Carrying on from my previous shoot, this shoot is dedicated to creating an intense and moody atmosphere. I kept a close eye on the weather and picked my time to undergo with this shoot carefully. As explained in my previous post, I am focusing on the white house location with a variety of weather conditions to portray how the weather can transform a familiar landscape. The end result will have my images in a typology which will allow an easy comparison between the different weather and lighting.

Contact Sheet

Edited Images

I was really happy with the way in which this shoot has turned out. The sky formed perfectly for the moody feel I was going for. I shot the majority of these photos with a very fast shutter speed to present us with a darker and more intense image. It worked well that my focal point was white as it really stood out against the dark background. These images will work extremely well along side the photos at sunset from my previous shoot helping me to demonstrate how lighting changes a landscape.

Inspired by Haystacks and the notion of effects of changing light I have decided to peruse a shoot series looking at this. For these shoots I have focused on a specific location this being the white house at St Ouens bay. The reason I chose this location was due to the fact it is a popular location for local photographers on the island and therefore will be a very different approach to how the majority of people chose to photograph it. Also i like how the shape of the building linked with the shape of haystacks with a cone shaped top. I have decided to achieve the best result i will photograph it at different times of the day also whilst varying on the days I shoot to get a variety of weather conditions. Through this series of photo shoots I will be showing the changing light and how it colored the surroundings of the same place. Also inspired by Sugimoto there will be a representation of time and movement within this. I will use the typology method at the end of all the shoots to show the impact the light has on perspective.

Contact Sheet

My Edited Images

Overall, I think this photo shoot has been successful in demonstrating the golden hour light upon the white house. I think I have clearly portrayed the lighting within this hour and through the editing process in Lightroom I have made this much more enjoyable for the audience. Originally the photos were much too harsh and the harsh yellows did not blend well causing a distraction for the viewer. Therefore in Lightroom I adjusted the yellows to become slightly more orange whilst changing the blues to aqua to create a nice contrast. These two colors compliment each other creating an overall successful aesthetic. To further develop this shoot I think it could be interesting to mess around on photoshop trying to create brush strokes in the style of ‘impressionism’ and like Monets haystacks series. Or perhaps i could try and create a faded look similar to Sugimotos seascapes project. I have intentions on re-visiting this location when it is cloudy and dark creating more dramatic and moody images that will transform the landscape into something that will far differ from the one I have depicted in this shoot.

Analysis of my favorite Image from the shoot

I captured this image using natural lighting which allowed me to bring out the natural shadows and shapes within the sand and sky. Using natural lighting was one of the key factors that i had in mind when going on this shoot as my overall intention is to show how a landscape is transformed in different lighting/weather conditions. There is a subtle tonal range with the most part of the picture dominated by the brightness of the sky there are also some variety of highlights and shadows within the sand creating a very interesting texture. Clearly, these images were captured on a very sunny and bright day therefore a low ISO of 100 was used with a relatively fast shutter speed of 1/200. Having a low ISO allowed me to keep a high resolution image preventing little to no grain in the image.

I really liked this image due to the overall composition and textures that are present. Linking to Sugimotos seascapes project I have incorporated a method that he used where he bifurcated exactly in half by the horizon line however I have used the sea wall as my point to divide from. The interesting textures within the sand help to draw the viewer to the main subject thus being the white house. I also like how there is a direct contrast between the many textures within the bottom half of the picture compared to the top half were it is all one constant texture. This incorporation of variety at the bottom and similarity at the top is a direct link to the exam project title.

The concept behind this image is the notion of movement and time implied through the light which although appears in this photograph as something that is always there, is not and is always changing. Also the textures within the sand help to show this sense of time as it appears to be moving just like how the sun is always moving that creates a variety of light. The photographs from this shoot show just one perspective of a landscape and indicate the one perspective we usually have of a landscape. However through multiple shoots at the same location I intend to show how the image should differ throughout time.

David Prentice was an English artist and former art teacher. In 1964 he was one of the four founder members of Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery. His work is hard-edged, abstract, close to the Op art of a period when young artists and architects were full of ideas for new beginnings.

For many years, his subject was the Malvern Hills, which he knew intimately from countless walks with sketchpad in hand. The forms of the hills were a constant, the weather constantly changing. He painted with the concern for structure and surface that had characterized his earlier work. The watercolors, often done on the spot, were more specific but the paintings done in the studio were as carefully constructed as ever.
In time his subjects expanded to include dramatic cityscapes of London, especially of the river, and the landscape of Skye, or rather its approaches.

I believe there are direct correlations between the work of David Prentice and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The key similarity is the attention to lighting and textures as appose to detail and displaying a landscape how we would usually see it. Instead, Prentice uses large brush strokes giving a faded/blury look to the landscape with emphasis on accurate depiction of light. Sugimoto focuses on using slow shutter speeds to bring about this faded look like Prentice does. Despite Sugimoto’s images being in black and white I believe there is a main focus on how lighting/weather can transform the similar landscape that he focuses on. Another key similarity in their works is the elimination of any man made features creating a difficulty in identification of a place.

Each painting within the Haystack series is different however they all share common qualities too. They were painted in the farmlands of Normandy, north of Parish. Each picture shows a field with hills and trees in the distance. In the foreground Monet painted haystacks – which lead to the title of the group of paintings. Sometimes there is one stack, sometimes two or three. The haystacks themselves are put together by binding a large base of hay and then adding a cone shaped layer of hay on top. Each stack is close to 20 feet tall and weighs an enormous amount, withstanding the harsh weather until it is time to harvest them.

Impressionist artists like Monet were interested in seeing the world in a new way. In doing so, they wanted to show that viewing their surroundings could be much more beautiful and complex than what is on the surface. Through painting subjects that were common images, not heroic stories or sublime natural beauty, Monet shows that importance can be found in everything. His Haystacks elevate the status of common bales of hay, highlighting the importance hay plays in agriculture and sustaining life. Impressionism, and Monet specifically, often give importance to working class elements of life, like farming, by painting them.

Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s.

This impressionism technique was a quick way of working and was necessary for Monet to accomplish the real goal of his painting. Monet was looking at objects, haystacks, and at the “atmosphere that colors it differently at different times of the day/times of the year.” He had to work quickly to capture the changing light and how it colored his surroundings. Often we have an image in our head, but Monet was showing that that image should differ throughout time. A haystack covered in snow might appear white in our minds, but depending on the light, it would appear blue, yellow, or pink at sunset. Focusing on a single subject twenty-plus times gave Monet the ability to show the effects of changing light. It took his art from being focused on objects as subject, to being about light, or lumière, as subject. This idea about focusing on lighting/textures as appose to a subject matter links to the artist research I have done on Hiroshi Sugimoto and his project Seascapes.

The graphics interchange format (GIF) is a bitmap image forma that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by an American computer scientist Steve Wilhite on June 15 1987. It has since come to widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and potability. Giffs are  less suitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with color gradients, but it is well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.

Below is an example of a GIF

Below is my examples of a GIF

Typology (in urban planning and architecture) is the classification of usually physical characteristics commonly found in buildings and urban places, according to their association with different categories, such as intensity of development (from natural or rural to highly urban), degrees of formality.. Individual characteristics form patterns. Patterns relate elements hierarchically across physical scales (from small details to large systems). The definition of ‘typology’ is “a classification according to general type, especially in archaeology, psychology, or the social sciences”.  Essentially it is the study of types.

Bernhard Becher, and Hilla Becher, were German conceptual artists and photographers working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures, often organised in grids. As the founders of what has come to be known as the ‘Becher school’ or the ‘Düsseldorf School’ they influenced generations of documentary photographers and artists.

Meeting as students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1957, Bernd and Hilla Becher first collaborated on photographing and documenting the disappearing German industrial architecture in 1959. They were fascinated by the similar shapes in which certain buildings were designed and noticed many industrial buildigns shared many distinctive formal qualities.

Together, the Bechers went out with a large 8 x 10-inch view camera and photographed these buildings from a number of different angles, but always with a straightforward point of view. They shot only on overcast days to avoid shadows, and early in the morning during the seasons of spring and fall. Objects included water towers, cooling towers, coal bunkers, oil refineries, blast furnaces, gas tanks, storage silos, warehouses and much more. Their work also highlighted the need for preservation of these buildings. The end result of their work presented us with groups of photos  in a grid of six, nine, or fifteen that highlighted the similarity between industrial structures. It is a very interesting concept to look at for the viewer which engages them to compare the forms and designs of the buildings.

Video Art Research

Video art is an art form that relies on using visual technology as a way of creating a visual and/or audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting. Video art can take many forms: recordings that are broadcast; installations viewed in galleries or museums; works streamed online, distributed as video tapes, or DVDs.

