So Far.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   This is what I have photoshopped so far. They're all real rough - I have a lot more editing to do. However, I wanted to look at them together, to see which effect I like better - inverted or not inverted. Neither of them are true "night vision," but it's the closest I can get to the real thing.

   This is one of two ideas I'm working on. I'm still waiting to hear back about borrowing an infrared camera. If I can, I'll get some funky photos with that. If not, I'll go with this idea, that lighting etc affects mood. These photos looked at normally would probably just look like two people meeting at a bar together and going home. However, with the night vision, I'm hoping the photos look a little more criminal. I hope that the mood changes so that the viewer thinks something is wrong, something bad is happening. The photos could be taken either way. I still have a lot more photos to take and photoshop, but this is a good start, and seeing them all together will help me determine what I have left to do.

   It's hard to get all the photos the same, since they have a lot of different lighting to them. Some are brighter than others, which is problematic when I try to invert them. I took all the photos at night, in hopes that it would be dark enough. I had to have a long enough shutter to get details though, which made the photos bright.

Artist Precedent: Elliot Landy.

The Band, Richard & Garth's house above the Ashokan resevoir, infrared film, Woodstock, 1969.

The Band, Richard & Garth's house above the Ashokan resevoir, infrared film, Woodstock, 1969.

Rick Danko, Music From Big Pink session, infrared color film, Woodstock, NY, 1968.

The Band, pixelated art.

The Band, pixelated art.

Bob Dylan, outside his Byrdcliff home, infrared color film, Woodstock, NY, 1968.

USA. NYC. 1969. Ornette COLEMAN & son, Aero on infrared film, in Central Park.

   Elliot Landy is best known for his photos of professional musicians. He was the official photographer of Woodstock. Some of his photos were infrared or pixelated, perhaps an homage to the psychadelic era of the 60s and 70s. Most of his photos are relatively normal, except for the fact that they're infrared. It is normal subject matter, but seems strange because the colors are not as they should be. I like how Landy takes something so commonplace, but gives his own twist to the photos. It makes you take more time to look at them than if they were normal, visible light photos. I don't want to do exactly what Landy has done, but he has definitely been an influence to me. I can use night vision or infrared on something without it being army combat or police hunting criminals.

Artist Precedent: Sophie Calle

   Sophie Calle is a photographer who pushed boundaries with her "Stalker" series. She followed a man around, photographing him, without him knowing. Is this a total invasion of privacy? This is now what we're subjected to daily, with security cameras, cell phones, CCTV, etc. 

‘Suite Vénitienne,’ 1980, Paris

   This series of photos was taken in 1980. Could this be the reason the photos are grainy? Or perhaps Calle purposefully did that. She made the images black and white on purpose, perhaps to enhance the 'surveillance' feel.

   In this series, we see a man, the same man, over and over. He is always in the center of the shot, and is always looking away from the camera. He is always at a distance. This is because Calle took the photos without the subject knowing. There are lots of vertical lines in all of the photos, which is an interesting aesthetic.

   I like how Calle has used the 'surveillance' look in her photos, and has taken pictures of a stranger. I want to mimic this, in the sense that everyone is constantly under surveillance.

EM Spectrum Research.

   This video gives a really interesting contrast between night vision and thermal imaging. This leads me to think that maybe I should steer away from night vision, and move more towards different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. Each wavelength will reveal something different that visible light can not.

 

The EM spectrum and photography: 

Radio - Largest wavelength. On Earth, radio waves are sent through the crust, and reach an antennae at another location. Radio waves can penetrate some stuff, but not everything, so they can give an image of what the waves can't penetrate. In space, radio telescopes can collect data from things that emit radio waves, and somehow, with lots of science and magic, create an image.

Radio image of galaxies from ALMA in the Chilean Andes.

  Microwave - I haven't been able to find much about this. However, it seems that microwave imaging is used in medicine, but may not be safe for humans. My understanding is that microwaves are shot at tissue, and are absorbed my the tissue at different lengths depending on what is present.  

Microwave image showing a mannequin with a concealed weapon.

  Infrared - This is a type of photography that will perceive heat rather than visible light. It includes night vision.


Visible - Cameras use visible light waves to create images just like our eyeballs.   Ultraviolet - Like black lights. Images are composed using the UV wavelength instead of visible light. It's similar to visible light photos, because they're next to each other on the spectrum and there is some overlapping.  

Sunscreen absorbs UV waves.

  X-Ray - Kind of life microwave imaging, in that x-rays are absorbed my different media at different lengths.

Typical X-Ray. Bone is denser than tissue so it shows up.   Gamma - Smallest wavelength. I think the nucleus of some element emits a gamma ray, and a special gamma camera can detect it.  

Gamma image of breast cancer tumor.  

I don't fully understand all the different EM frequencies, but they all show something different than visible light. I could use this to my advantage with this project.

