When editing my landscape photographs, I used Lightroom to convert my images into black and white. I also increased the contrast in order to create a more dramatic landscape. Furthermore, by adjusting the curves and levels of the photographs, I made sure they were not either under or over exposed.
Final Image
I believe that this landscape photograph is my best image as it displays clear leading lines, created by the plough lines in the field, that direct the viewer towards the focal point, being the pointed hill in the centre. In addition, I think that this image also shows similarities with Fay Godwin’s rural landscape work, due to its moody atmosphere and dramatic, cloudy sky.
For me it’s better to take pictures in the morning because it’s pretty quiet
Why:
What I’m looking to do is to create some images but influence by Fay Godwin style .
Contact sheets :
Edited:
Final selection :
This my final selection , I choose those two images because I think that they have a pretty resembling style to Fay Godwin style and it’s preety much what I was looking for. I like the images in black and white because there’s a lot of shadows that appears and that we can’t really see on colour.
Romanticism, originating at the end of the 18th century, was a movement of European descent consisting of artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual forms. This new form of expression saw artists conveying their personal interests and feelings towards nature, allowing them to break free from the classical restraint, that had so long confined artists in their work. The pioneers in British romanticism are said to be artists J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, introducing the movement to the country through their dramatic landscapes. This ‘Age of Romanticism’ came shortly after what is known as ‘the age of enlightenment’, which valued the use of reason to bring about the improvement of humanity. This resulted in the many literary, philosophical, scientific and law creations and discoveries, including the revolutions of France and America.
JMW Turner- Hannibal Crossing The Alps 1835
Caspar David Friedrich 1832 Germany
Thomas Doughty (1793-1856)
John Trumbull
Samuel Palmer c. 1840-45
John Kensett
Romanticism in photography is said to have originated as a saturation of the movement, due to this new media being invented towards the end of this dramatic expression, therefore resulting in a larger focus on the mundane rather than the sublime. However the original intent of the romanticism movement immerged again through the work of photographers such as Ansel Adams, Roger Fenton and Fay Godwin, with the display of the immense beauty of nature.
For this photoshoot the lighting and weather allowed me to capture the subtle tones that Luigi Ghirri famously represents in his own work, however my work has a much darker tonal palette. Ghirri also takes many of his photos at the beach, so I felt like using him as an artist reference ties in well with the topic of coastal landscapes.
I believe the images highlighted in green are best photos because they capture the simple contrast of colours, shapes and the use of leading lines that is common in the works of Ghirri. To edit these photos I could use Lightroom or Photoshop in order to increase brightness and decrease contrast to make the tones lighter and more similar to those of Luigi Ghirri.
The photos highlighted in red are my least successful images because the horizon isn’t captured at a straight angle and in general I don’t think they represent Ghirri’s work as accurately.
Photoshop Development
Original Image
Edited Image
Original Image
Edited Image
I used photoshop to edit these photographs in order to make them more similar to the work of Luigi Ghirri. I did this by increasing the brightness and adding blue-toned hues to give the image the pastel aesthetic that Ghirri achieves.
How I edited these photographs
Firstly, I used the colour balance adjustment to add the blue tones and make the grey sky slightly more vibrant.
I then added a blue-green hue to the image to further accentuate the blue tones. I increased the saturation to highlight the pastel colours and increased the lightness to make the colours lighter.
Finally, I added a cyan colour filter to make the blue tones even more prominent.
Luigi Ghirri, born in Scandiano, Italy in 1943, was an Italian artist and photographer who gained recognition as a pioneer of contemporary photography. Ghirri began his career in the 1970’s, when he was heavily inspired by conceptual art. He went on to create his first two pieces, ‘Atlante’, in 1973, and ‘Kodachrome’, in 1978. Luigi Ghirri’s work was featured in many exhibitions around the world, as well as being invited to the ‘Photokina’ in Cologne in 1982, where he was acclaimed as one of the twenty most significant photographers of the 20th century for his series ‘Topographie-Iconographie’. He later died in 1992, due to a heart attack when he was 49.
Examples of Luigi Ghirri’s work
“Marina di Ravenna” – Luigi Ghirri (1972)
“Verso La Foce Del Po” – Luigi Ghirri (1989)
“Riviera romagnola” – Luigi Ghirri (1989)
Analysis of Luigi Ghirri’s work
“Campagna emiliana” – Luigi Ghirri (1989)
This photograph titled ‘Campagna emiliana‘ depicts a derelict Italian rural landscape. At first glance, there is a very muted colour palette and a very simple composition. This is an iconic combination for Ghirri’s work, as he captures the juxtaposition of nature and artificiality in a simplistic way. Ghirri’s use of subtle tones create an almost deadpan view of the world, as his contemporary lens produces an anthropological reaction to his surroundings.
The natural, soft lighting in this photograph forbids any prominent shadows or highlights from standing out, there is no true sense of direction to this lighting because of this as the angle of shadows indicate this, whereas there is a lack of this in the photograph. The lighting is evenly distributed for the most part in this image, although there is a slight sense of darkness towards the top right third of the photo.
