Concept: To capture any objects of a particular colour that stand out to me.
Lighting: I will walk around the area at night time so will have to rely on artificial light
Location: The area by my house
Camera Settings: Flash to expose the colour in objects. A larger aperture to allow in more light as it will be dark, however this will depend on whether the subject I am capturing is being lit up by artificial lights such as lamp posts.
For this shoot I wanted to create a response to the works of Fontana as I really liked the simplicity created through his highly saturated images. What drew me to his imagery was his use of using the textures and patterns found in nature and man-made objects to create impressions of the landscape around him in a way which would not have usually been percieved. From this shoot I would aim to achieve a new style of photography which I could then go onto incorporate into possible future works especially the aspects of colours, something I don’t normally consider when doing shoots. To create the desired effect I would probably have to manually increase the contrast and saturation within my settings of the camera in order to produce the outcome for the photos I would like. Using Fontana as my main source of inspiration I decided to have a look at some of his works which I found to be of particular interest:
Once I had gone over a few of Fontana’s imagery I decided it was nearly time to go ahead with the shoot itself. However before doing so I wanted to create a mind-map for the goals when taking photographs, by doing so for me it would reduce wasted time as it would allow me to quickly identify what I wanted to capture in order to achieve the results needed. Not only would this stop wasted time but allow me longer to focus on the things that I may not have realised if doing the shoot there and then. Here are some of my ideas:
Once I had completed my mind-map I decided it was time to actually go ahead with the shoot. To do this I wanted to explore the area North of Jersey as this area had the highest number of agriculture out of Jersey as it would provide me with the subjects needed to achieve the aims of the shoot. Using my mind-map as my primary source of inspiration and ideas I explored the footpaths which surrounded the North coast looking at how the blue sky could contrast the hills. Here are the results of my shoot:
Once I had completed the shoot I then wanted to go onto select out ten images that I thought were most effective and related most to not only the topic title of textures and patterns but also saturation. By doing this it would allow me to reflect on each image and make in easier to choose out a selection of five from that so that I could later on pick one overall image that I thought best reflected my intentions for the shoot. Here is my selection for the ten images I thought were best suited to the topic of saturation regarding textures and patterns:
After I had selected the ten images that I thought worked best regarding the topic title I decided to then whittle them back down to five images, by doing this it would allow me to analyse each image in more depth looking at things such as the visual and technical aspect of the pieces that I thought made them work well and link back towards the title of saturation and make my overall choice of best image easier. Here is my selection of the five best images from my shoot:
I selected this image because I loved how the orange contrasted the blue sky with the tree breaking up the dominant two colours. What I liked about this was how the two main colours compliment each other, however to stop both colours from becoming to eye-sore to the viewer the use of a lighter shaded tree and its shadow provide us with an implicit focus to what we almost instantly draw our eyes to. I also really liked the symmetry present within the photo as the skyline and pathway with the tree line up against each other as it presented the viewers with an overall sense of aestheticism. When looking over the image I found that it related well in response to saturation evident through the orange grass and the overly blue sky, this sense of other-worldly colour for me gives the viewer the impression of an over exaggerated landscape which has certainly been edited.
What I really loved about this image was the over use of blue to create the impression of an artificial sky, complimented by the patterns created from the tree branches I found that this worked well due to the overcast impression it paints on the photograph. For me I found that the use of the negative space taken up by the blue really brought the image together due to how it prevents the pattern of branches from completely covering the entire composition. The image itself relates well to saturation from how the use of an overly blue sky creates the impression of something to perfect to be true, with the photograph linking to texture and pattern through the branches which grow in random directions that produce a hige sense of aestheticism against the blue sky.
