On Tuesday 4th October we went to Le Hocq beach and travelled down to photograph things such as, rocks, landscape and ocean. I took around 300 images of different rock formations and the beach. I then exported all my images over to Lightroom and used the P and X tool to decide which images can be further edited.
P and X tool
After going through all my images and choosing which were the best I came down to around 30 images which I then decided to edit. Below shown are some of my best unedited images from the Le Hocq shoot:
Best unedited images:
I edited my images using Adobe Lightroom and changed many different features on my best images. I edited features such as the tint of the photo to create a warm or cold coloured image. Also, I used the transform tool to make my images straighten up because of the horizon being slightly slanted. I edited around 20 images using these different tools and was happy with how they turned out.
Lightroom Edits:
Overall, I am very happy with the way my images turned out after editing. I like the monochrome photos because the contrast between the brown rocks and sand makes the rocks stand out compared to the rest of the image. Also, I really like the close up images taken of rocks because it shows a very good amount of detail and texture.
Joseph Parra was born in South Florida and currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland where he received a BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) with a major in Painting, a minor in Art History, and a concentration in Printmaking. He has always had an interest in working with aspects of identity in relation to the human figure. His work has come to challenge the traditions of portraiture through acts of concealment and exposure; a reflection of the mind transposed onto a surface.
“Remember, today is the first day of the rest of your life. Don’t be bound by yesterday, just look forward“-Joseph Parra
Examples of his work
Exposure and concealment are Parra’s tools, carried out via printmaking, digital printing, drawing, sculpting and painting. While viewers connect with the figures, they are also silently confronted by the figures’ mindless expressions, illuminating that they aren’t aware of their voyeur.
Joseph Parras work could be an inspiration towards my 3d photo sculptures because of the way he creates the 3d effect. I really like the way he uses crumpled paper to create distorted faces and present them in an effective way. I could use the idea of rolled up paper with my images of rock formations to make a 3d sculpture in a similar way to Joseph.
Mary Ellen Bartley
Mary Ellen Bartley is known for her photographs exploring the tactile and formal qualities of the printed book, and its potential for abstraction. By emphasizing the unique “aura” and materiality of printed matter, Bartley’s work offers a celebration of textural and tactile properties, a particularly potent act in this increasingly digital age.
Examples of her work
Bartley photographs stacked paperback books that take on the identity of minimal sculptures. This is emphasized by the anonymity of the books, whose spines and covers cannot be seen, just the blocks of pages with subtle variations in colour.
Mary Ellen Bartley has a few different styles of work with a topic based on photographing and manipulation of different kinds of books. To create these abnormal books, Mary cuts out strips of the book cover and flips them around in a sequence, then photographs them on a vibrant coloured background. Examples:
Image analysis
In this image, you can see three crumpled pieces of paper displaying a distorted face on wooden shelves. The faces can portray the idea of lost identity due to the same face displaying different emotions through different positions and angles. The shadows being cast from the shelves creates a nice, dark contrast towards the plain grey background. Also, the artist has created relating shapes with the faces to give the idea of different identities through the face positioning. I would like to use a similar style of work when I create my 3d photo sculpture because I like the way the faces are positioned and displayed.
For this photo shoot, I went to the studio and laid out objects in a specific form to try and get the best photos. I took around 50 – 60 images of different layouts of beach like objects such as, rocks, dead bushes, seaweed, and shells. I made a total of 3 different layouts for 3 different types of images I was going to take.
Contact Sheets
I took a total of 51 images throughout my 3 different object setups. Most of the images turned out well, however some were slightly out of focus and had a shutter speed which was too high for some of the photos. After seeing how many images I had I decided to colour coordinate my images to narrow them down into specific colours for each object layout.
Red = layout 1, Blue = layout 2, Yellow = layout 3
After organising my images into specific colour I decided to start to edit some of my images in Adobe Lightroom. I knew which images to edit first because of the P and X tool which helped me pick out the usable images for these edits.
Lightroom Edits
Lightroom Colour Experiment
For this image, I wanted to try something different and experiment with the colour tools on Lightroom. I started by choosing the image I wanted to edit and chose the one displayed below.
