What is aperture?

The aperture is a hole on a digital camera that adjusts in side in order to control how much light is let into the camera lens. The side of the aperture is measured using the f-stop.

The smaller the f-stop, the more light is let through.

The larger the f-stop, the less light is let through.

Contact sheet:

• RED – Not usable.
• YELLOW – Maybe / Needs editing.
• GREEN – Usable.

This was my favourite image as it displayed the effects of aperture well. I set my camera to use a f-stop of F3.5, ISO 100 and a shutter speed of 1/15. The image shows a good use of focus as the shoe is clear but the background is blurred. The aperture has distorted the front of the shoe to make it appear significantly larger than the rest of the shoe.

For this photo shoot I have taken inspiration from both Aaron Siskind and partially from Nick Albertson.

Aaron Siskind was born in New York City. He started taking photos after he got a camera as a wedding present. He often worked with natural forms and urban areas he usually looked for the texture in the natural forms he photographed to get the images he wanted. 

This is an example of one of Aaron Siskind’s images. In this image, Siskind only really photographed in black and white. This created a sense of simplicity in the images he produced, even though he focused mainly on texture and line throughout his images. In the image above texture can be seen especially well. Siskind used light in his images to create texture and contrast. The image above shows light coming in from the top left creating shadows on the underneath of some parts that stick out and a larger shadow on the right hand side of the tree.

Nick Albertson was born in 1983 in Boston. He often works with everyday items to create repeating forms which are used to create pattern and texture in his images.

This is one of Nick Albertson’s images. In this image he has created a texture by scattering flat rubber bands all over a black background. This image has been taken from directly above where the elastic bands were scattered over. Albertson doesn’t tend to use shadows in his images, because of this the lighting is the same all the way around the image.

My response:

These are some of the best images that I took while I went on my photoshoot. I have tried to take images that best show line,texture or repeated patterns.

I have picked the image above as it shows a complex texture in the stone wall. I have also picked it due to the repeated texture on the back of the lizard. If I were able to take this image again I would have zoomed into the back of the lizard to get a larger image of the repeated textures over the back of the lizard.

I have picked the image above because the rust is creating a pattern over the top of the metal. This pattern can be seen where the rust goes darker creating brown spots all over the metal.

I have picked these last two images because I have zoomed in quite far into both. By zooming in  it let me see the textures closely in both the rope and the tree. I have taken both of these images outside during the day. This has created a nice shadow on one side of each object, this has worked especially well on the rope as the texture in the rope can be seen quite well in and out of the shaded area. On the tree I could have taken it with a higher ISO or a lower shutter speed so that the the lighter side appeared dimmer letting you see the texture in the tree a lot easier.

Julian Schulze

Julian Schulze is a Berlin born and based minimalist Photographer who chooses to focus on geometric abstractions and minimalist compositions with high contrast and wide ranges of colour. His work is very expansive and eye catching ,consisting of architectural features of cityscape environments

His work ranges from everyday scenes taken from different perspectives to mind blowing pieces that play with your perception and that can really make you question what it is you are looking at.

Below are some examples of his work

I have decided to use Schulze as my inspiration due to his portrayal  of colour and shape in his works, as well as his ability to truly capture the imagination of his Audience.

Shooting

For my Julian Schulze inspired shoot, I decided to go to my local town area and identify buildings and scenes that I thought matched this criteria in terms of colour shape and texture. I photographed high rise office blocks and items in the street to try and truly emulate this style

Contact Sheets

Here are my contact sheets for this project

Final Image Selection

An old CD Hung up outside a shop to scare birds off of the fresh fruit. whole background has been lowered in vibrance and the CD isolated and adjusted

Black and white garage doors, no alerting needed

Open sign outside a restaurant with red LED’s. Red border around the outside to supplement the colour

Black and white desaturated street corner

Illuminated office blocks

The Process

Final Images

Keld Helmer-Peterson was a Danish photographer who took abstract photographs. He was heavily inspired by Albert Renger-Patzsch and Aaron Siskind. This photographer took images of things like buildings, and edited his photos until the contrasts were very high. He published many books that contained heavily contrasted images, like the one below. He took the images in the books using cameras, and also bed scanners. All the images in the book are surrounded by a lot of space and sometimes even text.

My images

For my following experimentation, I have chosen 4 abstract images I have previously taken to edit on Photoshop. To edit all the images I have adjusted the threshold, by going to image then selecting ‘adjustments’. For each image I have then adjusted the threshold until i has satisfied that I had a heavily contrasted image that i was happy with. Below i have included screenshots of my process for each image.

My final piece

For my final pieces, I have attempted to create images like the ones Helmer- Petersen presented in his books. I think my images turned out very successful as they are very heavily contrasted and all the mid tones have also been removed. Because the paper I took pictures of was very scrumped, there were many different points on the paper that were illuminated by light, and other parts that were more shadowed. I think that has helped my images look very interesting after I had photo shopped them as there is a nice blend of both black and white on my final images.