There is a clue use of lines within this photograph which can be seen as a form of repetition. Due to the cropping of the image, the lining of the beach is very uniformed, as well as the thicker lining of the road and the juxtaposing thin lines of the walls separating the road and the sand. The use of thin lines can also be seen metaphorically as a separation between the natural world and the artificial world, which is shown as a fine line to separate the two. This could be said to prove the almost indistinct segregation between man and nature, and how they begin to merge in the modern world. There alternating lines also create the multiple leading lines for the viewer, to direct their eyes straight forward towards the horizon in the middle third of the image.
Repetition is represented in the form of lines in this image, however these lines are contrasted between each other with different sizes and colours, therefore the use of repetition in this photograph is contradicting. On the other hand, there is no representation of echo or reflection in this photograph.
Geometric shapes heavily influence this image as well as a lot of other works by Luigi Ghirri. This is proven once again by the repetition of straight-edged lines. The photo, for the most part, is made up of long squares that carry the viewers eyes to the horizon in the middle third of the image.
There is a slight shallow depth of field in this image as the image begins to fade towards the middle third of the image. This is due to the distance of the image paired with a lower f-stop of around 1.4. The majority of the image contains empty, negative space. However the bottom third of the image consists of positive space.
There is multiple contrasting textures within this image. For example, the smooth, even road is contrasted against the rough sand, which is then contrasted with the sharp-cut grass.
The darkest areas of the image would be the grey-toned road and the dim section around the horizon. These are juxtaposed against the lighter areas like the light yellow sand and the gleaming sky. Overall, the image tends towards the lightness, due to the muted, pastel colours in the photograph.
The colours in the photo are very muted and subdued, due to the use of natural daylight, which I believe was taken around midday as there is no sign of a sunset or sunrise. The dominant colour in this image, I would say, is the blue sky. This is because the light blue contributes to over half of the image. I think if this image was taken in black and white, the juxtaposing textures and tones would be increasingly exaggerated .
The image has a rather simple composition due to the repetition of lines as well as the image following the rule of thirds, as the leading lines simultaneously stop in the middle third of the image, and the horizon separated the top third and the bottom third. I would say the image is balanced as the positive space in the bottom third is evenly contrasted with the negative space of the top third.
Romanticism was a cultural movement that emerged in England and Germany at the end of the 18th century and spread throughout Europe during the 19th century, until the 1850s. It expresses itself trough literature, painting, sculpture, music and politics.
Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer 1818; Germany
The Man Contemplating a Sea of Mist is a painting by the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. It is preserved and exhibited at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. It was composed from 1818 and is, along with La Mer de glace, one of the painter’s most famous works. In the foreground, a man stands on a rock high, his back turned to the viewer. He’s wearing a green frock coat
Archive images are images that are stored and kept away images for people to be able to see them in the future, for the purposes of learning about the history of an image or to see the difference of an image through out the years to analyse it.
This is an archive image of St.Brelade’s that was taken with the view of the bay facing towards Ouaisne, in between the years 1850- 1920 as an assumption due to there being no information on when the image was taken.
Juxtaposed Image
Here is the image that I ended up editing by the use of two images of St.brelade’s bay from years ago and St.brelade’s bay today. The process i went through in creating this image was by getting up both of the images on photoshop, then cutting out certain parts of the old St.Brelade’s bay, then copying and pasting it onto the new one and adjusting the cut outs to fit in the image.
I used cutting tools in photoshop to separate various elements in the compositions to re-layer and reposition them.
I also added archival imagery and repositioned them in a way where they would look surreal but still play to the form and structure of the original image. I used this vintage imagery on my recently taken street culture images to create an element of postmodernism.
I went up to st ouens and photographed sand dunes and the coastline. I went when the weather was sunny with blue skies as I wanted bright lighting and not a rainy background.
contact sheet;
I like how these images turned out because there’s no sign of buildings or any man made aspects which is perfect for rural landscapes. I wanted to find a very open space and went to the sand dunes as well as photographing some coastal views.
Romanticism was a movement that ’emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental’. Romantic works were a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment and the advancing Industrial Age, a time in which science and rationalization began to take firmer hold in the public consciousness. It was an international movement that swept Western Europe and Russia at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. It expanded to North America in the beginning of the 1830’s. Romantic literature challenged this new wave of ideas by glorifying stories rooted in emotion, nature, idealism, and the subjective experiences of common men and women. “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.” – Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Romantic artists were apt to make statements about anything (or nothing), dependent on how an individual artist felt about any given topic on any given day. Francisco de Goya’s work explored madness and oppression, while Caspar David Friedrich found endless inspiration in moonlight and fog. In the movement’s early years, these artists predominantly focused on landscape paintings, the will of the Romantic artist had the final say on the subject matter.
Romanticism in Art
Francisco de Goya
John Constable
Théodore Chassériau
Caspar David Friedrich
Horace Vernet
Thomas Cole
When looking at Romanticism in photography it is clear that artists are aiming to capture the dramatic emotions and atmosphere they feel when taking in their surroundings. For example, photographers such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Fay Godwin capture awe inspiring images of tall mountains and winding paths to entrance the viewer into their romanticised setting. I aim to take influence from these photographer’s images and conduct a series of romanticised landscape photoshoots in specific areas around Jersey.