Original image
To begin, I first thought that the rocks need to be more centralized so I decided to crop the image down into a smaller portrait photo.
Cropped image
I then did the usual and edited the image using the basic developing tools such as, texture, exposure and contrast until I decided which way it looked the best.
Developed image
Finally I travelled to the colour tools to experiment with the tools such as, colour grading, tone curve and effects.
Still life photography is a genre of photography used for the depiction of inanimate subject matter, typically a small group of objects. Similar to still life painting, it is the application of photography to the still life artistic style.
Historical context:
Still life derives from the Dutch word stilleven, coined in the 17th century when paintings of objects enjoyed immense popularity throughout Europe. The impetus for this term came as artists created compositions of greater complexity, bringing together a wider variety of objects to communicate allegorical meanings.
Still life painting reached a height of popularity in the Netherlands during the 17th century, when the market for small intimate paintings for domestic settings exploded. These images reflected the importance of religion to their owners and used a rich symbolic language to subtly convey complex moral and spiritual ideas. Flowers, fruit, and common household items were used to gently remind the viewer that life is short, death is certain, and any overindulgence in sensual earthly pleasures will be paid for in the afterlife. A still life conveys vanitas themes because we know that flowers fade, and candles burn out. They symbolise the shortness of life and are meant to remind the viewer that existence is meaningless without the hope of salvation.
Still-life painting:
Franciscus Gijsbrechts (1657-1675)
Jan van den Hecke (1640-1684)
Jacob van Hulsdonck (1615)
Paul Cézanne (1893)
Still-life photography:
Still life photography is a form of professional photography that depicts inanimate objects or subject matters. Still life is a unique genre of photography. One thing that makes it so special is that often the subjects aren’t very interesting.
There are two different types of still-life photography which are found still-life and created still-life. Found still-life is photography that contains a combination of found subject, symbolic objects, and natural lighting. The visual message is concerned with the transitory nature of life, and the inevitability of death. However, created still-life is when a photographer creates an image with almost full control over lighting, mood, and composition. Because photographers directly influence the image creation process, still life photos reflect the creativity and style of the photographers themselves.
Key Painting Analysis:
Abraham van Beyeren
In this still-life painting created from 1620/21–1690 by Abraham van Beyeren it clearly displays multiple food items which symbolise the idea of ‘wealth’. The artist included a rich, red lobster which symbolises wealth and temptation with a fancy glass that shows the artist indulged in a life of luxury. The table shown is neatly lade boasting the luscious foods on display with a prosperous white and blue bowl. The glass could be used to reflect the richness off of the lobster to arrange the ideas of wealth throughout the collection of lavish items. The ideas of good luck and abundance have been presented through the grapes which are slightly hanging off the table meaning to always hold on due to the good luck. The painting has a great contrast between the black background and the dimmed items presented on the table. The use of the dark browns make the image have a dark tone and create a gloomy feeling towards the viewer.
To begin making my Joiner I selected around 15 images from Lightroom and exported them into a specific joiner folder. I colour co-ordinated my joiner images into a yellow collection so I can be more organised. I made sure all selected image were applied with the same editing tools to not ruin my joiner by having coloured images involved.
I exported my joiner images into photoshop through the Photomerge tool to create my joiner. I believe this is the most effective way of creating a joiner instead of using the manual way because it neatly forms all the other images together in a very effective way.
File – automate – photomerge
Here is how it created my joiner:
Clear background
Simple edits:
Stroke
Blur
Find Edges
Tiles
Ripple
Background colour experimentation:
Red
Green
Purple
Pink
Yellow
Orange
Evalution
I like the way most of these joiners turned out especially the ones with simple effects. During my experimentation I focused on using one main image that I chose to use throughout all my experiment. I chose this joiner because it was the best out of all the other outcomes I tried to produce due to the wide span of scenery. The use of the bright and vibrant colours made the joiners seem more ‘joyful’ and makes the monochrome joiner have great contrast towards the colours. For the next time I create a joiner I am going to experiment further with 3d objects and creating my own joiner manually instead of the automatic photoshop way.