I chose this image because of how I loved the golden colours of the grass contrasted to the rippling water. For me this image represented two over exaggerated aspects of nature, especially as an island where we are surrounded by water presenting both the land and sea side by side in a sort of aesthetic and beautiful state creates the transition between the two as a natural mirror. I found that the gold presenting throughout the image as the main reason for choosing the photo due to it adding character to the water, reflecting the overlapping pattern of the grass as it grows. As a result of this I found that the two contrasting textures present in this image, being the rippling water and the overlapping grass as complimenting each other as one provides a more abstract representation for the other. The saturated golds in the piece also link it to the title through the coloured reflection that would not usually been seen by the everyday eye.
For me I selected this image because of its use of neutral space to create a more abstract impression of the landscape and whats in it. For me the tree against the blue sky was what brought the image together due to how it broke up the otherwise dull composition of the photo, what I found was how the messy texture of the grass completely contrasted the smooth matte texture of the sky which sorts of juxtaposes it. I liked how the composition that took into consideration the angle of the hill made use of the sky and contrasting orange grass surrounding it so that it would not become too overpowering. Overall I find this image did reference well regarding the topic of saturation, however looking at texture and pattern it did not serve a great load towards possible patterns except through grass.
Finally I selected this image because of the natural gradient created by the sun, sky and grass to produce this sort of golden natural film over the waters surface. For me this piece worked well because of how no real use of saturation editing was used due to how vibrant the surface of the water was on that sunny day with only a bit of cropping being needed. I really liked how the composition of the piece was based around a fifty fifty colour wise, with the golds taking the top and the blues the bottom, because of this for me the piece was well balanced with no aspect overpowering the other and creating an aesthetic product. However when looking over the image I did not find it had a great deal to do with saturation due to there being no actual reflection of a saturated landscape.
After looking over the visual, technical and conceptual aspects of the five selected images I was happy enough to come to a conclusion regarding which image would be best to reflect my intentions around saturated photography whilst also looking at the title textures and patterns. Here is my final decision towards the topic of saturation:
Final Image:
I chose this image as my final photograph to sum up my chosen topic because of the contrasting sides to the landscape it presents using highly saturated colours. For me the dominant use of yellows and golds in the photo bring about great aestheticism whilst highlighting how areas of our environment provide us with varying textures and pattern (such as ripples in the water and the overlapping of grass), something that the everyday eye would not take in unless looked upon carefully. Symmetry played a part in this decision due to how it presented the image as visually pleasing, stopping both the water and land from becoming too overpowering.
This shoot will be at Noirmont point on Jersey’s south coast. I will fly a drone over a few specific locations on and around that headland. The locations I would like to shoot are Batterie Lothringen including the MP1 which covers the majority of the Noirmont headland, the Noirmont Point lighthouse and Janvrin’s Tomb in Portelet bay.
The satellite image below shows the locations I’d like to shoot, each colour coded by a coloured circle.
Green – Janvrin’s Tomb
Blue – Gun Point 1
Black – Gun Point 2
Orange – MP1 Tower + Range Finder
Yellow – Lighthouse
The aim of the shoot is to get top down images of locations that look like circles from above, I used satellite imagery to find the locations and also reviewed air laws and local airspace regulations to develop a plan and ensure the flight is within all regulations. The flight to Janvrin’s tomb takes the drone to it’s maximum legal distance but does not breach it, the location is just outside the Jersey Airport ATZ (Air Traffic Zone) yet we will still file a flightplan to let ATC (Air Traffic Control) know we are flying, giving location, time airborne, height and time down.
For my third photo shoot I plan to explore the fragility linking the relationship between human and nature, and ideologies of beauty. Doing this will allow me to develop my previous ideas further. I want to take inspiration from the photographer Andrew S. Gray who is inspired by
paintings of the old English masters who through camera techniques and post processing have developed painterly impressionist images of both recognizable and abstract scenes. I started experimenting with this in my second photo shoot by adjusting the shutter speed when taking photographs of the reflection of a tree in moving water. Doing this made interesting shapes and lines that were blurred and that I think were effective. I want to develop this further in my third photo shoot exploring photographing landscapes and moving the camera, as well as photographing moving water and reflection. Doing this expresses spirituality in nature and the fragility through the soft blurred lines.
