To start, I opened my photo in Photoshop and cropped the photo to my desired size.
Go to image ~ adjustments ~ threshold. The picture should adjust to black and white and a window with adjustments should pop up. Using these levels I played around to achieve the effect I wanted, which was the majority of the picture being made up of negative space.
I find negative space can add an eerie, obscure manner to the photograph. Normally we associate a busy, noisy picture with being the best image out there, but we never really stop and pause to appreciate minimalism in all its content glory.
I used the steps above with all the photographs to create my final works.
Keld Helmer-Petersen was a danish photographer, who grew up in Copenhagen. He was gifted a Leica camera in 1938 which started up his career in the world of photography. Keld was good at spotting trends within photography at the time and how it was all war influenced which then progressed into The New Objectivity. Albert Renger-Patzsch was a big inspiration for him and opened him up to abstract photography and in 1948 he published the bilingual book 122 Farvefotografier/122 Colour Photographs. Colour photography was his first style but he began to experiment with contrast in black and white photographer, which is what he is now known for. He was influenced by constructionist artists and their interest with industry’s machines and architecture’s constructions. His photos displayed large amounts of structure and patterns within industrial areas.
Original Images
Editing
original imageImage-Adjustments-ThresholdImage-Adjustments-Threshold
Ralph Eugene Meatyard was born on the 15th May 1925, in Illinois. At the age of eighteen he was forced to join the Navy, at the time of the Second World War. Lucky the war had ended before he was sent on an overseas assignment. Soon after the war he dedicated his studies into becoming an optician, but still continued with his passion for photography.
His photographic series ‘No Focus’ has combined his occupation with his hobby, showcasing what he was really passionate about. In this series the photographs are completely out of focus, reveling what it is like for blind people seeing the world. This powerful photographic series changed the way people captured photographs, as it went against the stereotypical techniques we would use to capture an image. His work within this series is very inspiring to photographers as it shows that experimentation with the camera is vital part of photography, and that breaking the stereotypes can actually result in effective images.
My main inspiration from his work was this composition from his ‘Zen Twigs’ series. I took a liking to this due to the fact that within the frame, only one thing is in focus with the background out of focus or ‘blurred’. Within my interpretations, I utilized this skill but used it focusing on objects in the foreground and the background.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–1972) lived in Lexington, Kentucky, where he made his living as an optician while creating an impressive and enigmatic body of photographs. Meatyard’s creative circle included mystics and poets, such as Thomas Merton and Guy Davenport, as well as the photographers Cranston Ritchie and Van Deren Coke, who were mentors and fellow members of the Lexington Camera Club. Meatyard’s work spanned many genres and experimented with new means of expression, from dreamlike portraits—often set in abandoned places—to multiple exposures, motion-blur, and other methods of photographic abstraction. He also collaborated with his friend Wendell Berry on the 1971 book The Unforeseen Wilderness, for which Meatyard contributed photographs of Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. Meatyard’s final series, The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, are cryptic double portraits of friends and family members wearing masks and enacting symbolic dramas.
Keld Helmer Petersen was a Danish abstract colour photographer. In the 1940’s and 50’s he captured an array of images which were purely in black and white, without any mid tones. Two books, Black Noise and Black Light, would then be published featuring these images.
I have tried to capture the essence of Petersen’s images by editing my images in Photoshop and primarily using the ”Threshold” image adjustment tool.
To Convert the image into black and white, I would first use the ‘black and white’ colour altering tool (this would still keep mid-tones). Afterwards I would use the ‘Threshold’ tool to remove mid-tones.
A couple other images I have altered in the same way are:
White balance is the process of removing unrealistic color casts, so that objects which appear white in person are rendered white in your photo. Proper camera white balance has to take into account the “color temperature” of a light source, which refers to the relative warmth or coolness of white light. For my experiments I simply edited the lighting so that neither of my images were too dark or too light. By doing this some of the colours have been enhanced due to the how bright the background colour is. However the temperature of the photo has also been changed therefore has caused the image to be more dim.
This is the original image:
Depth Of Field
The depth of field of the image is the zone where the sharpness and focus is based on one area of the image. Weather this means the background is blurred or simply toned down the focus will only be on a specific area. Again by simply adjusting the light and darks on the image i managed to focus it on one area.
Keld Helmer-Peterson is a Danish photographer born in 1920 and died in 2013. He was famous for his photography due to the structure of his images and the different types of pattern he used. His photos tended to be based in more industrial areas, city spaces and nature. Keld started photograph in the late 1930s in his late teens and first made his name with his a book ‘122 colour photographs’ in 1948.
Whilst in the 1950s and 1960s he began to focus more on the idea of architecture and design photography, his work began to lean to be present in a more abstract way. This happened as he began to look at other artist and began to get inspiration. He looked at German and American photography as well as other international abstract art that he liked. As well as many other artist Keld Helmer-Peterson was very much inspired by Albert Reneger-Patzsch, a German artis
For these edits i have used Photoshop and the setting in images called Threshold. Above is an example of how I interpreted Keld Helmer Petersons work.