For my L’Etacq Geopark trip I managed to photograph around 150-200 images to use to create multiple edits and then further develop into creating a ‘joiner’. I chose around 20 photos which I wanted to edit on Lightroom. Below are some of my best Lightroom edits:
Overall, I am happy with the way my edits came out after exporting. I really like the effects of the black and white because it has great contrast towards the earth like colours being brown, green and a slight orange. Also, the coloured images look really good through the way the sky reflects on the brown rocks and green land.
For my first photoshoot for my new topic ‘Islandness’ we went to the parish of St Ouen and walked around L’Etacq taking photos of interesting rock formations. We walked around the cliff paths trying to capture any rocks that seemed unique to take back to class and edit. Also, I took a lot of images of the same rock formations to try attempt to create David Hockney’s ‘Joiners’. Overall, I managed to take around 200 images when on the St Ouens photography trip.
Contact sheets:
After arranging my images in separate folders/collections I decided to flag the image to further understand which images I would like to improve and develop.
I ended up with 35 images which I think were good enough to further develop in Lightroom. But to narrow down my images more I decided to use the rating tool to rate my 35 images from a scale of 1-5.
Emily Allchurch, born 1974 in Jersey, Channel Islands, lives and works in Hastings, East Sussex. She trained as a sculptor, receiving a First Class (Hons.) degree in Fine Art from the Kent Institute of Art & Design – Canterbury in 1996, and an MA from the Royal College of Art in 1999, where she began working with photography as a material. Since then, she has exhibited regularly in solo and group shows in the UK and internationally.
Allchurch uses photography and digital collage to reconstruct Old Master paintings and prints to create contemporary narratives. Her starting point is an intensive encounter with a city or place, to absorb an impression and gather a huge image library. From this resource, hundreds of photographs are selected and meticulously spliced together to create a seamless new ‘fictional’ space. Each artwork re-presents this journey, compressed into a single scene. The resulting photographic collages have a resonance with place, history and culture, and deal with the passage of time and the changes to a landscape, fusing contemporary life with a sense of history.
Closer to home:
Spring Estate
Brede Valley
Fairlight
Beachy Head
Camber Sands
Hastings Pier
Throughout 2020 and 2021, whilst largely confined to her home county of East Sussex due to the Coronavirus pandemic, Emily Allchurch took photographs on her daily walks in the local countryside through the changing seasons. This has inspired a new collection of landscapes, ‘Closer to Home’, not only in celebration of the natural world, but also as a reminder of its precarious fragility.
The works explore themes of landscape management and control, the threat from development, coastal erosion, invasive plant species and detritus, and how we interact with the landscape through tourism and recreation.
The ‘Tower of Babel’ is a compelling motif with which to portray a city from a contemporary perspective and is a recurring theme in Allchurch’s work. The construction allows for multiple viewpoints and layers of history to be represented within a single structure.
As with all her works, Babel Britain is peppered with topical markers spotted in the environment: signage, graffiti, property developers’ advertising hyperbole, street art, and protest banners – all of which help to reinforce a message of political and economic uncertainty, as well as growing inequality of wealth.
Babel Britain
Babel London
Tower of London 2005
Image analysis:
Babel Britain (after Verhaecht)
In this image, you can see multiple buildings positioned into one big complex. All the buildings seem to be from different locations because of the different features and colours. The use of having stormy clouds create a great effect on the image by making the image seem medieval and dark. These images could be made to try and present the future of Britain having buildings positioned together due to lack of housing. The image has a lot of small details throughout such as structures in the background, graffiti, protest banners, advertisements and street art. I really like the way how such a small image is filled with lots of hidden and mysterious details everywhere you look.
David Hockney (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century. In the early 1980s, Hockney started to produce photocollages, which he called “joiners,” starting off with polaroid prints and later of 35mm, processed colour prints. Using a large number of Polaroid prints or photolab-prints of a single subject Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image. One of his first photomontages was of his mother. the images are taken from different perspectives and with slightly different lighting resulting in an effect similar to Cubism.