Transitions.

   After tutorial today, I feel like my project is already starting to change. I'm now looking to kind of do both of my initial ideas. I want to show how light affects mood, but throughout the electromagnetic spectrum - with visible and non-visible (to humans) light. Humans can only see visible light, but so much more exists outside of that. Using infrared or ultraviolet will expose things we normally can't see.

 This diagram shows the electromagnetic spectrum. I could try to take photos using these techniques, or at least mimic them.

Project 3 First Shoot.

   This is actually more like my first through fourth shoots. I went out more than once and got a lot of different scenes. The photos aren't good - I mainly just wanted to see what I could do to them in photoshop. I just tried to get photos of people so I could see how radically they changed when I tried to night vision them. I'm not pleased with the results at all. I didn't so much night vision the photos, as just turn them green. I couldn't figure out how to make them look more like night vision. I'm seriously starting to rethink this idea, because I don't know how I would make them appear night vision, and I also don't know if I could come up with enough varied subject matter for 6-8 photos. It's a cool idea, but I'm not sure how practical it is. Here are the two cover sheets of before and after I night-vision-ed the photos.

 

 

Project 3 Research.

   I'm curious at looking how lighting affects mood with this project. I especially want to look at the night vision effect, because that always conjures up notions of combat for me. I only really encountered night vision in video games, and those are pretty violent. I want to see if making something night vision will make it seem like combat. I looked for some screen shots from video games, but they were hard to come by. Here are some night vision photos that seem creepy. If they were regularly exposed, I think they would have a totally different feel to them.

 

 

 

 

   I also looked at how lighting affects the mood of a photo overall. The following photos are the same RAW file, but were processed using different colour temperatures. The first is cool and the second is warm. They have totally different feels to them.



 

Portland Bill, Dorset, UK.

Andrew Gibson 2012.

Weekly Task 8: Light Drawing.

   I spent a lot of time experimenting with light drawing, and the majority of it did not turn out very successfully. I wanted to play around at first, and my I soon realized my ideas were way too grand for the scope of the task and my talents.

My first attempt. Godzilla? Not quite.

Stars? Easier to draw? No.

   I soon admitted defeat and went back home to ask for help from my flatmates. I thought it would be much easier with models. We changed venues and I started over.

 

A cat! It worked!

I think this photo worked really well.

 

The most successful, in my opinion.

 

Of course. The most cliche. I had to do it.

 

Problems I had include:

• It was too bright out! I had a hard time finding somewhere dark enough for such a long exposure.
• I have no artistic talents. Drawing is hard.
• The scale and placement of the light drawing is hard, especially when you're not standing near the object you're trying to draw on.
• My models were fidgetty therefore blurry.
• I was alone for a while when I was experimenting. It was tricky to do everything by myself - take the photo, run around and draw, see how the photo turned out, figure out what changes to make, etc...
• I kept showing up in the photo while I was drawing! I tried to move fast enough that I wouldn't be exposed, but it wasn't always possible.
• A lot of the photos came out blurry, and I don't know if this is just because my models moved or because I didn't focus correctly, or what.
• I had a hard time thinking of a good idea that wasn't way out of my range.

Project 3: Light Proposal.

   I am currently in the process of researching and developing my idea for the third project. I have a general idea of what I want to do, but my idea is progressing and expanding and I need to narrow it down again. Here's my proposal for now, although I know it will change as the other two have.

   Light is so very important to humans. We use it every day in infinite ways. It allows us to see and be seen, but it can also deceive us and give us false impressions. Certain lighting tricks us into thinking of a certain mood. I aim to demonstrate this, using one particular technique - night vision.
   Night vision is usually reserved for the military, combat, and violent video games. For this reason, we typically associate this style of lighting and photography with fighting and severe situations. I will take some seemingly commonplaces scenes and transform them into a battle zone simply by converting regular photographs into night vision.
   This project will illuminate (no pun intended) the relationship between light and mood, and will help the audience to think about the preconceived notions they have of the mood of a photo given the light sources.
   If I were to show this in a gallery, I would probably have each photo hung separately on a white wall, with dim lighting in the room. I think this would aid in the creepy vibe given by the photos. However, upon closer inspection, the audience would perhaps discover that the photos are regular scenes.

Project 3: Light Ideas.

   When we first spoke about the third project in lecture, some ideas immediately popped into my head.

       1) I'm reading a book called Beware Invisible Cows, about the universe basically. There's a chapter in it that struck me. Here's part of it.

   "Your reflection is no longer you. You have always already moved on by the time you come to look at yourself, almost as if the mirror has taken a picture of you as you once were. I am exaggerating, up to a point, but the difference between you, as you are now, and you, as the mirror represents you, is measurable.
   "The reflection is your younger you. This is what you used to look like, a short time ago. And when I say 'short,' I mean: very short indeed."