Nam June Paik, a Korean-American artist who studied in Germany, is widely regarded as a pioneer in video art. Video art is often said to have begun when Paik used his new Sony Portapak to shoot footage of Pope Paul VI’s procession through New York City in the autumn of 1965 Later that same day, across town in a Greenwhich Village cafe, Paik played the tapes and video art was born.

Andy Warhol worked across a wide range of media—painting, photography, drawing, and sculpture. In addition, he was a highly prolific filmmaker. Between 1963 and 1968, he made more than 650 films. His style of films included hundreds of silent Screen Tests, or portrait films, and dozens of full-length movies, in styles ranging from minimalist avant-garde to commercial “sexploitation.” The films Warhol made in the are among the most significant works in the career of this prolific and mercurial American artist. Warhol’s films have been highly regarded for their radical explorations beyond the frontiers of conventional cinema. In the early 1970s, most of the films directed by Warhol were pulled out of circulation by Warhol and the people around him who ran his business. After Warhol’s death, the films were slowly restored by the Whitney Museum and are occasionally projected at museums and film festivals. Few of the Warhol-directed films are available on video or DVD.

Task – Record an activity or routine that you do/ repeat on a daily basis, e.g. brushing teeth, putting on clothes, applying make-up, comb your hair, eating, feeding your dog, walk to school/work, sleeping, scree time on social media, talking, selfies

My plan – Using a Go-Pro I will capture myself getting toast for breakfast; the process of walking up to the toaster, getting the toast out, cooking it, buttering it and then eating it. A simple task which i do everyday and usually don’t think twice about.

My Video

“‘Seascapes’ is art for the plateau, a group of images that measure time not by growth but in repetition.”

Inspired by Sugimoto’s seascape project, a meditation on time examined through repetition and constancy, I decided to do a photo shoot focusing on the movement of the sea. Throughout this shoot I wanted to capture a sense of the sublime that the ocean entails. With its array of colors and amazing formations it is undoubtedly beautiful however with its immense power and force it can be very dangerous too. The main aim for this shoot was to display a sense of repetition through the representation of the ocean as a rhythmic entity of waves. I also wanted to develop my own style inspired by Sugimoto therefore as well as using his long exposure method i also contrasted this with very fast shutter speed images to capture the waves in motion and gain a bunch of detail that can’t be seen by the naked eye. Changing up the shutter speeds allowed me to capture a whole range of different images which gave variety to this shoot whilst keeping to the similar theme of the ocean.

Contact Sheet

Edited Images

Using a combination of Photoshop and Lightroom I decided to edit some of the best images from this shoot. I used Photoshop to remove some elements of the photograph that were distracting for example the safety barriers that are positioned the hole way along the sea wall. Using Lightroom allowed me to do simple adjustments such as changing particular colors, highlights and shadows. Throughout the editing process I cropped the images to achieve the most aesthetic result and within some images used a black and white filter to replicate the style of Sugimoto.

Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photographer and architect. He leads the Tokyo-based architectural firm ‘New Material Research Laboratory’. Sugimoto has spoken of his work as an expression of ‘time exposed’, or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. His work also focuses on transience of life, and the conflict between life and death. Sugimoto is also deeply influenced by the writings and works of Marcel Duchamp, as well as the Dadaist and Surrealist movements as a whole. He has also expressed a great deal of interest in late 20th century modern architecture.

I am particularly interested in his project titled ‘seascapes’. In 1980 he began working on an ongoing series of photographs of the sea and its horizon, Seascapes, in locations all over the world, using an old-fashioned large-format camera to make exposures of varying duration (up to three hours). The locations range from the English Channel to the Arctic Ocean, from Italy, to the Tasman Sea and from the Norwegian Sea to the Black Sea in Turkey. The black-and-white pictures are all exactly the same size, bifurcated exactly in half by the horizon line. The systematic nature of Sugimoto’s project recalls the work Sunrise and Sunset at Praiano by Sol LeWitt, in which he photographed sunrises and sunsets over the Italy. Within this project there is a clear attention to the depiction of light and how it shapes the landscape as appose to the traditional landscape images from the romantic genre. 

All the images within this project are rather similar within the way they all consist of exactly half of the ocean and half of the sky. Another similarity is the fact they consist of black and white color tones which also links to my previous two artist references. Tommy ingberg’s images are all in black and white and also Ernst Haekel has works that happen to use the black and white color range. On the other hand, there are also a variety of shutter speeds clearly being used to capture the images with some of the photos being rather clear others are extremely hazy making it almost impossible to work out what the imagery is of. This unique perspective of the sea has elements of time and movement embedded into them as well as a clear interest for nature.

