Keld Helmer-Petersen is a Danish photographer. He was an international pioneer in colour photography and was a central figure in not only Danish but also European modernist photography. Helmer-Petersen’s career spanned 70 years and he had strong interest in modern architecture, industrial areas and structures. He started photographing in 1938, when he was given a camera as a high school graduation gift. He studied the graphic and abstract effects of a photograph in particular. He was self-taught and studied technical manuals, journals and photobooks.

Throughout Keld Helmer-Peterson life he maintained a strong interest in international trends, not just photography – but also art, literature, film, music and architecture. However, he wasn’t only inspired by them, but also collaborated and socialised with architects, artists, writers and musicians as a natural part of his work as a photographer.

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From 1950 to 1951, Helmer-Petersen studied at the Institute of Design art school in Chicago. Helmer-Petersen’s stay at the legendary Institute of Design came about because of his first photobook ‘122 Colour Photographs’ published in 1948. It gained international attention and was recognised as one of the pioneering examples of art photography in colour. Chicago’s impact on his artistic development was clearly showcased in the book ‘Fragments of a city’ published in 1960 where the photographs were taken in the city of Chicago.

Up until the 1990s he was busy photographing urban environments and industrial areas in the outskirts. He was particularly interested in the area around the harbourside in his hometown of Copenhagen.

My Editing

Here I have tried to edit some of my photos in a similar way that Keld Helmer-Petersen published his. I used the industrial images from the photography work do this and I edited them in photoshop by using the threshold style of editing. I like how the colours and tones are simple but are intensified by the different elements of the photos, like the cranes and the different angles of lines that built them or the darker, more bold structures that standout against the white and lighter sky. I really like how you can see all the little details of the structures and landscapes as the harsh black is more eye-catching against the white.

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Photoshoot 1	For my first photo shoot, I went down to the harbours and the block of flats near there. I went around 5:30 so that there was still good lighting.
Photoshoot 2	For my second photoshoot, it was the photography walk around Havre de pas and La Collette also near the harbour, this was from 2:20 – 3:20 with good lighting.

Contact Sheets

The day I went to the harbour it was sunny, with a bright blue sky which made a nice background to the photos. There are a few repeated photos as the sun was slowly starting to set so I kept having to change different settings on the camera to get the right lighting.

For this photoshoot, it was also a sunny day, with little clouding so there are no shadows in the photos and they also have a bright blue background from the sun. I tried to get a lot of different photos as I did not need to adjust the settings a lot as the lighting stayed the same a lot of the time.

Editing

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For my black and white edit, I have increased the contrast and only slightly increased the exposure to give the structure a darker look and have the background give an ombre type effect going from a dark grey into a lighter one. As I wanted it to be a darker image I have also decreased highlights, shadows, whites and blacks to get this edit. For the photo of the flats, I have increased the contrast up to 100 to get a brighter orange and extenuate the brick beneath it. I have increased the shadows and blacks also to try and help this as I really like the brighter orange against the white wall next to it.

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Similar to the black and white edit I did above I have increased the contrast but in this one, I did touch the exposure as I felt that if I decreased it the photo would be too dark and if I increased it the photo would be overexposed. I also didn’t adjust the highlights of shadows and I felt that only the white and black needed to be adjusted the get the effect that in I wanted. For the photo on the left, I wanted to keep it in colour to show the bright blue of the sky. For this edit, I increased the exposure to 58 to give the photo a more vibrant look and make the blue pop. I also decreased the highlights because I wanted the harsh line between the shadowed side and the lit side to be obvious and easily noticeable.

Final Images

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I chose the top left photo as one of my final images as I think that the colours all go together as the cream building sits nicely with the brighter blue of the sky. I also like the contrast between the two sides of the building and the harsh line going down the middle. I also like how there are small elements of blue in the different windows which I think helps the photo look more put together. I also think that it looks better having a little bit of the top cut off as there is not as much sky distracting from the building. I chose this to be one of my final images for the middle photo because I really like the contrast between the darker parts of the image and the brighter whites on the balconies.

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Urban Landscapes

Urban landscape photography involves capturing photos of cities and towns. Generally speaking, an urban landscape shot has a wide focus. Urban landscapes are complex structures which is a result of the interaction between human and their environment. It can also involve social, cultural and economic dimensions. They are also mainly formed and shaped under the influence of human activities. The main places which get photographed for Urban Landscapes are Industrial centres, Building sites, Flat blocks, Derelict buildings, Carparks and Harbours/dockyards.

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Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth is a German photographer who is best known for his Museum Photographs series, family portraits and black and white photographs of the streets of Dusseldorf and New York taken in the 1970s. In 1976, as part of a student exhibition at the Academy Struth attended he first showed a grid composed of 49 photographs taken from a centralized perspective on Düsseldorf’s deserted streets. In 1977, Struth and Hütte travelled to England for two months and teamed up to photograph different aspects of housing in the urban context of East London.

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Thomas Struth travelled to many different counties and cities to take photos with many of his fellow photographers. Struth photographed Rome (1984), Edinburgh (1985) and Tokyo (1986) for his project that largely consisted of black-and-white shots of streets and skyscrapers. These played a big part in his work, as many of his photographs were attempting to show the relationship people have with their modern-day environment.

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Thomas Struth studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher, they influenced Struth’s methodology towards photography, while his other professor, Gerhard Richter, inspired his interest in painterly images. His photographs are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf.

Typologies

A typology is a single photograph or more commonly a body of photographic work, that shares a high level of consistency. This consistency is usually found within the subjects, environment, photographic process, and presentation or direction of the subject.

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The art of photographic typologies started with August Sanders in his 1929 series of portraits titled “Face of our time” which is a collection of works documenting German society between the two world wars. The term ‘typology’ wasn’t actually used to describe this type of photography till 1959 when Bernd and Hilla Becher began documenting dilapidated German industrial architecture. The art of typologies has had a renewed interest in recent years which is due to recognition from different galleries including the Tate Modern which hosted a Typologies retrospective in London in 2011.

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Bernd and Hilla Becher

Hilla Becher was a German artist born in 1931 in Siegen, Germany. She was one half of a photography duo with her husband Bernd Becher. For forty years, they photographed disappearing industrial architecture around Europe and North America. They began collaborating together in 1959 after meeting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1957. Bernd originally studied painting and then typography, whereas Hilla had trained as a commercial photographer. After two years of collaborating together, they married.

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They photographed Industrial structures including water towers, coal bunkers, gas tanks and factories. Their work had a documentary style as their images were always taken in black and white. Their photographs never included people. The Bechers work has also been referred to as sculpture. The Bechers called the subjects of their photographs ‘anonymous sculptures’, and they produced a successful photobook of the same title in 1970.

“New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” was an exhibition that epitomized a key moment in American landscape photography. The term “New Topographics” was coined by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers (such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz) whose pictures had a similar banal aesthetic, in that they were formal, mostly black and white prints of the urban landscape.

Many popular photographers that were linked to New Topographic were inspired by the man-made, selecting subject matter that was matter-of-fact. Parking lots, suburban housing and warehouses were all depicted with a beautiful stark austerity, almost in the way early photographers documented the natural landscape.

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These photographers began to move away from traditional landscape photographs of natural views and started photographing what replaced them, unromanticised views of stark industrial landscapes, suburban sprawl, and everyday scenes which are not usually given a second glance. 

Joel Sternfeld

Joel Sternfeld is an American fine-art colour photographer. He is known for his large-format documentary pictures of the United States and helping establish colour photography as a respected artistic medium. Sternfeld began taking colour photographs in 1970 after learning the colour theory of Johannes Itten and Josef Albers. Colour is an important element of his photographs. Joel Sternfeld produced many books but one of his most popular being American Prospects.

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American Prospects (1987) is Sternfeld’s most known book and explores the irony of human-altered landscapes in the United States. To make the book, Sternfeld photographed ordinary things, including unsuccessful towns and barren-looking landscapes. Sternfelds work looks more into utopic and dystopic possibilities of the American experience which is mainly shown through his pieces in this book. Walker Evans was a big role model for Sternfeld and much like Evans he continued working in the tradition of American naturalist colour photography. Seen through his lens, the late-1970s’ America oscillates between artificial, nostalgic paradises and crude reality.

“I picked this title because the word ‘prospect’ has several meanings in English: first, it means ‘view.’ In New England, when a new farm is being built, care is taken to give the farmer’s wife a nice view from the kitchen window (nice for the women, right?). ‘Prospect’ also means ‘seen from above, perspective,’ which goes well with my working method. But it also signifies possibility, hope, future, like when you prospect for gold, you hope to find something…,” Stated Sternfeld

What was the new topographics a reaction to?

Their stark, beautifully printed images of this mundane but oddly fascinating topography was both a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental.

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Photoshoot 1	For my first photoshoot, I went down to the waterfront and onto the beach (St Aubin’s) along the avenue. I decided to go around 6-6:30 so that I could take photos of the sunset.
Photoshoot 2	For my second photoshoot, I went to a reservoir in St Saviour, I decided to go around 4-5 in the afternoon. On this day the sky was more grey and very cloudy.
Photoshoot 3	For my third photoshoot, I went for a walk on some of the back roads around Jersey, I decided to go around 5:30 in the evening so that I could try and photograph golden hour.

Contact Sheets

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In my contact sheets, there are lots of repeated photos as I had to keep adjusting the ISO, shutter speed and F-number to try and get the right exposure for the type of lighting, I had gone on a grey, cloudy day so the sky kept coming out to bright in the camera.

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In these photos, I also had to make repeats as I had gone while the sun was setting so there was a glare in some of the photos due to the high exposure, but as I was walking the lighting would change due to the sun being blocked or because of me being in a more shaded place which also contributed to the number of similar photos.

Editing

These are two edits from each of my three photoshoots. In all my photos I have chosen to make the colours more vibrant and stand out which contrasts with the somewhat dull photos that they were before.

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These are two of the photos that I have edited from St Aubin’s beach, in both I have increased the vibrancy so that the colours in the sky, such as the blues and oranges stand out more against the darker parts of the photo like the sand and ocean. In the photo on the left, I have only increased the contrast to make the photo darker so that you can still see the person walking forward. For the photo on the right, I have decreased the contrast so that the photo isn’t as dark as the photo to the left, I have also the texture and clarity so that the ripples in the sand can be seen more clearly and stand out with the reflection of the sunset.

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These are two of the photos that I have edited from some of the backroads around the parish of St Saviour, in the photo on the left I have increased the contrast to darken the bushes to the side of the photo and the hills in the background. As the sky was quite bright and grey the clouds couldn’t be clearly seen in the photo, so I slightly decreased the exposure which helped the clouds become more defined in the sky which now has more of a blue tint. I did similar editing to the photo on the right, I liked the look of the darker greens against the grey of the road, but I still wanted them to be vibrant and pop so I also increased the vibrancy so that I could get this effect.

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These are also photos taken on backroads around St Saviours but I went at a different time so that I could capture the sunset and hopefully get different lighting than my other photos. In these two photos, I wanted the clouds to be defined so that you could see the key poking through at different places. I did this by decreasing both the contrast and exposure, by doing this I made the clouds darker which made them stand out against the blue of the sky. In the photo on the right and wanted the photo to have a more saturated and golden look as the sun was at the perfect place for the ‘golden hour’. I decreased the exposure and highlights as well as increased the contrast to make the image darker and give it the golden look that I wanted.

Final Photos

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I have chosen these as my final images because I believe that each one shows different parts of Jersey’s beautiful landscapes. One of my favourites is the bottom right as I think that the sun is giving a really nice golden look on the few parts that it is hitting the plastic. I also think that the clouds are nicely formed in the sky and are highly defined. I really like how the lighter sky in the mid-ground contrasts with the darker trees towards the ground and the darker elements of the field. Another one of my favourites in the middle right photo as I think the defined grey clouds sit nicely against the bits o bright blue from the sky poking through. The sun also has a similar effect to the photo just beneath it, with some of the rays being able to be seen in the photo which adds another element to the photos that viewers might find interesting. I also really like the saturation of this photo which just gives it a more brighter effect. Finally, the bottom left is also a good final image as I really like the contrast between the darker tones from the trees and grass and the brighter sky and highlights on the lake. I feel that this phot covers the whole of Ansel Adams Zone system as you can see the darkest shades are in the lake or on parts of the ducks in the bottom of the photo and the lighter parts are either the sky as it was a grey and cloudy day so the sky is brighter or in the different highlights on the lake.

Romanticism emerged after 1789, the year of the French Revolution that caused a relevant social change in Europe. Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until the mid-century. Romanticism spread throughout Europe in the 19th century and developed as an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that embraced various arts such as literature, painting, music and history. Romanticism was also expressed in architecture through the imitation of older architectural styles.

Romanticism was an art form that rejected classicalism and focused on nature, imagination and emotion. Landscape photography was popular at this time, therefore, romantic landscapes were common. The landscapes focused on the beauty of nature and included a lot of running water and vast forests.

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Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He and Fred Archer developed an exacting system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a deep technical understanding of how tonal range is recorded and developed during exposure, negative development, and printing. The resulting clarity and depth of such images characterized his photography.

