture some of the learning I'm doing.

Location

Sue has a lovely spacious house with a large lawned garden, so there were several locations to choose from.  However I was captivated by the office and most of the images are from there.  There's a large desk with a lovely green leather chair. These items impressed me so much that I rather disregarded Sue's actual workstation: a table behind the door, with a steel and plastic swivel chair. This is more of an administrative workstation than a writer's desk.

Poses

In the office, in the green leather chair, using the reflector to light her face. There was a bookcase in the corner of the room and I was able to get shots with this in the background.
The large desk on the right obtrudes; it wouldn't have been a great hardship for me to step half a pace to the left!
 
This is the one she chose. The presence of the books emphasises that she's a writer.
 
It's very similar to this, which I think is more active but harder, especially in monochrome.

We then moved across the office to her workstation.
The sun was moving round and caught the edge of her face.  If this had occurred to me earlier I'd have taken these shots first, before it got round so far.

We moved her office chair in front of the big green one and turned her round, so that the sun coming in through the high window behind her cast a halo on her hair.
It's a pleasant image, the halo effect on the hair is attractive.

I prefer this, but in colour, the background's a bit busy.

It's less cluttered, and stronger, in monochrome.
I removed the distracting bright lines on top of the radiator.  I think this is my favourite.

We moved to the dining room. This gives onto the garden through French windows, and is where she keeps her musical instruments, including a large pair of bongoes. 
I fell between two stools here. When she played the bongoes there was movement blur and when I asked her to keep still, the spontaneity leaked away and the pictures looked posed. In future, I'd use my biggest ISO or fill-in flash to stop the movement rather than make the model do it.

The garden background tended to overexposure, but I got super modelling on her face, again with the reflector. This was propped up below her while my assistant talked to her.


In general I was able to capture views where the model was not obviously aware of the camera and was animated and well modelled. A couple of to-camera shots. I tried for variety; when using books or garden as part of the picture I felt the figure was too small. Again, I'd ask her to read a book or use her laptop, to get the face illumined from a logical source.

Sunday 26 January 2014

Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2013

This exhibition is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 6th April 2014.  My final assignment for People and Place will comprise a series of portraits, so I was doubly interested.

One recurring theme here is twins.  There's always been something sexy about twins, since long before the Collinsons. There are three photographs of twins here; my favourite was:
The Twins, by Adrian Peacock.
Two elderly women, identical twins, are posed lying on a bed, dressed in bathrobes.  There's no sexual feeling here; they're clearly comfortable with each other - if not with the situation the photographer has put them in.  A display of innocent affection.

Other images that caught my eye:
Jari and Terhi, by Jari Salo
And expectant couple, drug users; she very pregnant and looking at him while he looks to camera.  His eyes are bloodshot; has he been crying?  They face a tough future together, coping with parenthood and battling addiction.
Beauty Recovery Room 01, by J Yeo
A young woman, clad in tights and bra, sits on a bed in a room, looking at the image of herself in a mirror off.  She has a bandage over her head and under her chin, having recently had plastic surgery.  There's a mixture of hope and fear on her face.
Mary Beard, by Adrian Peacock
This woman with controversial opinions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Beard_(classicist)) sits on an upright chair with a French window behind.  There are books piled on the table beside her, indicative of her calling.  A sunlit book provides reflective light up onto her face.  The media cruelly said of her, "should be kept away from a camera".  The photographer accepted the implied challenge and has produced a warm, sympathetic, attractive image, avoiding problems like double chin, etc.
Zadie Smith, by Linda Bowler
This writer stares calmy out of a window off left, her hands clasped comfortably together.  A vertical pale line (curtain?) divides the frame into left (model) and right (a blank, dark space).  The composition is interesting, and works.  A different, more conventional, framing would not be as powerful.  Something for me to consider.
Sofia, by Nestor Diaz
The photographer's wife sits right, her crossed legs pointing left.  She has had a mastectomy; the scar has healed.  This picture is partly about colour: the luminous green of the wall behind the orange of her patterned skirt, the light tan of her skin, paler on the surviving breast, darker on the depressed site where the other was.  Her direct gaze is challenging: "This is what I look like.  Get over it."
Vanessa Redgrave, by Christopher Lane
I'm afraid that this seems to be a picture of the still-beautiful woman's sack-like jumper, which dominates the frame.   The shadow of her underwear showing through it helps draw attention away from her face.  If most of it were cropped away, this would become a picture of the woman, not her clothing, and her beauty and strength would be prominent.