By trying to interpret the work of Andrew S. Gray I will be exploring abstract photographing in a different way to how I am looking at the artist Kandinsky’s work. This is because in this shoot I will focus more on landscape and emphasising the colours, rather than the shapes and details in the lines. In my fourth photo shoot I want to focus on the details of plants and water. I still want to pay attention to the textures of the branches and trees, but will focus on emphasising the fragility and the delicacy in the landscape. I also want to experiment in this photo shoot by photographing at different times of day as I want to see how photographing at dusk would be different from photographs taken early in the morning. This will allow me to create a variety of images with different levels of light.
For my fourth photo shoot I plan to interpret the style of the artist Wassily Kandinsky who was a pioneer of abstract art, similar to my work in my first photoshoot, but developed. I want to focus on the shape and textures of plants and branches, whether that be in water or not. I want to focus on how Kandinsky argues that the impact of colour on the viewer could be two-fold; both physical and spiritual, ‘Colour is a power which directly influences the soul’. So in this photoshoot I will focus on the colour and experiment with editing them to make them resemble abstract art more. I think that emphasising the spirituality in nature in my photos will add another aspect to my project, focusing on that as well as the relationship between the self and nature.
For one of my photo shoots I want to explore the work of Susan Derges who
specialises in camera-less photographic processes, most often working with natural landscapes. Her work revolves around the creation of visual metaphors exploring the relationship between the observer and the observed; the self and nature or the imagined and the ‘real’.
To interpret her work I want to photograph waves and ripples in water. I also want to experiment by using light sensitive paper, like she does, if I can find the materials as I think that this work help me understand how shes works. From researching photo grams of the movement of water I have found out that the process if very difficult. This may make it hard to produce work that I can use as a final outcome to my project, but I think that doing it will help with my experimentation. If i am unable to do this technique then I plan to take images of water and edit them to interpret the appearance of a photo gram.
Cloudscape photography is photography of clouds or sky. An early cloudscape photographer, Belgian photographer Léonard Misonne (1870–1943), was noted for his black and white photographs of heavy skies and dark clouds. In the early to middle 20th century, American photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) created a series of photographs of clouds, called “equivalents” (1925–1931). According to an essay on the series at the Phillips Collection website, “A symbolist aesthetic underlies these images, which became increasingly abstract equivalents of his own experiences, thoughts, and emotions”. More recently, photographers such as Ralph Steiner, Robert Davies and Tzeli Hadjidimitriou have been noted for producing such images.
In the summer of 1922, Alfred Stieglitz began to take photographs of clouds, tilting his hand camera towards the sky to produce dizzying and abstract images of their ethereal forms. In an article the following year, Stieglitz maintained that these works were a culmination of everything he had learned about photography in the previous forty years:
Over the next eight years, he made some 350 cloud studies, largely produced as contact prints on gelatin silver postcard stock. Stieglitz called these photographs Equivalents. More than describing the visible surfaces of things, the works could express pure emotion, paralleling the artist’s own inner state. Stieglitz, along with many of the artists of his circle, argued that visual art could assume the same nonrepresentational, emotionally evocative qualities as music. Indeed, music was an inspiration for the Equivalents, and this is reflected in the early titles he gave them: Music: A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs (1922) and Songs of the Sky (1923). Stieglitz did not limit himself to clouds, or allusions to music, in these photographs: one notable work, Spiritual America, shows a close-up of the nether regions of a harnessed gelding (a castrated male horse), the image serving as a metaphor for the artist’s impression of a diminished American culture in the same way that his depictions of clouds represented his emotions. Stieglitz often presented the Equivalents in series or sets, recombining different groupings of prints for exhibition.