   ..."To see the past it is only necessary to hold the mirror far enough away from the object. Space is not just proportionate to time, space is time. The further we go through space, or simply see into space, the further back in time we travel."

   ..."We are born, we live, we die: we have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But looked at from a cosmological perspective, not only do we never die, but from certain points of view, we are still not even born. We are born again and again as we pass through new galaxies, and we will die too just as often, only to be born again, and then die. Eternal recurrence is unavoidable. This is not so much reincarnation as us repeating our errors endlessly. We have endless opportunities to start afresh and yet we keep on going down the same path, for ever. We keep on making the same mistakes, for ever. Be careful what you do: your actions will be visible for all time to faraway eyes. Do you seriously think you are going to get away with mugging that old lady and stealing her handbag? Even if terrestrial police fail to apprehend you, whole nations, planets, morally revolted multitudes will be reviling your name for eternity. On the other hand, one good deed and you could be a hero in a galaxy far, far away. Nothing is hidden. There are no secrets. Everything can be seen and known. Everything."

   We are eternal simply for the fact that there is light. This chapter in this book totally rocked my world, and made me think a lot about light. Light is being radiated throughout the universe, and it is bouncing off things and bending and doing all sorts of weird stuff. Eventually it will reach Earth, and we'll be able to see our universe because of it. Because of the speed of light, or the cosmic speed limit, some light that is really really old and really really far away hasn't reached us yet. And some light has reached us, but in the time it took to reach us, the body emitting it has aged millions of years. We are essentially looking into the past when we look at celestial objects many light years away.
   Anyways, enough with the science rant. The reason this book and this thought relate to the light project is pretty obvious: Light is responsible for basically everything we see. And there's also a lag. I want to somehow demonstrate this duality of light as giving us info, but also giving us the wrong info. I don't know exactly how I want to do it. I don't want to photograph an object deceivingly with light, but I want to show how light deceives. If that makes sense.

       2) I used to play video games a lot. I immediately thought of Splinter Cell as we were discussing the light project. Wikipedia describes it like this:

"Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell is a series of award-winning action-adventure stealth video games, the first of which was released in 2002, and their tie-in novels. The protagonist, Sam Fisher, is a highly-trained agent of a fictional black-ops sub-division within the NSA, dubbed "Third Echelon." The player controls Fisher, who usually has the iconic trifocal goggles at his disposal, to overcome his adversaries in levels based on Unreal engines that were extended to emphasize light and darkness as gameplay elements..."

I remember a lot of different scenes in which night vision was used, and it made the whole game have an eerie feeling. As I was walking home that day, I kept thinking about lighting, and how it can change mood. Walking down Lambton is creepy at midnight when you encounter just a few other people, but imagine if you saw it in night vision. It would be 1000x scarier. 

Weekly Task 7: Analysis.

Alfred Hitchcock

New York, 1947
Vintage gelatin silver
from:National Portrait Gallery, London

   Irving Penn shot this portrait of Alfred Hitchcock in 1947, before his peak years in the '50s. Hitchcock was an British-American film producer and director. His films were generally psychological thrillers.

   At first glance, this photo seems to be just a portrait of a man, but upon further inspection I started to notice more and more. The man is not shot straight on, but is sitting facing away from the camera, looking towards it. He is centered in the frame. He is not smiling, or frowning, or showing much emotion at all. His hands seem very tense. He doesn't look comfortable. To me, it is as if the photographer caught him as if waiting for the bus, or waiting for bad news.

   The set is very plain. I researched a bit, and found that Penn had Hitchcock sit on a cardboard box covered in scrap carpet. The lighting in the shot is very plain and not focused on anything in particular.

   Given Hitchcock's nature, this photo seems fitting for him. The photo suggests that he is not a normal person, that he is tortured by something. I imagine he had to be tortured if he produced such films. Overall I think the photo is reflective of how eccentric Hitchcock and his films were.

   Methods and Techniques:  In the 1940s, colour film was very new, and black&white was the norm. photos were shot with roll film, and developed from negatives in the darkroom. This photo is a portrait, and offers a snapshot of Alfred Hitchcock's personality with the way it is composed.

   Context and Ideas:  This photo was shot during Hitchcock's wildly famous film career. It has a social context, and now, alludes to history. I couldn't find much info about this photo, but I think Penn tried to show a minimalist, strange, unemotional, normal Hitchcock perhaps in response to him as a person, or his work in the film industry.

"Deconstructing the Pyramid" Final Images.

This is not in the final set, but it shows all 30 photos I shot and edited for the pyramids.

Reworked Proposal and Evaluation for Project 2.

