Aperture photo shoot
Keld Helmer-Petersen: Thresholds Experiments
Keld Helmer-Petersen was a Danish photographer who achieved widespread recognition for his abstract photographs. He gained recognition through his coloured photographs but also published black and white photographs exploring the contrasts of the tones. He was inspired by Albert Renger-Patzsch, the experiments at The Bauhuas in Germany and by Henry Callahan and Aron Siskind at the Art Institute of Chicago.
My Own Experiments
For all four of my experiments I took my photograph into Photoshop and I edited and experimented with the threshold of the image which adjusted the contrast of the black and white tones within my photographs. From taking inspiration from Keld Helmer-Petersen my aim was to extenuate the dark’s and the lights of the photograph and editing and experimenting with the threshold of the photograph.
Final Four Photographs
These are the final four photographs I produced from experimenting with the thresholds of the images being inspired by Keld Helmer-Petersen. I feel my outcomes were quite successful as some are showing the geometric lines which Helmer-Petersen also produced and using the thresholds I have extenuated the contrasts of the black and whites.
Threshold adjustment. Nature Vs Man made
In this blog post I am trying to mimic the style of Keld Helmer-Petersen. Helmer-Petersen is most famous for his dramatic use of black and white features, where he explored dramatic contrast of tones.
Keld Helmer-Petersen was a Danish photographer who achieved widespread international recognition in the 1940s and 1950s for his abstract colour photographs. He was born in Denmark on 20th August 1920, and died 6th March 2013
Here is some of his work.
As you can see there is a massive contrast between the extreme white, and dark black within the colours.
I have tried to recreate his take on photography by using the change on threshold within Photoshop, I feel I did really well with this task, I did two different sheets for this, each with 4 photos. My first attempt was an all natural version, with a Flamingo, some wood, a Lemur and a Whippet. I feel this went really well
My second attempt was more of a man made version, with a Climbing frame for Orangutans, the side of a building, a glass bottle within a wall, and an old hook for a large gate.
Personally I felt this was even better than my natural one as I found the perfect threshold for the contrasting tone, much like Helmer-Petersen.
exploring Keld Helmer-Petersen’s photography
KELD HELMER-PETERSEN:
The pioneer of Danish Modernist photography, Keld Helmer-Petersen (1920-2013), is internationally acclaimed for his images of structures, patterns and details found in industrial areas, cityscapes and nature. He started photographing in the late 1930s and first made his name with 122 Colour Photographs in 1948. This book is especially well known due to its innovative use of colour in thoroughly composed photographs of patterns in landscapes and buildings. During the 1950s and 1960s he established himself as a photographer of architecture and design. Simultaneously, his artistic work shifted towards the more abstract, as he found inspiration in German and American photography as well as international abstract art.
CRITICAL ANALYSIS:
The contrast in this image is very high creating a very dramatic and overexposed photo. It is composed of geometric shapes and lines which crisscross each other in regular, sometimes patterned shapes and forms. It is very difficult to create this type of photo purely through camera work therefore I believe that Petersen used heavy editing in his photography in order to create this highly overexposed image whilst in the dark room. It is hard to distinguish between the foreground and the background in this photo as the lack of tonal range merges them together. As the only colours in this image are black and white, they flow and create the appearance of one large structure.
PROCESS:
This is the most successful set of images based of the work of Keld Helmer-Petersen who focuses on over exposure of images creating simplistic line work in his work. I applied this same technique to my work through the use o threshold on Photoshop, as the example shows down below. By decreasing the threshold, the image becomes more exposed and white, by increasing the threshold, the image becomes less exposed and black. I tried to keep all my images to the middle of the scale which prevented them from becoming too overly over exposed or underexposed. The images which I chose to include in this work were ones which contained a lot of strong, geometric, line work. I found that the more busy, and packed a photograph is, the more messy the threshold filter looks on it, therefore i chose to stick with fairly simple photographs.
This is the before and after the threshold has been applied to the image, clearly showing the extreme contrast it has between the different geometric shapes in the picture.
CRITICAL ANALYSIS:
In terms of the technical aspects of this image, the light is coming in from the top left hand corner of the image, creating a lot of exposure making it more white whereas the right bottom corner of the photo has less light hitting it, creating more shadows. In this photo I used a fairly long lense as the subject the image was high up and could not be phothraphed without the aid of zoom, giving a fairly small field of view. In the original photo, the ISO was set to 600 as it was a bright room and I felt that in order to combat the possible overexposure I should decrease the ISO. The grain on the original photo is quite fine therefore the image is detailed and sharp.
After applying the threshold filter, the image has been totally flattened out due to the lack of tonal range, only being composed of black and white. It is difficult to distinguish between the background and the foreground in this image. The photograph is mostly composed of very strong and bold line work. There is also a sense of pattern in this image due to the repeating lines and triangles. There is no real sense of space in this image as the abundance of line work fills every part of the photo.
I created these images with the intent of capturing as many geaometric shapes as I can because I knew that this would work best when applying the threshold filter. More organic shapes tend to look too busy and messy in a sense as they have too many tonal ranges and shadows.
ORIGINAL IMAGES:
Successful Photos From Photo shoot
ANALYSIS AND APPROACH:
These four photos were the ones which i felt were the most successful out of the Photo shoot I personally did. I really focused on the formal elements which I had to cover such as exposure, shutter speed and focal length. In the first and fourth photo I mainly focused on exploring exposure, changing the ISO speed to 200, resulting in a very dramatic and dark photo. I captured these photos with the aid of a tripod as I found that lowering the ISO speed resulted in shaky photos that distracted away from the main formal elements which I attempted to capture. In the fourth photo, the glass bottles were in a very dimly lit room therefore i changed the ISO setting all the way to 16000, which allowed the colors to pop and stand out.
In the second photo, I experimented with changing the focal length. I zoomed into the piece of broken glass and used manual focus in order to focus on it, this resulted in a very blurry backdrop which was the main aim of this shoot. I had the same approach with the fourth photo, the radio post was quite far away from me which forced me to zoom in. The backdrop is not as blurry as compared to the first photo as I used the infinity focus setting on my camera to see the type of effect it would have on the focus.
Colour and Texture- Research
Colour photography is photography that uses media capable of reproducing colours. By contrast, black and white (monochrome) photography records only a single channel of luminance (brightness) and uses media capable only of showing shades of grey.
Texture is the perceived surface quality if a work of art. It is an element of two dimensional and three dimensional designs and is distinguished by its perceived visual and physical properties. Use of texture, along with other elemental design, can convey a variety of messages and emotions.
Texture in photography can be used to create strong images in an architectural and structural way like this
It can be used to show off the beauty and different surface feelings of nature, like this
It can even be used to show the certain characteristics and age of a person like this
I like this type of photography as it allows you to have more freedom over the camera as you can use both auto and manual focus, letting you get as close or as far away from the subject as you want or need to be. It also means that anything can be your subject as anything and everything has a different surface and texture.
I also like the use of Colour photography as it can be original or edited to have a great outcome. There are many different types of ways you can have an outcome of photography. You can have multiple or the same colours in your original photoshoot, you can add a layer of colour on top of the frame during editing or even make the whole frame black and white and only select specific parts of the photo to have colour.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Ralph Eugene Meatyard was born May 15, 1925. He was an american photographer who initially in the navy during world war 2, after the world war he began to study to become on optician. After he married he continued his trade as an optician with a company that also sold photography equipment. Meatyard purchased his first camera in 1950 and joined the ‘Lexington Camera Club’. He tended to make work in bursts and left his film for long times before developing it in his darkroom at his home. He approaches photography with a heavily influenced jazz music background, he used his children as the prime subject in his photos. He addressed the ‘masks of identity’ and the nature of the surface matter. By the time he dies his work was just being recognized.
This photo by Ralph Eugene Meatyard has a main focus which is the twigs, this then gives the photo depth, because of the blurred background it shoes the distance in the photo and it isn’t just a shallow photo where everything is focused in the image. Meatyard has used a natural light because of the nature of his photo, this gives the photo a mysterious feel to it because of the shadows in the background created by trees behind it, even tho is is blurred out it is still apart of the photo and gives it that mysterious feel.
I aimed to take photos like Ralph Eugene Meatyard, with little focus in the pictures. Here are a few of my outcomes;
This small selection of photos show the way I try to copy the way Ralph took his photos. I used manual focus to get these photos and zoom, this is so I could really focus on one thing in the photo. I got inspiration for these photos by his selection of photos known as ‘Zen Twigs’. The depth in these images vary, this is because depending on the background of the photo, how blurred out it was, some of the images had a slightly blurred out background whereas others had one main focus in the photo.
“Conceal / Reveal”
Threshold Adjustment
Keld Helmer Peterson was a Danish photographer who spent most of his working life as an architectural photographer. He was inspired by Albert Renger Patzsch, the experiments at the Bauhaus in Germany, Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. Although he was best known for his coloured photographs, he also published several books of black and white images that explore dramatic contrast of tone. Some images are purely black and white since all the mid tones have been removed. He created and found these images using both cameras and flat bed scanners to have the effect he wanted. He encourages us to consider the space around the image and to use high contrast to create abstract photos.
My Response
To respond to Keld Helmer photography work I will use four abstract images that I have already taken and experiment with the threshold adjustment on photoshop to adjust the black and white contrast. I will then merge them together so different formal elements can be seen in one image. Using Keld Helmer Peterson’s style of photography will make me consider the negative space around the objects.
On each photo individually, i adjusted the threshold level to create images in black and white with different contrasts. When increasing the threshold level the negative space became darker and decreasing made the negative space brighter. Afterwards on powerpoint i grouped the images together so the black areas would merge together and connect to create one image. The formal elements line, shape and pattern can be seen in these images. The most dominant formal element that can be seen is line as they appear in different widths and different directions (horizontal, diagonal, vertical). The formal elements would regularly appear in Keld Helmer photographs. What i like about Keld Helmer photographs is that the negative space is the main feature. Although his images appear simple and reject colour and form, they are visually effective. I think my response was a success since I have incorporated his style into my photography and have experimented with the threshold adjustment for the best final outcomes.