The “Cloudman“, Dr. John A. Day, is a professor emeritis from Linfield College, in Oregon, USA, who taught meteorology for over forty years and who has a great passion for sharing the wonder of clouds. Now in his nineties, he continues to write, teach, and inspire people of all ages, around the world. His photography and writings are found in international publications and museums, and are used by artists, musicians, teachers, and many other cloud lovers. In 1962 he was granted a Faculty Fellowship from the National Science Foundation to study Cloud Physics at Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, England. In 1971 he returned to England, this time on sabbatical leave, for intensive study of the History of Cloud Classification, focusing on the work of Luke Howard, England’s first meteorologist. Day’s interest in clouds was first of a technical nature, learning to forecast their appearance and development. Studies of clouds in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s were directed toward gaining a fuller understanding of the physical causes that led to the formation of particular cloud types. In this period he started photographing clouds which led to an extensive collection of photographs. In later years his focus of interest has shifted form technical to artistic, and through the medium of photography, he attempts day by day to capture the beauty and majesty seen in the cloud forms that grace the sky. His photographs are rich in colour and greatly differ from the works of Alfred Stieglitz’.
Who is he?
Franco Fontana was born in 1933 in Modena. He took up photography in 1961 and joined an amateur club. He held his earliest solo shows in 1968 in Modena, his native city, which marked a turning point in his career. He had published over severnty books with Italian, French, German, Swiss, Spanish, American and Japanese publishers. His photographs have appeared worldwide in over 400 exhibitions, solo and collective. His images are in collection in over fifty public and private, Itlaisn and international galleries. Many companies have asked him to collaborate on advertising campaigns, he had published photographs in The New York Times and various other major magazines, with Fontana being invited to hold photography workshops in various school, universities and institutes such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Every year he holds academic courses at the Politecnico di Torino, and the LUISS University, Rome. He is the director of the Toscana Fotoferstival and has collaborated with the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Japanese Ministry of Culture and the French Ministry of Culture.
Fontans photography mainly depicts extremely aesthic portrayals of natural landscapes, using vibrant colours and a high saturation to link beauty to what would typically be seen in things such as flower, fields and the sky. What has inspired me is his use of aesthetics through a more unusually high saturation, depicting which would usually be everday scenes in a more visually appealing approach. Here I intend to go about photographing nature in a more aesthetic manner, using the textures and patterns found in each subject as a means of photographing a hidden viewpoint not usually seen to the everyday eye. Some examples of his work can be seen below:
After looking over some of his works I decided that I would go onto analyse one of his images, by doing this it would allow me to have a broader knowledge regarding the techniques used to photograph the pictures and the more conceptual side of them. To do this I would have to look at three categories, technicality, visual and conceptual, the image that I have selected to study is called Paesaggio Basilicata, and was photographed 1990, depicting the use of minimalist styled composition of a agricultural landscape:
Technical:
Technically the image is composed using a very minimalist technique, capturing and using only the yellow crops and the contrasted black and white backdrop to provide the image with an overall very aesthetic product. The photo has been taken in two filters, one being coloured and the other monochrome, by doing this it really highlights the shadows that make up the layers of the hill seen in the background and as a result create an abstract like effect which in a way depicts them as waves. To stop the monochrome becoming too overpowering Fontana has included two small trees located in the center of the photo, including this allows for a more symmetrical and aesthetic looks as the continual gradients of the hill are broken up and separated. The yellow contrasts this due to it being a contrast to black and so allows the shades on the hillside to pop even more.
Visual:
Looking at the image its evident that a high saturation has been used to create the vivid colour of the grass which is depicted unnaturally yellow. This is also contrasted by the monochrome hills which by doing so allows for all of the hills to have a layered portrayal used by the darker areas which have highlighted and smoothed out the grass to create a more gradient effect as a result. Composition wise the placement of the trees in the center has definitely been thought about, this is because of how it breaks up the otherwise consistent pattern found throughout the photo, with the yellow flowers taking on about 1/3 of the image up so that it cant become too overpowering due to its colours.
Conceptual:
The style used for this photo is based on his on vibrant language, Photographic Trans-avantgarde, abstracting the landscape and its colours. By using things such as a higher saturation he aims to create ideals for people regarding the aestheticism of an area which is often over-exaggerated in order to push a certain mind-set onto the viewer.
