Tagged: images

October 11, 2020

Prints of the City

A few years ago on a walk along Baker Street, I snapped a photo with my phone camera of the sunlight in the morning mist. I was so surprised by the light that I returned the following day to photograph the sight and the light again with my Fuji X Pro-1.

During my computer cleanup, I came across this image again, along with a number of others I took in the Regent’s Park and Baker Street that morning. I loved their light, mist and timelessness, and the responses to them on my Instagram feed.

I took a number of photos of each shot: I put four of the better versions of the social media uploads together as prints, which I have placed on sale on my Etsy page. These image represent a look at London that I enjoy: showing a sight that could exist at any time in the past few decades, even with modern shop fronts, clothes and cars; a period view of the present.

London can be viewed in so many ways: as an historical city; as a financial city; as a place of politics and protest; as a place of culture. In my prints, I want to reflect all these different Londons and perhaps show new ones.

My Etsy print page is at: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/BurningDetails?ref=ss_profile

October 7, 2020

The deep dive

I’m currently amping up my photoshop skills.

There have been two projects so far; both to do with layering. They have been fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, but also totally necessary in order to make the images I am ambitious to create.

I have been inspired by such photographers as Ilina S, Erika Tschinkel, Sabina and Zhang Jinga, who all suffuse their images with an air of the fantastic, with their use of subject, composition, lighting and post production. Their images and technique remind me of the painstaking work of special visual effects teams in film making.

My rudimentary efforts so far make me think of how one can know when an image is “complete”. I’ve never been able to work that out in my writing, editing or darkroom work. The idea that creative work is never finished but abandoned comes to mind.

Maybe such knowledge comes from knowing how to best use the tools, which is what I’m learning now. Tutorials abound and I’m practising regularly.

October 5, 2020

New Light through Old Windows

To clear space on my computer, I’ve been going through every file to find RAW images. Thorough searching has turned up a plethora of files, containing RAW images from as far back as 2010. I’ve been editing them and exporting them to jpeg files and the space cleared has been phenomenal.

I’ve learned a lot from this process. My image editing speed has risen and I’ve become more organised in my photo collating: over the years, files have become organised by date and place, rather than subject, titles, moods and whatnot; I hope to find an ideal filing system in future, but for now, my filing has never been more organised.

The main aspect I’ve learned is in my ability to edit an image, especially when I come across photographs that I have edited some years previously. Like shining new light through old windows, my editing vastly improves on what I have done before. I’ll be printing some of these new images soon.

This last aspect has left me wondering about when an image is complete. I must have felt that I had done a decent job editing some years ago, only to supplant those efforts more recently. How may I edit those photos in a year’s time? How do I know when an image has been edited enough? When will a photograph be “correct”? And what is a correct image? One that represents an event with perfect accuracy, or one that lives up to one’s personal memory or expression?

I have also been wondering more about how I use editing programmes. I recently wrote about taking a deeper dive in using Photoshop: part of that deeper dive concerns thinking about what kind of images I want to create. There are many photographers I follow: snappers, artists, portraitists, fashionistas; they all have their own way of looking at their worlds. They all worked towards their particular view, so in my new photographs, I hope to experiment towards a view of my own.

March 1, 2020

Files

I’ve spent the past fortnight gathering images for my guide to landscape photography ebook. In the process, I’ve found myself rifling through both physical and digital files for images to edit and use to illustrate it.

It’s been a long task: I’m working through two hard drives full of images, most filed by place and date. A large minority are not. At one point, I found a large file of untouched images. At another, I lost about a month’s worth in a mistaken purge (I imagine they’ll turn up again).

On the physical side, negatives, prints and slides taken over previous decades are in envelopes, files and folders and boxed within various crates in the loft. Their contents have been listed but not properly catalogued: finding particular prints and slides has been time consuming.

As the photos are collated and arrangements are made to take new images to complement them, I wonder what method of cataloging I can do in future to speed up such a process, or at least allow me better knowledge of what photographs I have? Definitely one to research in future.

January 3, 2020

Faces and spaces

“There’s nothing more interesting than the landscape of the human face…” Irvin Kershner.

Portraits, in magazines, newspapers and galleries, have always fascinated me. Representing and interpreting a personality without words has always been a great skill.

I love taking photographs of people, but have done very little formal posed work until now. While I’ve enjoyed taking portraits, I have become more interested in making environmental portraits, like those of Arnold Newman: where somebody is photographed is integral to who they are.

So far, I’ve attempted to capture people in spaces that are important to them. In time, I hope that I can capture a person as much with light, speed and exposure as much as with the space that surrounds them.

October 13, 2019

Experimenting

Finally, after collecting articles from photography magazines and websites, I’ve been working through various tips and hints to advance my photography, both in image capture and post-production.

I haven’t quite mastered the Breziner method, but I’ve made some architectural collages that I like: