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
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.
The original image
My final image.
My second image
My final image.
My 3rd image
My final image.
My 4th original image
My final 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.
Layer Masking is a process that involves creating a layer of color over an existing image and removing parts of the new layer to have certain parts of the photo visible.
Method
I loaded up Photoshop and selected my Image I wished to edit
I then went to Layer-New Fill layer-Solid color and selected a colour from the image that would accent the image and layer and applied it and removed sections of the layer
Here are a few final edits
Instead of using circles, I chose to focus mainly on squares and rectangles in order to isolate different parts of an image to highlight them or to create a nice visual effect.
Keld Helmer Petersen was a Danish photographer who gained widespread recognition for his color abstract work in the 1940s and 1950s. He was the pioneer of Danish modernist photography and published his first book 122 color photographs in 1948. He Established a himself as a photographer of architecture and design and while also being known for his color images, he later transitioned into more abstract photography, taking influences from German and American photography as well as international abstract art.
Keld Helmer Petersen’s Abstract photography:
Structure 2 By Keld Helmer PetersenBlack Noise by Keld Helmer Petersen
I wanted to recreate Petersen’s work involving cranes and scaffolding using the threshold tool on Photoshop with my most recent photo-shoot. I wanted to emulate the same sense of atmosphere created by Petersen’s photographs. many of the images that I have Chosen had Petersen’s Photos in mind while editing.
My Final Images:
I wanted these Images to replicate that of Petersen’s Black Noise photograph and evoke the same feelings that his work does. I wanted to create the a similar image, while also using my own style combined with that of Petersen’s. This image, while it mainly takes inspiration from Black Noise, it also takes inspiration from many other pieces of his work.
I decided that the Harbor was not the only place to get pictures of industrial buildings and materials. These photographs were taken in town on a building site that was under construction. I wanted to create a high contrast, B&W picture using the threshold tool, and decided that scaffolding with the backdrop of a white sky would work to my advantage.
Keld Helmer Peterson was an architectural photographer who did a lot of working regarding experimentation with high contrast images featuring man made structures.
A similar effect can be created using the threshold tool in Photoshop
I found that Graffiti translated well into the threshold tool however it creates a rather boring image. I also like how the barbed wire looks when using the threshold tool as it creates an abstract, repeating but chaotic pattern.
I found that introducing grain into the flatter images helped the image react better to the threshold tool. however i was careful not to add too much grain as it would result in the image simply looking like a grainy black and white image.
This was one of my favorite images of the photo-shoot. The fence reacted very nicely to the threshold tool giving a strong contrast to the white walls littered with graffiti.
This is my favorite image of the photo-shoot, while the original image was taken in very low lighting, the threshold tool works nicely to highlight the main subject of the photo.
Here I experimented with photographing various signs. On the second image the rust and the peeling vinyl on the sign creates some interesting texture to prevent the image from being too flat.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard was born in 1925 in Illinois. He studied pre-dentistry but later changed his studies into become an optician. He bought his first camera in 1950 to photograph his first new born child. In 1954 he joined the Lexington camera club.
Though Meatyard experimented with lots of different ways to take images such as using multiple exposures and blur. He often worked with very heavy depth of field effects in his images and normally worked in black and white. He may have worked with heavy depth of field effects to reflect his job as an optician. These can be seen especially well in his “Zen Twigs” project.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
This is a selection of my favourite work by Meatyard. These are all images from his “Zen Twigs” project. In this project he focused mostly on depth of field to make the images look simple.
After researching about Meatyard, I went out and took some images like the ones from his “Zen Twig” project. After I went out and took some photographs I went into photoshop and edited the best ones. I have done this to crop them down to the parts I wanted, to make them black and white so they’re more similar to Meatyards project and to change the exposure levels to make some of the images a lot darker than the others. I have changed the exposure to make them darker so that the blacks in the images stand out a lot more over the whites. These are the best images I took on this photoshoot:
The image shown above is my favourite image that I took. In this image specifically I have added a lot of exposure to make the dark areas stand out a lot over the white. I think this image mimics Meatyard’s work the best out of the images I took as it shows a very heavy amount of depth of field around the focus point. While the image below don’t show nearly as much.