Who is he?
Born in Moscow in 1866, Wassily Kandinsky took up the study of art in earnest at age 30, moving to Munich to study drawing and painting. A trained musician, Kandinsky approached color with a musician’s sensibility. An obsession with Monet led him to explore his own creative concepts of color on canvas, which were sometimes controversial among his contemporaries and critics, but Kandinsky emerged as a respected leader of the abstract art movement in the early 20th century. In Munich, Kandinsky was accepted into a prestigious private painting school, moving on to the Munich Academy of Arts. But much of his study was self-directed. He began with conventional themes and art forms, but all the while he was forming theories derived from devoted spiritual study and informed by an intense relationship between music and color.
Color became more an expression of emotion rather than a description of nature or subject matter. He formed friendships and artist groups with other painters of the time, such as Paul Klee. He frequently exhibited, taught art classes and published his ideas on theories of art. He had already formed the New Artists Association in Munich; the Blue Rider group was founded with fellow artist Franz Marc, and he was a member of the Bauhaus movement alongside Klee and composer Arnold Schoenberg. Back in Germany after clashing theoretically with other artists, he taught at the Bauhaus school in Berlin and wrote plays and poems. In 1933, when the Nazis seized power, storm troopers shut down the Bauhaus school. Although Kandinsky had achieved German citizenship, World War II made it impossible for him to stay there. In July 1937, he and other artists were featured in the “Degenerate Art Exhibition” in Munich. It was widely attended, but 57 of his works were confiscated by the Nazis.
What is the book about?
The book acts as a reflection of anticipating “the spiritual turning-point” where Kandinsky looks at how this could occur within people. To do this Kadinsky looks at the artistic meanings of the psychology of colour, the compositional interrelation of forms etc. As a result of this her main goal as an artist becomes the constant search to find the very innermost necessity that can be found within the spiritual foundations of any individual. When looking through the initial pages of the book it is made very clear that Kadinsky is trying to anticipate the emergence of abstract art as the purest form of influence on the human soul, allowing many to view the future optimistically, foretelling the upcoming emergences of spirituality. Some examples of the book and its content can be seen below:
After reading through a bit of his book and looking over some of his artwork, I decided to go onto analyse a piece of his work that for me summed up his points stated in the book and his link between spirituality and the individual. The image I have selected is called ‘On White II’, and was created 1923:
Visual: The piece overall is very aesthetic through its contrasting bright colours and the use of negative space to create feeling within the blocks and random assortment of shapes jotted around. The bright colours for me draw a sense of happiness linked together with gloom, this is due to how the vibrant colours compliment each other bringing about a sense of joy, however contrasted to this is the darker greens and black which for me derives the image of its joy and instead implemented some underlying perspective of loss of gloom which could potentially be interpretted.
Technical: When looking over the image its clear that though the image looks like a random assortment of coloured shapes each piece has been carefully placed to be as effective as possible to that it can impact the viewer through its paint splatter like composition. The use of black within allows to break up the overlapping shapes which otherwise would have become too overpowering without a border. For me the use of the negative space occationally included with a few black lines adds to the overall effectiveness due to how it boxes in and compresses the piece so that it is only confined to one area making it as a result more minimalist.
Contextual: Kandinsky used an array of geometric shapes and lines in a colourful and riotous contemporary display, prompting many artists to imitate his style. On White II, is located at Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris, France. As the title suggests, white is predominant in this painting, including the background. Kandinsky used white to represent life, peace and silence. The majority of the geometric shapes are presented in a variety of colours, reflecting the artist’s love for the free expression of inner emotions. Striking through the kaleidoscope of shapes and colours are bold, spiked barbs in black, representing non-existence and death. Kandinsky liked to paint while listening to music, and On White II, is his interpretation of the music, as created by his inner consciousness. The abstract and possibly mesmerising display of shapes and colours can be compared with the complexity of a musical composition.