The zone system of Ansel Adams divides the photo into eleven zones; nine shades of grey, together with pure black and pure white. Adams, who photographed in black in the white negative film made sure to expose the darkest parts of his scenery. This way he prevented having pure black in the photo. When developing his photo paper, he made sure to manipulate the dark and light parts in his photo in such a way, that the shades of grey would follow his zone system.

The Zone System is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development. The Zone System provides photographers with a systematic method of precisely defining the relationship between the way they visualize the photographic subject and the final results. Although it originated with black-and-white sheet film, the Zone System is also applicable to roll film, both black-and-white and colour, negative and reversal and to digital photography.

Adams’s reputation soared in 1931 following his first solo exhibition, featuring sixty of his photographs of the Sierra Nevada mountains, at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. In 1932, Adams founded Group f/64 with Edward Weston, the group was active between 1932 and 1935, during this time they comprised a group of photographers – including Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Consuelo Kanaga, Henry Swift, Alma Lavenson, and Sonya Noskowiak. The group advocated Straight and unmanipulated photography over pictorialism.

During the early 1930s, Adams wrote for the magazine Camera Craft and published his book Making a Photograph in 1935, in which he demonstrated a technical, but straightforward and approachable way of writing about photography. Making a Photograph was a great success and continued the newly established tradition of the photography manual. The book was illustrated with high-quality reproductions of his photographs, and technical commentary about how to “make” rather than “take” the best photographs.

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Don McCullin

Sir Donald McCullin is a British photojournalist, particularly recognised for his war photography and images of urban strife. His career, which began in 1959, has specialised in examining the underside of society, and his photographs have depicted the unemployed, downtrodden and impoverished. McCullin has documented the poverty of London’s East End, the horrors of wars in Africa, Asia or the Middle East. As well as creating pictures of arranged still lives, soulful portraits and moving landscapes.

McCullin was called up for National Service with the RAF. After postings to Egypt, Kenya and Cyprus he returned to London armed with a twin reflex Rolleicord camera and began photographing friends from a local gang named The Guv’nors. McCullin was persuaded to show these to the picture editor at the Observer in 1959, he earned his first commission at age 23 and began his long and distinguished career in photography.

McCullin mainly focused on photographing and writing about the wars and the main events going on around the world, one of his bigger pieces was in 1961 when he won the British Press Award for his essay on the construction of the Berlin Wall. His first taste of war came in Cyprus, in 1964, where he covered the armed eruption of ethnic and nationalistic tension, he initially wrote for the Observer and, from 1966, for The Sunday Times. Away from war Don’s work has often focused on the suffering of the poor and underprivileged and he has produced moving essays on the homeless of London’s East End and the working classes of Britain’s industrialised cities.

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From the early 1980s, he focused his foreign adventures on more peaceful matters. He travelled extensively through Indonesia, India and Africa returning with powerful essays on places and people that, in some cases, had few if any previous encounters with the Western world. At home, he has spent three decades chronicling the English countryside – in particular the landscapes of Somerset – and creating meticulously constructed still life’s all to great acclaim. Yet he still feels the lure of war. As recently as October 2015 Don travelled to Kurdistan in northern Iraq to photograph the Kurds’ three-way struggle with ISIS, Syria and Turkey.

Image Analysis

I have chosen this photo because of its harsh light from the sun which looks like a mist covering the mountains. The light sort of resembles a spot like shining on the stage which how you can only see it directly on one spot in the midground. The angle which the photo was taken at makes the pebbles and rocks in the foreground seem bigger than they are. Ansel Adams must have gotten quite close to the ground to take this as the rocks are mostly in focus and they slowly lose that when they get further away. The smaller rocks are also a lot more pigmented than the mounts in the background due to the angle and closeness of the camera. The photo is also a good example of Adam’s zone system, for example, the clouds would probably be placed at a 9 or 10 whereas the spaces in-between the smaller rocks might be put at a 0 or 1 which shows how Ansel captures every different contrasting shade in his photos.

The term “rural landscape” describes the diverse portion of the nation’s land area not densely populated or intensively developed. Landscape photography is a type of photography that captures the beauty of nature, bringing the viewers into the scenery, setting, and mood in these outdoor locations. Landscape photographs also typically capture the presence of nature but can also focus on man-made features or disturbances of landscapes. Landscape photography is done for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most common is to recall a personal observation or experience while in the outdoors, especially when travelling.

