The aperture stop of a photographic lens can be adjusted to control the amount of light reaching the film or image sensor. In combination with variation of shutter speed, the aperture size will regulate the film's or image sensor's degree of exposure to light. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture Here is my experimentation with a 75-300mm lens:
With one of my abstract images I will open up photoshop and add another layer on top (solid colour) so I can create holes with the brush tool. These holes will reveal the image beneath and the covered areas will have the solid colour which will be blocking the image. I will create holes in areas of the photo that I think need to be revealed if they are an important feature in the frame. Using this editing technique is another way of creating an abstract image and will help me improve on my photoshop skills.
The final image came out well since I have chosen certain parts of the photo to be displayed. This makes the image visually interesting as it’s only highlighting the important aspects.
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.
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
Here are my contact sheets for this project
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
ISO controls the brightness of your photos and controls the cameras sensitivity to light. Put simply, it will lighten or darken your photos. As you increase your ISO, your cameras sensitivity will increase and therefore photos brightness will increase.
It means you could have more flexibility in your aperture and shutter speed settings. For example, if you’re indoors with poor lighting and you’re photographing a sports even where people are moving fast, then you would be able to use a fast shutter speed without the photo being under exposed.
When using high ISO you can start to get more grain/noise.
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.
Intro
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.
Throughout the past two decades, Uta Barth has made visual perception the subject of her work. Regarded for her “empty” images that border on painterly abstraction, the artist carefully renders blurred backgrounds, cropped frames and the natural qualities of light to capture incidental and fleeting moments, those which exist almost exclusively within our periphery. With a deliberate disregard for both the conventional photographic subject and point-and-shoot role of the camera, Barth’s work delicately deconstructs conventions of visual representation by calling our attention to the limits of the human eye.
A 2012 McArthur Fellow, Barth was born in Berlin in 1958 and currently resides in Los Angeles. She received a B.A. from the University of California, Davis in 1982 and an M.F.A from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1985.
Since then, Barth’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions worldwide. Notable solo presentations include to draw with light at SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, GA (2013), … and to draw a bright, white line with light at The Art Institute of Chicago (2011), Henry Art