I detect two themes in my response to these images. 
The idea of a story, of something about to happen, interests me.  It extends the interest of the photograph into the future.  Without it, a photograph has no time but the instant at which it was taken.  It allows the viewer to contribute to the picture by speculating what is to happen next.
The other one is more commercial.  People usually want to appear their best, and in a formal portrait the photographer is generally expected to try to achieve this.  There's a strong contrast between the photographs of  Mary Beard and Vanessa Redgrave.  In one, the photographer has shown the best of his model.  In the other, he's allowed her beauty to slip away. 

Friday 24 January 2014

Only in England: Tony Ray-Jones, Martin Parr

"Photography can be a mirror and reflect life as it is, but I also think it is possible to walk, like Alice, through the looking-glass and find another world with the camera." Tony Ray-Jones.

I recommend this super exhibition at the Science Museum's new Media Space.
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/Plan_your_visit/exhibitions/only_in_england.aspx
It closes on 16th March 2014.

I was attracted to the exhibition by the inclusion of Martin Parr; I hadn't heard of Tony Ray-Jones.   Yet I found I preferred the Ray-Jones images; they show an affection for their subjects, even while sending them up.  He died in 1972, still a young man.

Photographs by Tony Ray-Jones

The first section of the exhibition is of photographs taken and printed by Tony Ray-Jones.  They are small by today's standards: 8" x 6".  I feel this size was suitable for the images, giving a cosy, homely feeling.  I found a recurrent theme in this section: isolation, potential, waiting.  Places that wait, and the people that wait in them.   Spaces that should throng with people but are almost deserted.   The killing of time.  The interminable, dead, time before the expected something happens.  I give examples:
Ballroom, Morecambe, 1968.
A couple dance alone, to the music of an organist and a drummer.  There is room on the stage for a lot more musicians, and space on the floor for many couples.  A white-coated waiter does something to a table.  The dancers are practising, the waiter preparing, and the ballroom is waiting, for the show to begin.
Highland Gathering, Richmond on Thames, 1968.
A field, a tent, a small stage, all set up but no gathering.  Two men, well wrapped up, one in a kilt, sit at a trestle table to sell tickets but no one has come.  They do not even idly watch the piper standing on the stage.
Battersea Park Easter Parade, 1966.
People simply hang about, waiting for the parade to pass by.
Douglas, Isle of Man, 1968.
Two women sprawl in sunshine on steps outside a terraced house.  One sits on the steps, the other lies flat back on a table, hands on abdomen, shins dangling off the end, careless of how she looks.  Bored, they wait...
Dickens Festival, Broadstairs, 1968.
Exterior: a garden.  Two smartly dressed waitresses stand behind a table.  There are no people to wait on: the place is deserted.
Crufts Dog Show, 1966.
A woman reclines, curled in the enclosure intended for her Great Dane, half-hidden by the dog.  They derive comfort from each other's presence, contact, while they wait for something  to happen; for the waiting to be over.

Photographs by Martin Parr

These are from his monochrome phase in the 1970s.  They images don't seeem to me to have the life, the sympathy with subject, the meaning, of those by Tony Ray-Jones.

Photographs by Tony Ray-Jones, printed by Martin Parr

Martin Parr reviewed the contact sheets left by Tony Ray-Jones and printed the photographs in this section.   At 16" x 12", they don't seem to me to have the impact of the smaller images.  There's more waiting:
Margate, 1967.
A mother and two children lean against a wall in a street, their suitcases by their side.

Contact Sheets by Tony Ray-Jones

These covered a wall.  It was exciting and interesting to see the images captured; those selected for printing and those rejected.  It revealed aspects of the way he worked.  Angled and poorly framed images indicate that he often shot from the hip.  A useful ploy, when shooting candid photographs in the street.

Notebook by Tony Ray-Jones

Pages this were displayed on the other side of the wall.  They also provided insight and evidence of the way he worked; the things he thought might be interesting or worthy of attention; the planning that went on.  There's a page of exhortations to himself, titled Approach:
http://mediaspacelondon.tumblr.com/post/52131493534/dont-take-boring-pictures-our-first-exhibition

My Notes

There is more of Tony Ray-Jones's material at the Bradford Museum's Photo Library. I must visit it.
I will incorporate some of what I have learned into my own practice: I shall plan more; I'll prepare more thoroughly; and try not to take boring pictures