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Edward Weston

Edward Weston was an American photographer between 1886 – 1958. Weston began to make photographs in Chicago parks in 1902, and his works were first exhibited in 1903 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Three years later he moved to California and opened a portrait studio in a Los Angeles suburb. In the 1930s, Weston and several other photographers, including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard van Dyke, formed the f/64 group, which greatly influenced the aesthetics of American photography.

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In 1937, Weston received the first Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to a photographer, which freed him from earning a living as a portraitist. The works for which he is famous–sharp, stark, brilliantly printed images of sand dunes, nudes, vegetables, rock formations, trees, cacti, shells, water, and human faces are among the finest of 20th-century photographs.

Weston made his last photographs at his beloved Point Lobos, California, during the decade from 1938 to 1948, 1948 being the year he was stricken with Parkinson’s disease. Point Lobos was only one of his subjects, though he returned to it again and again. His career spanned crucial years in American photography, and a restless pursuit of his art created a body of work that ranged over nudes, still lives, industrial scenes, portraiture, landscapes, and any other subject that touched his visual imagination.

Eliot Porter

Eliot Porter was an American photographer known for his richly coloured images of the natural world. his interest in nature was fostered by his family from a young age. He began photographing his family’s island property as a youth in Maine, before going on to study chemical engineering at Harvard University. After graduating in the mid-1930s, his brother the painter and art critic Fairfield Porter encouraged his latent interest in photography and arranged introductions for him with both Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz.

In the early 1940s, after having committed to pursuing a career in photography, he moved from traditional black and white film to the new Kodachrome colour film used by magazine photographers. Throughout the following decades, he published a number of photography books, including In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World (1962), capturing the disappearing wilderness of America as well as the Galápagos Islands, Antarctica, and East Africa.

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Throughout Porter’s career, he travelled and photographed locations of cultural and ecological significance. Among the locations that he photographed were Utah, California, Maine, Antarctica, Iceland, East Africa, Mexico, Egypt, China, Greece, and Czechoslovakia.

Image Analysis

I have selected this photo as I think that even thought its just sand dunes there are many different components to lookout throughout the photo. As you can see in the foreground there’s different dips and ripples in the sand that has probably be made my the wind which contrasts to the smoother sand in the background on the higher sand hills. I like how it seems the different textures in sand slowly decrease as you look further into the photo, for example in the very front theirs different lines which kind of looks like veins or roots that have appeared in the sand, here there is minimal shadowing and if their is any its more grey then a harsher black which is what is in the background. Towards the back of the sand dunes they are smooth like they have been untouched for years, but there is a dip in the sand which is facing away from the sun so it causes the shadow to be a deep black which immediately draws everyone’s eyes to it because its the darkest shade in the photo.

In this photo, I was inspired by Carolle Benitah and her work with her old family photos as well as her use of different materials. In photoshop I used the brush tool to get the effect of an actual paintbrush over the eyes of my dad. I also used the same tool to cover the three men that stood behind him as I thought that the final image would be too plain if I hadn’t. This photo was taken while my parents were on holiday in their 20s so you can see the age of the photo especially after I retook them with the copy stand. I like that you can see the age behind the photo because it adds character to the final piece. As the lighting wasn’t the best in the original image I increased the exposure slightly which has given it a more washed outlook which I really like and it compliments the background and the colour on the clothes that my dad is wearing. I like the red which was used because it’s very bright and bold which sits nicely against the background but is still eye-catching, I also like how it’s not a big circle covering the but its silhouette. The streak over my dad’s eyes I tried to make it look like a paintbrush so I used the mixer brush so that it would blend with some of the colours with the actual photo which you can’t really see in the middle of it but at the ends, it slowly mixes with the colours from the background.

This photo is also inspired by Carolle Benitah Instead of filling in the body I outlined it to make it seem like it’s sitting in the background. This is another holiday photo of my mum in her 20s in a similar place as the other Carolle Benitah inspired photo. I like how you can see the ‘paint’ streak more clearly over her eyes and that you can really see the blending of the darker background in with the bright red. I’m happy that I didn’t outline my mum’s face as well as her body because I feel it would have been harder and looked wrong with the way her hair is blowing in the wind, I also allow for the red line to be the centre of attention on her face without crossing or competing with anything else. The original photo was also quite dark, to begin with, so I increased the exposure to make it light while doing that it made the reflection of the sun off the hair loom more golden which frames both her face and makes her skin look more tanned. I also really like how the golden features and the red go together and compliment each other nicely. Lastly, I like the way the foreground (my mum and the rock she is sitting on) is a lot lighter and contrast with the darker background making the foreground pop even more.