REWORKED PROPOSAL:

  I come from a nation that seems to be obsessed with consumerism. We buy things, and eventually throw them away. We waste resources and we waste money. This consumeristic behaviour governs the way we view our food as well. We buy in excess, and not all of it is eaten. Sometimes this is simply due to time: food rots before we can use it.

  The food pyramid has been around for decades. It tells us how we should and should not eat, ideally, and therefore what we should and should not buy. Those foods that should be avoided are at the top, and those that should be consumed the most are at the bottom. This seems to go against the natural taxonomy, that what is important is seen as above, and what is unimportant is lowly. Also, it seems as though the food groups at the bottom of the pyramid decay faster than those at the top. This provides an interesting juxtaposition: the foods we are supposed to avoid are able to be kept and eaten for longer periods of time, and are symbolically held in esteem at the top of the pyramid, and vice versa.

  With this Time project, I seek to investigate several things. First, I want to see the way that certain foods rot and change and decay over time and how this relates to the food pyramid. Second, I want to affirm the consumeristic tendency to over-buy and throw away in bulk. Third, I want to challenge the model of the food pyramid that seems to be contradictory. I want to do this through the presentation of a series of images of food over time.

  I will photograph 6 different foods – I from each of the 6 food groups. I have a month to let my food rot, and I will document it’s changes within that month. With close up images of food, I will have to focus on angles, lighting, and the background. I aim to use bright lights, almost as if in an advertisement, with bold colors and a white background. The angle will be from above to show greater surface area of the food.

  I’ve chosen this idea because I am so fascinated by the consumer nation I live in. I’ve never understood those people who buy food and don’t eat it, so I wanted to look at the time scale for each of the 6 foods to decay. My work is interesting, because it shows how each food changes over time, which is different in each case. It brings to light the reason why junk food is ‘easier’ than fruits and veggies – it is often cheaper, and does not go bad as quickly. I think that my work will help to demonstrate some issues with the food pyramid, and hopefully highlight the futility of buying massive quantities of food, as is common in a consumeristic nation.

  The result of this project will be a series of photographs. Each photo will be in the shape of a pyramid, representative of the food pyramid. The pyramid will be split up into 6 categories, just like how the food pyramid looks, and will have a photo of each food in the 6 categories. There will be 5 pyramids in total, for the 5 different photo shoots I had. In total, there are 30 final photographs that will comprise the 5 pyramids.

EVALUATION:

   Overall, I’m pleased with the outcome of the project. There are some things I like more than others, and some things I would have definitely changed. If I had more time or access to better resources, I feel I could have changed my project for the better.

   I really like my final images. I think they’re very strong, and portray what I intended. I don’t like that they are not all exactly the same, though they are close.

   The hardest part about my project was photographing the food from the same angle each time. I had markings where I set my tripod up for each shoot, but it was hard to get things exactly the same. Photoshopping each image separately also led to some differences. However, I’m pleased with the outcome, and I learnt a lot about photoshop with this project.

   With this project, I learnt that it is simultaneously easy and hard to photograph the same thing multiple times. It is easy in that you can compare to earlier photos to produce the same results. However, it’s tricky in the same respect: if the images are too dissimilar, it looks sloppy.

   If I could do anything differently with this project, I would set up a makeshift studio, rather than just storing the food in my flat and moving it each time I took photos. I would put more effort into taking the photos as well. I think when I began the project, I had the idea in my mind that I could photoshop all the imperfections away. In reality, I should have taken more time composing my shots, whitening the background, etc. before taking the photo rather than after.

   All in all, I think this project went much better than the first. My images are stronger, my technique is improving, and my skills with photoshop are getting much better.

Some Final Research for Project 2.

   I have been looking for inspiration to guide me in the presentation of my final images, and I've stumbled across a lot of interesting work lately.


   This song doesn't really have much to do with the project, but something about listening to it helped me to visualize where I wanted to go with the photos. I think the eclectic mood made me feel more in tune with how weird it is to be glorifying rotting food. It helped me a lot while I was photoshopping! The video is pretty cool too.

   I also looked at the work of Fraser Clements, a New Zealand photographer who has a lot of weird subject material. He has some normal stuff too, but nevertheless, they all seem very advertisement driven. Most of the photos I looked at had bright colors, and some even were advertisements, like this one for Up & Go.

   Along with Fraser Clements, I've been looking at a lot of the artist's we've seen in lecture. Those that stick out the most to me are Hiroshi Sugimoto, Craig Barber, Martin Parr, Alfred Stieglitz, and Tim Davis. Here are some of my favorite photos by each of them:

"Thom" by Craig Barber

"Steerage" by Alfred Stieglitz

"KFC 2" by Tim Davis

Martin Parr

"Radio City Music Hall" by Hiroshi Sugimoto

   I've found that writing things out has helped me immensely with this project. I've written my ideas, drawn numerous pyramids, tried different layouts for my slides, etc. Here's an example from my workbook.