Friday, October 30, 2009

To the Zoo!




Going on a field trip after a hard test, while it's cold outside, on a miserable rainy day... Sounds lovely doesn't it? Well after a crazy week of tests and a week intensive shooting we needed to have some fun. We really didn't expect it to be fun but it turned out to be a fun time hanging with the girls. Andrea, Sheldean, and Hannah made the cold experience easier to handle with all the laughter. After we let go and sucked it up we took some awesome pictures. I'm not sure the animals were really happy to be out either but they still looked cute enough to take pictures of. We also ended up finding other interesting things around the Zoo other then the animals to take images of. Like each other, and the fact that it was Boo at the Zoo and Fall time made things a little more interesting to Photograph.
Enjoy the pics.

Walk towards the light.





For this class assignment we were required to take images of the sun rising, sun setting, night time light, mid day light and of a cloudy day. I loved it! I got to sleep in the Pembina Valley and wake up to the best sun rise, and end the day with the perfect sun set.

Friday, October 23, 2009

AT 6.2 Photographic Hero - Karl Blossfeldt

Karl Blossfeldt

Karl Blossfeldt was born June 13, 1865, and died December 9th, 1932. Karl was a professor, a sculptor, an artist, and a photographer. As a self taught photographer many of his photos were taken with a homemade camera with the capability of magnifying its subjects up to thirty times its actual size. Not much is known about his hand made camera but what was known about his work was the printing which was a high-quality Photogravure printing process it wasn't the quality of his prints that made him famous but in which way the plant was shown. His work went on to be the base of his teachings, and what he did with Ironworks. His attention to detailed curving and his observations in organic forms allowed him to use his photographs as a teaching tool, this was the basis for a formal language of construction that could also be applied to objects and architecture.

That being said I tried digging around a little more on Karl Blossfeldt to try and figure out his camera and printing methods. Well not much was said about his actual homemade camera but that it had amazing abilities of "zooming in 30 times its actual size", that his subjects (plants) were placed in front of stark objects like a grey cupboard to avoid camera shake and that his homemade plate camera was equipped with very long bellows. The grey back ground makes sense so that the tonal range is flat thus giving all the attention to the subject with out having to light it in annoying positions and as for the bellows his camera had extra long one to achieve the 30 times zoom on the subject.

And as far as his printing methods Blossfeldt used a high quality process called Photogravure. Photogravure is a printing process where images are printed using forms of mechanised etching of plates. Which makes sense when talking about Blossfeldt's work his photographs had so much detail that you'd need a printing process that would have a wide variety of tones from depth of etch. It's the "wells" and "tooth" in the actual etching that give the varying depth to hold ink.

Researchers also say that Blossfeldt's work have tint of green to them. I've noticed too that most of the prints i've found online do have a greenish tint to them. I believe he did this for the effect of making his botanical collection of prints seem more organic and true to it's natural state because adding magenta would give a photo more contrast when printing photographs and not green.

From looking at his prints they are pretty consistent having the image pretty much smack dab in the center or if a plant had a curve in it he would place the subject so that it would have symmetry in the frame. Take Plate # 38: Polystichum munitum (magnified 6 times) the thick stem of the evergreen fern is placed to the left but balanced on the right by its tightly curled point. Plate # 55: Adiantum pedatum (magnified 8 times) another type of fern shown in this image works for me because it has sense of flow to it. and finally Plate # 58: Aristolochia clematitis (magnified 5 times) this is herbaceous plant almost looks like a baby bird, but I can see why with this image that Blossfeldt would use this as a teaching guide for architecture what's apparent in this image is the detail in structure of this plant.




Friday, October 9, 2009

Composition at home.



For the past 5 months I thought that I was familiar with my environment... Nope not quite! My partner and I just purchased our first home together and have been living with a house that's been gutted, so find things to take images of was going to be hard, especially because we still live out of boxes. But I thought wrong, my images turned out better than I expected. There were plenty of objects wanting my attention. Who knew we had such interesting, varieties of design elements through out the house, the house is 100 years old.
Enjoy the slide show!

Monday, October 5, 2009

Walking around the Exchange with Hannah.





Today Hannah and I got partnered up to take portraits of each other. We were the last ones to leave and the very last to come back, I think they were about to send a search party out after us.. Oh well we both got great shots! I hope Hannah's turned out she had a horrible subject. Just kidding.
Enjoy!

Thursday, October 1, 2009

100 images of 3 objects.




100 images of 3 different objects... "Great!" I thought "this is going to be easy!" Nope, this was actually challenging. After the first 5 I was done what else could I do with a water bottle, Pink Dunny and an Ice bucket? So I sat back trying to clear my mind and nothing. Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock... oh and then having to blog about it too CRAP! So I got my journal out and started writing about the stuff that was going on in my life and stuff about school, after about 20mins I relaxed, and stopped trying to force my self pics then I just started snapping. I got to about 110 images and they turned out pretty good. I was satisfied enough to put them up on my Blog.