Daniel Meadows

Being drawn to an OCA article on Daniel Meadows [1952 - ], written by an old tutor, I was pleasantly surprised to find something in photography I had never seen before. Photo Story Telling......

From Meadows free website at http://www.photobus.co.uk I have looked and listened to all of the stories put together, and I find them fascinating. Meadows strings together an excellent passage of words to accompany some first class photography of journalism. His opening story of The Shop of Graeme Street is a narrative of his early days as a photography student with images of one particular shop. I really liked the following image, it reminded me of Judith Joy Ross [1946 - ] in an untitled image taken in 1988. In both images there are clearly subjects that are more relaxed about the photographer being there, perhaps the length of their skirts made them uncomfortable.... the woman seemingly hiding in the doorway adds to this.

Daniel Meadows [ The Shop on Graeme St]

Judith Joy Ross [Untitled 1988]

There are too many stories to retell here, but I particularly like the ones around Stanley, where a long term relationship has been established between the subject and the artist, and this has even been reciprocated with Stanley creating his own Photo Story.......

I will have to remember Daniel Meadows and perhaps put together my own picture story as part of the OCA courses.... fantastic work.....

James Fee

In one of my earlier assignments I referenced the work of Photographer James Fee [1949 - 2006]. I was inspired by many of his images and strangely drawn to his work entitled 'Psycho Ward'.

I think it is also true that this type of photography led me to choose derelict buildings for the final assignment, to capture something out of the norm', something eerie.

I tried to emulate Fee's work a little here when doing the final assignment and saw one opportunity that inspired me from the following image taken from Psycho Ward.

This image of a long hallway with light at the end is intriguing and the use of motion blur makes this an eerie image, added to by the lonesome figure seemingly banging the wall with his head. The curved ceiling adds to this tunnel effect.

The opportunity that I saw in one of the abandoned buildings I visited was a contained hallway with a door at the end, barely hanging by its hinges with light pouring through from outside. To obtain the motion I purposely increased the aperture to f/6.3 giving me a 2 second exposure, holding the camera by hand as steady as possible knowing the image would be blurred by motion. I processed this image in raw adjusting the colour sliders in making a monochrome conversion. Post production included dodging and burning, adding noise (grain) to give it a grittier feel and finally adding a yellow cast. When I compared my image to Fee's there was more warmth so I used the colourise option in a saturation layer to replicate this by adding a small amount of yellow/orange.

I did not submit this as part of my assignment as I tried to submit images that reflected the techniques learnt in this course, and although this has been a good learning point in this course, I did not feel that it met this criteria.  I may live to regret this! I was also put off a little by using techniques that most photographers avoid at all costs, such as camera blur and noise, but here I think they are used creatively for a purpose.

I think that the image has worked well in James' style and I am pleased with the effects of motion, grain and colour. The motion almost has an effect of madness and to me this is an intriguing image in wanting to know what is the on other side of the door, perhaps freedom from the surrounding decay..... with the motion adding a sense of urgency in trying to get there.....

Finished

This weekend I have finished the DDP course. It has taken me longer than anticipated dues to personal reasons and the fact that I wanted to get the most out of it.

I didn't think that I would pick up that much out of this course, but it has pleasantly surprised me as did TAOP; it has been a real learning curve. I will post comments received and that will be the end of this blog.

Next People and Places.....

Exercise: Sharpening for Print

This exercise surprised me.

In it we are to take an image without any form of sharpening and then create three more version of the same image with varying levels of sharpening. From the RAW converter I selected the following image taken from the Olympic Torch bearer that passed my house with 0 sharpening and opened the image in Photoshop.

I then applied a 20%, 100% and 250% amount of sharpening with 1% radius and printed each one out. On the screen I would say that the best image was 100%, this is what I normally sharpen to. When printed the 0% and 20% images were clearly in need of additional sharpening whilst there was very little difference between 100 and 250%, especially when compared to the screen. It would therefore suggest that for print more than 100% is required as it is very clear. Looking at the skin tones those these do appear to be over sharpened and harsh but nowhere near as much as the screen image which look frightful.

Conclusion: open at the moment, certainly for screen 100% seems to be perfect, for print I think it may now benefit from a little more....

Exercise: Web Site Portfolio

The web site is now live after many hours of struggling with html and some javascript...... I am not entirely happy with the splash page and may change this as and when I get more topics to present. For now I have uploaded some of the Art of Photography images just to demonstrate some varying images to see how things work.

I think I have met all of my objectives. It was written in basic html using a jquery plug-in called ad-gallery that was slightly modified. This gave me a slideshow, gallery thumbs and a nice navigation engine to display the images, image descriptions and it also pre-loads images so I probably could go for bigger image sizes but at this point I have left them at a medium screen resolution that I think is fine.

Web site address: www.nathanadams.me.uk

Web Site Design

As part of section 5 we are tasked with building a web site to display our portfolio, so I have been reviewing various photographers' web sites to get ideas of what looks good and what doesn't. The following is what I am planning:

• Clean classic design, minimal no fuss. The site should concentrate on the images.
• White (or near white) background. Use of grey text [#807e7e and #999999] seems best
• Slide show would be nice
• Menus for different projects
• Contact information
• Film strip
• Optional description of the project / image
• Would be nice if when re-size the browser the web site was not affected or moved with the resizing. A lot of sites seen to fail on this point.
• I don't like pages that have the viewed imaged fading in and the background lost, this is too messy for my liking and too animated. Examples of this are Thickbox and lightbox.
• What size are my images going to be, the viewing area should accommodate for both portrait and landscape, if pre loading of images can be done then size can be bigger, perhaps around 350k for JPEGS or 400 x 600 px as this is the same ratio as my camera so no cropping.
• Flash is a little above me and I am told will be retired soon with html 5 taking off. So it is just Javascript for now.

I have found some javascript / jquery called ad-gallery which is free to use so I am hoping to use this. Although this part of the project is optional I really feel that it will be worth the effort as I am sure this site will evolve over the coming years as I progress my courses.

Here is my first attempt at a logo, drawn in Photoshop.....the fonts I have chosen are Corbel and Verdana, I actually compressed my name a little and obviously expanded out the character spacing for the word ' photography'. However as these fonts may not be installed in my viewers computers I think I will have to use a more standard font such as arial for the site's text so that every viewer receives the same experience.

Assignment 4: Feedback

Overall I was very pleased with the feedback I have received for this assignment. I did struggle more than usual over this and although the original idea was reasonable I found it hard to put into practice. However help from my tutor in replacing the lenses with mirrored lenses proved to be the winner and saved the project.


The rider placed in the lenses was blurred using motion blur as I found him too sharp to be real, comments received back suggested that I over did this and that the reflection should have been sharper. I did try this out before submission and thought that it was too unreal, and made too much of a focus on the reflection in the lenses. I do however agree that the image in the lenses needs attention but at my level I am at a loss as to what it really needs. 


The image was a composite of three images, the main rider, the rider in the lenses and a pair of reflective glasses.