Joiners:
David Hockney’s creation of the “joiners” occurred accidentally. He noticed in the late sixties that photographers were using cameras with wide-angle lenses to take pictures. He did not like such photographs because they always came out somewhat distorted. Working on a painting of a living room and terrace in Los Angeles, he took Polaroid shots of the living room and glued them together as a preparatory work, not intending for them to be a composition on their own. He realised this picture created a kind of story, as if the viewer was moving through the room. He began to work more and more with photography after this discovery and even stopped painting for a period of time. Hockney had always been interested in Cubism and the idea of multiple perspectives and viewpoints so this was another way for him to explore this way of looking.
Examples of David Hockneys ‘Joiners’:
In the early 1980’s, David Hockney began creating intricate photo collages that he called “joiners”. His earlier collages consisted of grid-like compositions made up of polaroid photographs.
Hockney was very interested in how 3-dimensional space can be portrayed in a 2-dimensional image. Joiners aimed to create an image that was able to show reality how we experience it (in fragments, not as a whole), and to show the passage of time.
How he created joiners was by taking multiple and varying Polaroid shots or photolab-prints of just an individual subject. Then with these shots he would arrange them into what almost looks like a patchwork, to create on overall image. One of Hockney’s first ‘joiners’ was a photomontage of his own mother.
Image analysis:
David Hockney first created ‘Pearlblossom Highway’ first when noticed that photographs taken in the late 1960s came out a bit distorted. This lent him to the idea of creating “joiners” i.e photographic collages. Hockney created Pearblossom Highway over several days while in California. He took many photographs of a view on the notorious route 138, Antelope Valley.
Pearl Blossom Highway 1986
In this photo you can clearly see the image is made up of over 100 different 2-dimensional quadrilaterals positioned in different angles and variations which all make up an image of Pearlblossom Highway created in 1986. The image displays a deserted road containing street signs and a few trees, with a heap of litter scattered around the beginning of the road. It shows good weather conditions that create a good effect contrasting between the blue sky and sandy roads. The images seems slightly distorted in a positive way by David creating all objects and features not appear normal.
A geopark is a UNESCO-designated area containing one or more sites of particular geological importance, intended to conserve the geological heritage and promote public awareness of it, typically through tourism.
A UNESCO Global Geopark comprises a number of geological heritage sites of special scientific importance, rarity or beauty. These features are representative of a region’s geological history and the events and processes that formed it. It must also include important natural, historic, cultural tangible and intangible heritage sites.
Jerseys Island Geological maps:
A Geopark is about more than rocks. Jersey is a strong contender for this special designation because of our Island’s exceptional geology and our important cultural heritage which forms the outstanding surroundings we enjoy every day. Whether exploring Jersey’s diverse landscapes or seascapes there is lots to discover and inspire you.
Examples of Jerseys Geopark:
Jerseys Geological History:
The Island of Jersey has a geology that is significantly different to that of the United Kingdom and even from that of the other Channel Islands. Many of the island’s geological sites are of regional and international significance and some have attracted global attention.
Jersey consists of a striking variety of sedimentary and igneous rocks, varying from shales, greywackes and conglomerates to extrusive andesites, rhyolites and ignimbrites and several varieties of plutonic granite and diorites and gabbros.
Jersey is the sort of place that appeals to geologists. Millions of years ago it was in an area near a volcano. The lava which spewed forth formed the dark, mauve coloured rocks peculiar to Jersey. These rock formations around the coastline tell the story of how the island was formed in ancient times.
Granite – is a light coloured, grey to pink, coarsely crystalline, plutonic, acid igneous rock composed of quartz, alkali feldspar, generally orthoclase, and biotite and/or muscovite.
Jersey is famous for its granites, which have been favoured as a building material for thousands of years. These major intrusive or ‘plutonic’ rocks were formed between 580 and 480 million years ago by molten rock cooling and solidifying between the Earth’s surface.
Three fascinating granite masses occur in Jersey and form the north west (NW), south west (SW) and south east (SE) corners of the island; they are well exposed and easily accessible, with interesting relationships to adjacent rocks and all within 15km of each other.
They are fascinating because two of them, the SW and the NW ones, consist of three and four different granites respectively, but of different ages, while the SE one consists of four different granites which have yet to produce reliable dates.
In addition, the NW and granite masses include gabbros and diorites, with structures and textures that make their relationships to each other even more interesting study material.
