Contextual Reasons: Tom and his neighbours were receiving letters addressed to “Persons Unknown” saying they are non longer welcome to live in semi-derelict squats from the local council. Tom therefore wanted to capture “the dignity of squatter life” in order to show the council that these were real people they were putting in danger and that they would be greatly impacting their lives.
In the end his famous image ” Woman Reading a Possession Order,” got a dialogue going with the council – and they infact managed to save the houses.
References:
The book we found the image we were studying and re-enacting is called “Tom Hunter”. It is a collection of images from different projects of his which includes work from, Tom Hunter and the modern world, Persons Unknown, Traveller Series and Life and Death in Hackney.
Here is a link to an article written about Tom and his Persons Unknown project which gives deeper contextual reasons and some background behind the photos.
We first gathered props such as the headphones, water bottle, chairs, table and cloth and bottle cap. These props were all intended to give our image the likened look to the real picture captured by Hunter.
We then sat each other in the correct positions in order to have each of the three people sat in exactly the same position as the models in the photograph and they posed with similar facial expressions.
Technical Features – We then set the camera to an ISO of 800 and made the shutter speed faster to 1/10 second. There was a slightly higher shutter speed so the image was sharp incase any of the models moved slightly.
Contact Sheet
Final Image Response:
Visual Features – These include a fairly plain range of colours being mostly greys, whites and creams with a lighter tone due to the side lighting and a strong contrast between the shaded and non-shaded areas . There is quite a large depth of field and 3D effect created due to the fact that the 3 models in the photo are all sat at different distances from the camera, meaning that their shadows create a visual element of distance when the shadows are overlapped.
“Tom Hunter is Professor of Photography Research at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, graduated from the London College of Printing in 1994 with his work ‘The Ghetto’, which is now on permanent display at the Museum of London.
He studied for his MA at the Royal College of Art, where, in 1996, he was awarded the Photography Prize by Fuji Film for his series ‘Travelers’.
In 1998 ‘Woman Reading a Possession Order’ from his series ‘Persons Unknown’, won the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery.
In 1999 Tom’s series of the ‘Holly Street’ estate was exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, London, while in 2000 his ‘Life and Death in Hackney’ series, went on show at the White Cube Gallery and the Manchester City Art Gallery.
In 2006 Tom became the only artist to have a solo photography show at the National Gallery for his series ‘Living in Hell and Other Stories’, which talked about Hackney and its relationship to its local paper.
His works are in many collections around the world including; MOMA in New York, Tate Britain, The V&A and the National Gallery in London, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Smithsonian in Washington and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2010 he was awarded Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society.”
– Words taken from Tom Hunter’s Website.
I have also come to learn that Tom Hunter lived abroad for a period of life. He was part of a group of people with the generic name “New Age Travelers”. In a series of photographs he captured images of the essence of the life he lived whilst travelling round Europe in motor homes with other people like himself, some families, some old married couples. He also captured images of the people he traveled with in a tableaux vivant stylist way which he has now published on his website, in books of his and in galleries across the UK.
The art of destruction: Exploring manipulated studio portraits with Rankin and his collaborators.
Who is Rankin?
“Rankin made his name in publishing, founding the seminal monthly magazine Dazed & Confused with Jefferson Hack in 1992. It provided a platform for emerging stylists, designers, photographers and writers. The magazine went on to forge a distinctive mark in the arts and publishing spheres, and developed a cult status forming and moulding trends. It is responsible for bringing some of the biggest names in fashion to the foreground. Today, Dazed Media is a leading online fashion and cultural brand.
As both a photographer and director, Rankin has created landmark advertising and editorial campaigns. His body of work features some of the biggest and most celebrated publications, brands and charities, including Nike, L’Oreal, Dove, Pantene, Diageo, and Woman’s Aid. He has shot covers for the likes of Elle, Vogue, Esquire, GQ, Rolling Stone and Wonderland.”
What the project is about:
Words from his website –
“This short project formed part of a unit of work entitled Photographic Techniques & Applications with my Year 10 class and took the form of a Controlled Assessment. To celebrate Youth Music’s 10th Birthday, celebrated photographer Rankin asked 70 musicians and visual artists to ‘destroy’ their own portraits. The participants included Joe Strummer, Ian Brown, Marianne Faithfull, Andre 3000, Michael Stipe and Kylie Minogue as well as bands like Pete and the Pirates, The Enemy and The View. For example, Florence Welch drew over her portrait with a metallic pen, inspired by her school days of decorating photos from magazines and Debbie Harry burnt, masked out, painted and stitched-up her picture to make a series of six ‘destroyed’ portraits. Damien Hirst painted over the portrait of Joe Strummer. Asked about this approach he said,“I tried to keep it about him as a person. I kept looking at the thing on the hand, where it said ‘Joe’. Joe Strummer was a great guy who I met, who was much more of a hero in real life. You don’t meet many people like that,”
I was keen to encourage my students to create proficient studio portraits, considering a range of technical issues, before destroying them, thinking about the particular strategies they might use to add other layers of meaning.”
The most basic and important form of light is natural light, generally referring to any light created by sunlight.
Photo by Filipe Costa
In other instances, ambient light (meaning the available light in an environment) can be considered as natural because it isn’t directly influenced by the photographer’s lighting equipment. This usually indicates natural lighting from outside that lights up a room through a window.
BENEFITS OF NATURAL LIGHT:
Natural light is a part of nature. It’s always around even if it’s a cloudy afternoon natural light is always readily available. There’s no equipment you have to buy or set up in order to do an outdoor photo shoot. Artificial light, on the other hand, takes time to set up and can cost the photographer a lot of money should a bulb break or burn out. If you are just beginning your career as a photographer, you are going to want to save money where you can.
NATURAL LIGHT IS EVERYWHERE
Natural light allows the photographer to have fun with locations without movie equipment everywhere. You can use reflectors if you chose, but they aren’t necessary if you don’t want them. Everywhere you go there is always going to be some form of natural light, so photographers don’t have to confine themselves to a studio.
NATURAL LIGHT IS CONSTANT
When you work in a studio, you have to spend time adjusting the lights to match the pose of your subject. Natural light doesn’t have to be adjusted; you will just need to find locations with the best lighting. Of course, the sun is going to set throughout the day so you have to plan around that. However, the setting sun is going to give a chance to create different atmospheres for the photos–depending on what the client wants.
NATURAL LIGHT CREATES ADDS AN AIRY QUALITY
When natural light comes through doors and windows, it can create an airy, romantic feeling to the picture the photographer takes. This effect isn’t as easy to achieve when artificial lights are used.
CLIENTS OFTEN PREFER NATURAL LIGHT
Clients will always have their own ideas of what lighting works best for them, and sometimes they’re right. Wedding photography, for example, is often done outside because natural light is really going to bring out the natural beauty of the bride and the groom. You’re also going to be able to get amazing shots during the final hours of daytime because those rays will really bring out the natural tones in someone’s skin.
Natural light is everywhere so any location can become a photographer’s studio. It’s a free light source so you will never have to worry about buying new bulbs. Natural light will bring out the natural beauty of the subjects, and they will fall in love with your photography. So, for your next photo shoot don’t be afraid to step outside the studio and see what nature has to offer.
Artificial Lighting
What is it?
Lighting or illumination is the deliberate use of light to achieve a practical or aesthetic effect. Lighting includes the use of both artificial light sources like lamps and light fixtures, as well as natural illumination by capturing daylight.
There are four common types of artificial light sources used for photography today
Incandescent
Fluorescent
LED
Studio strobe
The challenges of using natural light are quite similar to those faced when shooting in artificial light. You must still understand how various light sources act upon a subject and how to produce the desired effect. Different sources of light can produce soft or hard light when shooting in a studio, but in this case, the photographer has direct control over elements such as hardness, distance, intensity, and angle. Furthermore, artificial light from different sources yields different color heat signatures. For instance, halogen bulbs are colder and produce a light that is blue in color, while tungsten bulbs, being hotter, produce light with a reddish hue.
Keep in mind that when you use different sources of artificial light, these must produce the same color heat signature. The only exception to this is if you’re shooting in black and white.
Photo by M.G.N. – Marcel
When it comes down to controlling and manipulating light, there are many options within photography, whether you’re dealing with artificial, natural, soft, or hard light. It comes down to understanding how images are affected by different lighting conditions, setting up the desired lighting environment, adjusting your camera settings (e.g., the white balance), and post-processing your picture in programs such as Gimp or Photoshop.
Definitions:
Intensity of the light – Light intensity refers to the strength or amount of light produced by a specific lamp source. It is the measure of the wavelength-weighted power emitted by a light source.
Direction of the light – Direction of light affects shadow placement and where darker/lighter spots are.
Temperature of the light and white balance –
The color of an object is affected by the lighting conditions under which it is viewed. Our eyes and our brain compensate for different types of light—that’s why a white object appears white to us whether it’s viewed in sunlight, under overcast skies or indoors under incandescent or fluorescent light. But digital cameras need help to emulate this process, to compensate for different types of lighting and render a white object white.
Three-point lighting is a standard method used in visual media such as theatre, video, film, still photography and computer-generated imagery. By using three separate positions, the photographer can illuminate the shot’s subject (such as a person) however desired, while also controlling (or eliminating entirely) the shading and shadows produced by direct lighting.
A portrait with three-point lighting: a 300 watt key light, a 150 watt back light, and fill light from a bounce board.
My own aim, action plan and technical features:
The aim for my 3 point lighting shoot was to use 3 different lights to capture a selection of images that demonstrate I can use the technique correctly whilst also trying to create images that are clear, in focus, and presentable. The lights were placed in 3 positions for some, with one in-front, one to the side and one on he other side. In a lot of the other photos there are a light in-front and behind the model and then a light slightly to the left. The technical features of these images included a wider aperture to allow a lot of light into the lens with a quicker shutter speed to keep the images harp incase the models move.
Contact Sheet:
Final Image Outcome:
Visual elements of this image include:
Visual elements of this image include a very simplistic array of colours which mainly consist of whites and yellows. The tone is fairly light and the texture, very smooth. There is a fair depth of field due to the shadows on and around the model which also creates a 3D object effect.
Two point lighting setups can be very beneficial. By adopting two separate positions, the photographer can illuminate the key subject (such as a person) however desired, while also controlling (or eliminating entirely) the shading and shadows produced by direct lighting.
The key light, targets the key subject of the photo and serves as the primary illuminator source. The Photographer can experiment with the strength of the video lighting, colour and angle. The key light will determine the shot’s overall lighting design.
Then a fill light can be used to balance out the shadows appearing on your subject. The fill light will typically not be as strong as the key light. If your lights are all the same strength you can look into using diffusers to help soften a light source along with colour gels. A colour of lighting gel is a transparent coloured material placed over a light source for colour correction and video lighting effects.
Use two separate lights in different angles facing the model to capture a series of images that highlight/concentrate on key features of the photograph.
Therefore is se up two lights one facing towards the model from the left and one light facing towards the from the front. This helped to keep the focal point in the part of the photo where those lights cross over, which illuminates the key areas I want to show. I then set my camera to a high ISO so the colour differences were distinct in the harsh light, whilst using a shutter speed of around 1/8 second and a slightly lower aperture so not as much of the light could enter the camera.
Contact sheet:
Final image outcome:
Visual elements of this image include:
The lighting in this was in two locations with one light at the front of the model and there was another lamp to the right side. A fairly plain colour range of primarily whites, greys, browns and black can be seen with a range of light and dark tones across the photography which contact each other. The depth of field and 3D-ness of the photograph is created by where the bottle in the foreground is not in focus, but the model is. The texture is quite smooth and there is a slight lead in line using the sides of the bottom.
Many portraits have contextual and conceptual meanings but this one does not and is designed to showcase a camera technique.
This post is focussed on our studio lighting photoshoot using a single light to capture images.
Single point lighting or “one point lighting”, is the technique of carrying out a photoshoot within a studio with only a single source of light, for example large lamps, spotlights or torches.
It enables reflective lighting techniques, and it sometimes, can be used to focus a viewers attention to a particular aspect of a photograph or subject in the photograph, or it can be used to create shadows when used correctly that add additional depth of field and conceptual features to an image.
Contact sheet of images:
From this contact sheet I picked out my favourite two images from the shoot and edited them in Adobe Photoshop.
My final edited images from the single point lighting shoot:
I chose to edit both of these images because of the sharpness, diversity in model actions, contrast differences, brightness differences and the similarity in the position of the single light and the shadows on the models’ face.
The camera was using a high ISO of around 800 and an above average aperture on the first photo, and using a lower ISO of around 600 and a smaller aperture on the second.
The shutter speed for the first photo was slightly faster than the second creating the darkened effect with only the single light from the side creating the shiny parts that give the image its ‘definition’.
The depth of field in both images is shown through the shadows created by the side-lighting however, this only shows depth of field on the model themselves.
Bruce Gilden (born 1946) is an American street photographer. He is best known for his candid close-up photographs of people on the streets of New York City, using a flashgun. He has had various books of his work published, has received the European Publishers Award for Photography and is a Guggenheim Fellow. Gilden has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1998. He was born in Brooklyn, New York.
About his style and technique:
Photographer Title Theme – Candid Black and White Photographer
Bruce’s style is defined by the dynamic accent of his pictures, his special graphic qualities, and his original and direct manner of shooting the faces of passers-by with a flash. Gilden is also very prone to shooting in extremely close proximity to his “models”, so close in in-fact that a lot of the people he photographs think he’s photographing someone being them which makes them feel more part of the image and gives them a more natural and interesting facial and bodily expression. Gilden’s powerful images in black and white and now in colour have brought the Magnum photographer worldwide fame. Bruce has been known to walk on certain sides of streets and locate himself in certain places he believes give the most diverse and interesting range of people and actions to capture in his portraits.
Bruces inspiration stems from a large fascination of his to do with capturing the energy, the stress and the anxiety of busy city life. He uses flash in a large proportion of his photos and is very selective on the characters he shoots. In one video he quotes, “I look for characters, things that make an impression on me. Someone who’s not the average looking person.”
One of his famous quotes is “If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, its a street photograph”. This quote captures his ethos of trying to take photos that fully represent the non pictorial qualities like emotions and moods of people in the city and those that come with city life.
Video Links:
Images:
Favourite image and analysis:
This is my favourite image because of the anger it carries through the texture of the photography.
Technical features of this photo include;
An artificial flash gun light along with dull daylight.
A macro lens used to distinguish the smallest of facial features.
A greater exposure and shutter speed to capture the minute changes in colour and the variety and true form of the main colours.
A higher saturation to give the photo some more warmth and colour.
Visual features of this photo include;
A very intricate texture with little noise in the photo but a lot of texture.
An extremely high sharpness and high levels of colour saturaion
A kind of 2D shape, made 3D by the small patched shadow areas and of out of focus scenery behind the model
There is also a high contrast to other colours in the photo and shadows are very prominant to enhance the facial features.
Contextual and Conceptual features of this photograph;
This photograph is part of a project carried out by Bruce Gilden called ‘Portraits’ which aimed to capture very different and diverse looking people who captured Bruce’s attention. There may be a personal context that Bruce applies with these photos as-well due to his rough up bringing he maybe feels like these people are those he was destined to end up among if he hadn’t have found photography.
The conceptual essence behind these portraits and portraits in general is to capture the whole environmental feeling from the place the photo was taken. For example emotions like anger and stress can come across from this photo due to unknown reasons. Or street photography portraits can capture the chaos that occurs in a city.
Why Bruce Gilden?
Out of all of the case studies I have completed so far on photographers, Bruce has come across to me as the most genuine, realistic and diverse photographers around. I love his confident style in shooting up close with a flash gun and not caring what other people think of him or his work for example he once quoted “nobody can tell me a picture isn’t good if think its good “. I also love his approach to finding who he’s going to shoot by looking for people who are “different” and not fitting into society because it makes them interesting. I also finally like the way he tries to capture emotions and feelings of city life in his portraits because I personally think street photography is all about not capturing an image necessarily but capturing a mood, emotion or vibe from a person or place.
This blog post is about the photo shoot i carried out in the streets of town in St. Helier Jersey. The focus of this shoot was portrait photography and i was aiming to capture a natural essence of everyday life in the town through the view of the camera without having staged or positioned photos.
Definition of street photography:
Street Photography, also sometimes called candid photography, is photography conducted for art or inquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places. Although there is a difference between street and candid photography, it is usually subtle with most street photography being candid in nature and some candid photography being classifiable as street photography. Street photography does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic. Therefore here it is worthy to note that the kind of street photography our project is focused on is portraits. I chose to go for a more candid approach to collecting these photos and therefore as we are collecting portraits, all my finished pieces contain people in them.
Difficulties:
One difficult aspect of this portrait shoot was the fact that some public members may not like their picture being taken. Therefore i used this theme of being unnoticed in a lot of the photos i took with a minimal amount of disruption to the public that i could use for example not having flash turned on or using the zoom to collect close up features instead of getting in peoples faces, or way.
Contact sheet with best images:
Here is a contact sheet with my best images from the portrait shoot.
My favourite image edit:
I edited this image because i find its the most focused and intricate portrait I collected of a person. It shows an elder gentleman with a cap on walking by and is effective because of its simplicity and the unusual angle it was taken from. It has a look of double exposure however, its is just the levels of color turned up and down
Portrait photography or portraiture in photography is a photograph of a person or group of people that captures the personality of the subject by using effective lighting, backdrops, and poses. A portrait picture might be artistic, or it might be clinical, as part of a medical study.
Aim: To explore the different kinds and ways of acquiring portrait photos and what methods photographers use for different styles.
Types –
TRADITIONAL PORTRAIT
“Face is the focus”
In this type of portrait photography, the object is supposed to look directly at the camera and the focus is on the face.
CANDID PORTRAIT
“Take as it is”
Candid portraits are generally the real and spontaneous images. Here the photographer has not much control on the surroundings and cannot alter the emotions.
POSED PORTRAIT
“Intentions have been conveyed”
Posed portrait means that the photographer has conveyed the intentions to the subject, by words or by action, and there needs to be a change of body position or expression.
ENVIRONMENTAL PORTRAIT
“At objects own environment”
Environmental portrait means that you are photographing the object in its own environment, where it is comfortable most. Like an Engineer at his construction site, farmer in the field etc.
FORMAL PORTRAIT
“Object with a formal pose”
This is a posed portrait, but with a formal touch, prepared for business and other formal occasions.
COUPLE PORTRAIT
“Highlighting the relation”
In this type of portrait the emphasis of the photographer is to show the intensity of the relation between the people in the photograph. For ex: The relation of child with his parents.
GLAMOUR PORTRAIT
“Highlight the appeal”
Taking portrait of the model is the best example of this, where you want to enhance the appeal of the object.
CLOSE UP PORTRAIT
“Get it close”
These are the images that are taken from very close, using zoom or macro lens.
Examples of some good portrait photographs/Mood Board –
William H. Macy photographed at Sundance Film Festival for Be A Star Anti-Bullying Campaign in partnership with WWE and The Creative Coalition
My favourite image edit:
