A tradition in my family is to regularly go out for family meals on a Sunday. Our lives are heavily family orientated with constant excuses for celebrations. This photo shoot was taken when I went to France and we went for our family meal with close family friends to a gourmet Chinese. I used standard flash to create a candid feel but to achieve the establishing shot, I got them all to stand in the order they wanted to.

Originally I wanted to capture only one or two objects together, as to not over-complicate the image, however the more I played around with the idea of using different objects together to create a scene, the more I got into it. As you can see, my first images only featured a couple of objects, where as the later ones, in my opinion, feel more alive and have more personality that my starting photos, and help create the effect of authentic occupation items.

In Depth Analysis:

I wanted to create a slightly less cluttered image compared to the previous one, but still wanted to tell a story. In my mind, these objects belong to a British soldier who is delivering a red cross package and food rations to a family, and has rested his helmet next to the parcel after relieving it the family. Obviously creative liberties have been made in order to show off the objects in the best way possible, but represents this story to me personally. I also wanted this image to be slightly less saturated to show a contrast between the happiness that islanders felt after liberation, and all of the hardships that they have been through over the previous years. Alternatively, the helmet can also be used to represent this oppression in contrast to the Red Cross Parcel.

For this image I wanted to make it look as though a bag was dropped, and the contents had spilled onto the ground. For this reason, I wanted to make the contents seem as realistic as possible, for a satchel being carried by an average citizen. Therefore, I included a tin of rations which has been slightly obscured by the bandages in front. This person would also have been carrying a small crystal radio set, which has been thrown out by the bag hitting the ground.

I used the rule of thirds as well as the leading lines of the open satchel to draw the eye to the bandage tin in the left, where the viewer can follow the line of unraveled bandage along to the radio set as well as the other tin further back in the bag. In hindsight it may have been a better idea to move the ration tin further to the right the first bandage tin, and perhaps rested it on the tin that is further in the background, as the view would have an idea of what it looks like due to the one in the foreground.

For my studio shoots myself and max had decided that it would be best if I tried to get some other things that my family had during the occupation and we could use alongside with the things that were being provided for us from the archive.

We had three different methods to shoot the objects available to us, there was a still life table, which is good as it means you can get lighting from all sides including from behind. We could also make a horizon with coloured card and there was a rig to do top shoots.

These results above are from the Still life table the skull is one that we were able to obtain from school and everything else (other than the helmet) was from my grandads time in the occupation.

These images are ones that we took using the coloured horizon, all of these objects are ones that were provided by the archive. I chose the coloured cards as they are complementary colours, they also have strong contrast to the objects that are the subject.

The idea of creating auto chromes came about when there was a high demand to create colour images.

The first practicable method of colour photography was the autochrome process, invented in France by Auguste and Louis Lumière. Best known for their invention of the Cinématographe in 1895, the Lumières began commercial manufacture of autochrome plates in the early 20th century.

AN EXAMPLE OF HOW AUTOCHROMES CAN BE MADE TODAY:

Above is an example of how autochromes can be made at home using fairly primitive and easy to get items. Although a lengthy and sometimes difficult process, autochromes can still be made today.

These are close up shots of the makeup of an autochrome, the tiny specs of pigment can be clearly distinguished from one another, all working together to create an image. Although most photos look extremely colourful, made up of various tones and shades, in reality most images are made up of just different combinations of the same three primary colours, red, blue and yellow.

EXAMPLES OF AUTO CHROMES:

IMAGE ANALYSIS:

VISUAL:

In terms of the visual aspects of the image, the first impression which comes to mind is the graininess of the image but this is very typical of the photography style. There is also a slight vignette around the border of the image which may be a result of the technology of the time or due to the fact that the image has aged slightly and therefore the coloraturas around the edges of the image has faded drastically. There is a very clear foreground and background with the family and kids being entered around. large cannon in the foreground and the trees and buildings being situated in the backdrop. This is quite an interesting image in terms of the composition and the subjects as this was taken during the early 20th century, when coloured photography was in its infancy. Seeing the men and women dressed in period specific clothing being displayed in a coloured image is very conflicting as they almost look out of place and strange within the image. As this is an auto chrome, and early version of coloured photography, the colour scheme is subtle and we can see any variations of soft beiges and other muted tones.

TECHNICAL:

As these images are auto chromes and early versions of colour photography, the standard setup for photography as we know it today has not been used in this case, in order to create an image. The process, called autochrome, involved covering a glass plate with a thin wash of tiny potato starch grains dyed red, green, and blue, thus creating a filter. A thin layer of emulsion was added over that. When the plate was flipped and exposed to light, the resulting image could be developed into a transparency.Like early black and white photography, autochrome was a slow process. Because exposures were long, subjects had to stay still—sometimes unsuccessfully—to avoid a blurred image. But with autochrome, the blur had an unusual aesthetic effect: Paired with the soft, dyed colors, it made the photo look like a painting.

CONTEXTUAL:

Color photography was available long before the technology for color printing came along in 1941, when Kodak made it possible to order prints from Kodachrome slides. Because printing wasn’t an option, Autochromes were best viewed as projections or with the aid of special equipment, such as a diascope.  The Autochrome process was used to produce color photography well into the 1930s, but fell out of use as advances in subtractive color film processing allowed for a wider spectrum of color to be captured.