Analysis

This particular image and all the others embedded within the book are all neutral black and white. The image is formatted horizontally and there is a divide directly in the middle distinguishing the sea and the sky. There is no land mass or man made objects within this image, it contains only three elements; light water and air. Having very little features in the image gives a minimalist approach which is visually pleasing. This image has indications of movements on the water surface however mostly is hidden under the fog, haze and light clouds.

Splitting the frame in half, the images are classically balanced and no emphasis has been inferred to either sky or the water. There are no lines within the image that lead us to any part of the image or which emphasize one area or another. Minor pattern or texture on the water or within the sky do not demand our attention but provide some variety within an overall sameness. The affect of the computational structure is that while our eyes may freely wander, they tend to gravitate back to the center of the image and the horizon. Within this image and all the others contained within the project, he places the horizon in the center. I think this is to do with the instinctual human way of seeing. If we stare into the horizon, we stare right into the middle of it. In fact, anything we look at, due to the basic nature of human perception, is put right in the middle of our field of vision. I assume that Sugimoto knows this and has purposely constructed the image in this sense to reflect this.

The elimination of any land mass or man made objetcs means we have no way to determine where or when the images were made. Land mass characteristics allow identification of a place as well as man made structures or even a particular boat. These factors may even give a sense of time frame on when the image was created however with the absence of these we cannot know when or where the image was taken. This gives a sense of mystery and the unknown which is really interesting as it gets the viewer engaged with the image. Another thought that comes to mind when I consider the minimalist approach is a connection to the biblical view of the creation of the earth, being originally covered in water with light introduced before land surfaced.

I think through this particular image and the project as a whole the intent was to create a sense that, regardless of where we are, we could all go to a large body of water and see the same thing. The fact that we would share the same visual experience regardless of if we did that now, in the past or in the future. Our internal experience stimulated by the view will be more individual and vary from person to person. I think that Sugimoto’s view based on the quiet nature of the image is thought provoking. I also think he is expressing the ocean as a place to relax, where the repetitive sounds and beautiful view allow our minds to disconnect with any stress and simply enjoy life.

Ernst Haeckel (February 1834 – 9 August 1919) was a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist, and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology including anthropogeny, ecology, phylum, phylogeny and protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin’s work in Germany and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory.

The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures, collected in his Kunstformen der Natur (“Art Forms of Nature”). The book consists of lithographic and halftone prints. Lithography is a method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone or a metal plate with a smooth surface. Halftone is the reprographic technique that simulates continuous tone imagery through the use of dots, varying either in size or in spacing, thus generating a gradient-like effect.

I decided to study the artwork of Haeckel due to his clear relation to nature and in particular living species. Undeniably there is huge variation within the species however all stemming from only four DNA variants there are some similarities too. I was really inspired by the vibrancy of his artwork along with bold solid colors. His black and white work is also very interesting as it allows us to view the species in much more detail revealing interesting shapes and textures. This use of black and white also links to my previous artist reference which therefore applies to the word ‘similarity’ that was given as part of the exam project. I think it would be interesting to combine inspiration taken from the two artists to produce a series of images that focuses on the thoughts and feelings of humans (Tommy Ingberg inspiration) and the diversity of species (Ernst Haeckel inspiration).

Photo Analysis

The diverse range of colors against the white background makes the image really pop and aesthetically appealing for the audience. The use of predominately orange and teal colors compliment each other contrasting nicely giving an overall effective result. There are a large variety and use of similar textures within this photo from the intertwining tentacles to the soft edges around the top of the species. There is a clear precision and careful shading that has taken place, but they also give a detailed insight into the understanding of organic evolution. Haeckel’s works is the emphasis on the essential symmetries and order of nature; even in the strangest of creatures, he managed to find a sense of biological beauty which to me is what makes his work stand out. Often people would associate a jelly fish as a scary and not so beautiful specie however his art has really transformed how some species are viewed in this case the jelly fish looks magnificent.

The art and science of  Ernst Haeckel outlines the 19th-century artist-biologist’s most important visual works and publications across a hefty 704 pages. The compendium includes 450 drawings, watercolors, and sketches from his research, which was in large support of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Most notably the book contains the Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature), a collection of 100 prints of varying organisms originally published between 1899 and 1904. This particular image has come from the book which displays very detailed imagery of what appears to be a collection of jelly fish.