The images above and below show branches in focus in the foreground with a lot of depth of field in the background. These images follows closely with Meatyard’s work due to the main focus point and the huge amount of depth of field in the background. If I were to take the above image again I’d focus further in on one part of the branch rather than the whole thing. While the below image I am happy with how it turned out.
I am not sure what I think of this because of the photo and the fact that the bunker in the foreground is too big to put in one circle.
Then I developed my ideas and made these:
The above slide shows me using the content aware fill to remove some of the larger imperfections.
i chose this photo because the main subjects (the ends of the piers) are small enough to fit in a circle and i can get the sun and the reflection in it to.
Helmer-Petersen was a Danish photographer who was inspired by Albert Renger-Patzsch, the experiments at The Bauhaus in Germany and by Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Art Institute of Chicago. He achieved fame for his colour photographs but he also published several books of black and white images that explore dramatic contrasts of tone. In some, we are only presented with images that are black and white. All mid tones have been removed. He created and found these images, using both cameras and flat bed scanners to achieve the effects he was looking for. These books are beautifully designed and encourage us to consider the space around the image and the accompanying text as integral to the meaning of the work.
These are my experimented ideas, I have chosen to use different pictures and seeing the result of the threshold adjustment.
Here i have chosen my favorite 4 photos out of my edited photos using threshold. I have chosen the photos as they still contain a lot of detail which is what I wanted especially the close up of the plant, this is my favorite image out of my for images as it has more character than the others. the second best image is the one of the close up of the Eiffel tower as threshold effect has made the solid lines more solid and the image I found is the most abstract out of this project as there is only focusing on the detail of the lines it also looks better in black and white instead of using colour.
Grid With My Favorite Photos
This picture below is of a close up of the plant I like this picture as in black and white there seems to be more detail within the image which is presented. I used the threshold adjustment which made it go into black and white and it adds more detail and a sense of it coming out of the page. I have included the original photo before I started editing the photo so I can compare the differences of before and after. In my opinion I prefer the edited version as it makes me feel that the picture is actually coming out of the page which is different to the other picture. In the second edited photo I used the edited photo but afterwards I changed the contrast and brightness so that it was darker. I have included it but i didn’t like it but included it as a comparison.
Plant Close UpPlant Close Up 2
For this photo I decided to again use the threshold adjustment, but I didn’t like this outcome due to the fact the detail within the photo was taken this was because it wasn’t very abstract and the lines were very close together so the shadows collided making it darker.
Eiffel Tower
For this photo I used the threshold adjustment making it into black and white. I like it as the detail within the picture is still present however I don’t think it would be classed as abstract as there is a definite lines and it isn’t close up. I also after using the threshold adjustment i decided to add a and invert which converted the picture into white and then the lines were black I found this very basic and I didn’t like it however i decided to include it as a comparison between the original and both of the edited photos. On the threshold edited photo I included a Stroke to identify my favorite out the of the edited photos.
Eiffel Tower 2Eiffel Tower 3
I decided to use this photo below to see what happened when I choose the very basic picture and used the threshold adjustment to convert into black and white however I found that the edited consisted of little detail and I preferred the original photo as it contains more things to focus which maybe not abstract however the edited would be classed as abstract.
Leaf In Corridor
I chose this picture as it was very simple and I thought about the idea What would it look like if i used the threshold tool. I thought that it was a good outcome as all the shadows reflect the tree. Comparing it to the original photo I prefer the edited photo as you can see the shadows more clearly than the original.
Trees
This picture is of a bicycle wheel I chose to edit it as i found that it was abstract as it only focused on the wheel and its shadow, I thought that if I edited it with the threshold adjustment that it would bring out the detail and it would make the lines bold. For comparing I Prefer the edited version of the photo as it is more unique to the original which I think is very dull and has no personality.
Bicycle Shadow
I think for this photo it would be classed as abstract as it only focuses on a little section unlike the other photos. I used the threshold adjustments which converted the photo into black and white and the lines are solid and bold which is what Keld Helmer-Peterson. I included the original so I can compare how different the adjustment did to the photo. Personally I prefer the edited photo as it seems so much more alive and it brings out the uniqueness of the photo.