CONCEPTUAL:

When photography was invented in 1839, it was a black-and-white medium, and it remained that way for almost one hundred years. Photography then was a fragile, cumbersome, and expensive process. In order to practice, photographers needed a lot of extra money and time, or a sponsor. 

In that early period, the people advancing photographic technology tended to focus not on achieving color photographs but on making improvements in the optical, chemical, and practical aspects of photography. For many, the goal was to make photography more suitable for portraiture—its most desired application. For that, photographic technology needed to be more stable, portable, and affordable, not more colorful. There was a steady demand for the need of colour photography therefore experimentation with the topic came about, kickstarting the invention of auto chromes and other various methods of achieved colour through photographic imagery.

First Edit:

Edit 2:

By Fri 18 Oct – COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING WORK:

• Each student must have been in the studio at least once experimenting with coloured backdrops.

• Show experimentation with the above images using cutout figures from archive photographs as a response to Rafal Milach work: The First March of Gentlemen – see this blog post here under week 6

• Have a folder with 10-12 images of both PORTAITS and OBJECTS (including any montages – if relevant) in high-res TIFF files (4000 pixels on long edge) ready for zine design and layout first lesson Mon 21 Oct.
  
• Select 2 montages as final prints and save in the folder below. You can choose any montages that you have made from LANDSCAPE, PORTRAIT or OBJECTS modules. If you have a paper collage, then photograph it in the studio to make it digital. All image files saved as high-res TIFF (4000 pixels)

M:\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\PRINTING\A2\A3 Montages

Still-life Studio Shoot:

Each group of two students work on one station each ie. Continuous Light and Flash Lights and swap halfway through

It takes more time to work with Continuous lights so it may be that each group needs to visit studio twice – which is okay as the studio is booked every lesson the erst of this week and next week too.

You can choose to photograph each object individually or group together several objects for a more complex still life arrangements.

Technical stuff – just in case someone has changes the settings.

Continuous Lights – photograph objects three dimensionally

Camera setting: Manual Mode
ISO: 100
White Balance: Daylight
Aperture: F/16
Shutter: 0.5 sec to 0.8 sec (depending on reflection of each object)
Lights in room must be switched off to avoid relfections

Flash Lights – photograph images, documents, books, newspapers, etc

Camera setting: Manual Mode
ISO: 100
White Balance: Daylight
Aperture: F/16
Shutter: 1/125-1/200 (depending on reflection of each object)
Flash heads set to power output: 2.0
Use pilot light for focusing

NB: At the end of the day – or if someone from media has booked the studio in between lessons – move still-life table away from backdrop and set up again for next lesson.

Uploading images from shoot:

Students can decide to use their own card in camera or use shared card – 10 mins before lessons ends take card out and upload images in folder on computer.

You must take an image of how the lights was set up and annotate, key light / fill light / back light (if used)

Those students who are not in the studio work independently in class editing images from shoot and produce blog posts as per instructions here:

3. EDITING: Upload and process images from photo-shoot using Lightroom and make a rough edit of 8–10 images 

4. EXPERIMENTING: Show experimentation with different adjustments/ techniques/ processes in Lightroom/ Photoshop appropriate to intentions. Produce at least 3 different variations of the same still-life with 3 different images.

Michelle Sank:

“Michelle Sank was born in Cape Town, South Africa. She left there in 1978 and has been living in England since 1987. Her images reflect a preoccupation with the human condition and to this end can be viewed as social documentary. Her work encompasses issues around social and cultural diversity.”
http://www.michellesank.com/about

Insula:

“Working outside of particular demographic scenarios Sank’s Jersey imagery continues to develop a lyrical vision within which the defining influences are place and cultural geography. As a stranger, present for a limited period only, Sank’s ‘residency photographs’ are of course procured under certain psychological precepts. In April 2013 when she arrived at the Archisle Project to undertake a six month residency, geographic and historical influences also loomed large. There were late twentieth century blanks in the archive to compensate, Jersey’s peculiar British-Norman cultural identity to contemplate, economy, politics, community, work, leisure, environment; these concerns together set against a twenty-first century backdrop. As Insula, the Latinate title of Sank’s resulting exhibition suggests, an enduring islandness is a defining influence in this body of work. It also seems fitting that the insula or Island of Reil in the human brain plays a part in regulating self-awareness and emotion.

Insula eschews a specific brief though the work responds to the wealth of nineteenth century portrait photographs within the Jersey Photographic Archive that it now joins as a powerful point of interpretation. The beguiling qualities of these new photographs call to mind the position that Lewis Baltz found for photographic series, ‘somewhere between the novel and film.’ As such, Sank’s photographs offer a visual poem to the island.”
http://www.michellesank.com/portfolios/insula

Technical:

This photo as taken with natural lighting coming from the left with a small aperture, probably around F20. The shutter speed is around 1/8 and the ISO is set around 400-1600.

Conceptual:

This photo is described by Michelle Sank as “responds to the wealth of nineteenth century portrait photographs within the Jersey Photographic Archive”. This conveys the meaning of money and power in Jersey and shows how richer people live and what they have.

Contextual:

This images portrays a deeper meaning of social class in Jersey. This woman appears to be quite wealthy, so it contrasts with Sank’s other images in this series, as there is a mixture of different classes in this project.

Visual:

The colours all match cohesively and this photo has maroon red colour palette. This photo is in colour which shows the vibrancy of the image. The tone of the picture is quite light. The main focus is on the lady as she is in the center and the focus is mainly on her.