This photo is inspired by Yoshikatsu Fuji, I looked at one of Fuji’s photos from his ‘Red String’ book where he had his parent’s wedding photo (coloured) and layered it over another photo of his mother down at the beach (black and white. I adapted that idea and decided to outline the different coloured triangles with red to represent the connection between my photos. they also help to see the actual colour difference as the original picture is less pigmented especially around the bedsheets and certain spots on the wall. By moving some of the triangles slightly it gives the look of the photo being pulled apart and put back together. This photo is of my dad just after he had moved to Jersey which was over 30 years ago, this is also one of the photos that my dad had sent back to my grandparents. I like how the photo has a slight yellow tint which shows its age and how it looks slightly washed out which makes the greys stand out more especially in bold and more pigmented colours, for example on the jeans and on my dad’s face.

For this photo, I took inspiration from my edit above by taking different parts of the photo and turning them black and white as well as slightly moving then giving the effect of the photo coming apart revelling and colour photo underneath. In the edit, I decided not to outline the triangles with the red as I felt like the photo didn’t need it and the different red from the lines and the red on the top might clash. This photo is of my mum while she was on holiday when she was in her 20s, I like how the hill in the background is slightly blurry compared to my mum who is in focus. I think it makes her stand out against the hill making her the main viewing of the photo. The black and white triangles fit nicely next to the more saturated colour of the older photo.

As I need to use some of my own photos I decided to do a sequence of my dad which I took while I was back in Ireland, I tried to put the three images in the order of ‘smoking’. I like how there are different factors in each picture that aren’t in the following photo, for example, my brother’s face in the background of the first image, the smoke in the second photo. These make the photos interesting and show more dept into what was happening around when the photos were being taken, but in each background is plain black which hides everything so viewers have to use their imagination.

Photo Gallery

I was inspired by Yoshikatsu Fuji’s ‘Red string’ book as all the photos and different elements of the final piece is connected by the red string. Most of the photos are stitched into the book and while reading you following the red string to the different parts of Fuji and his parents lives before their divorce.

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My Work

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I have put together three photos of my dad, all taken of the right side of his face and in black and white. I have been testing out different positions and sequences of the photos to see what will look best with this group of photos. I have tried to make sure that the photos will be able to be connect by red ‘string’ which I will do on photoshop.

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I have added red ‘string’ to the sequence so that I can see how it will look with the different positions of the photos. Once the images are printed out I will replace the red lines from photoshop with actual red string so when you look at the final piece the red will pop out as it will be sitting on top of the frame which will connect all of my final images.

In the first edit I like how the images are going down in size order and how it seems that the red ‘string’ will fall through the photos and not going over them so it covers parts of the images. For the second edit I like how the middle image isn’t centred exactly in the middle of the two images above and below it, I also like how there is more of a thought out order to the placement of the photos as it represents the actual motions of what my dad is doing. In edit 3 I have chosen to place the photos horizontally instead of vertically like the other two, what I like about this edit is that photos look like that they are all hanging from the string as if it had actually been hung up, even through the photos could have bigger spacer in between them which would make it looked less squished together I like how they all look next to each other and the sequence of the photos. Edit three photos are in the same order that edit two are and that I shows the motions and are not just in a random order.

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Photo-montage editing

I have got some old headshots of my mum and my dad which I have halved and put together to create a montage of their faces. I used photoshop to do this as I am able to layer the two images on top of each other to get this effect of the spilt faces. I also used the cropping tool to take off the white boarder which was around the two photos, I did this because they were hard to line up as the faces are different sizes, in the end the final photo looked better without them. After editing them on photoshop imported the new montage into Lightroom where I increase the exposure and adjusted some others like contrast and whites so that it didn’t look to dark but also so its not to bright as well.

I found some old pictures of my Granny and Grandad from when they would go on day trips, as they could only take photos of each and none together, I have taken the picture of my Granny and put her into the picture with my grandad. As they had taken the photos in the same place it was easy to match the surrounds in each picture, I have cropped the individual picture of my Granny so that you can only see her and moved it top my Grandad’s picture. Once I got it so the railing they were both sitting on lined up I used the history brush tool to take away the background that was still surrounding my granny and to show the scenery behind my Grandad. As the photo below my Granny’s is more blurry I decreased the opacity slightly so that they look more similar and not out of place. I then moved the final montage to Lightroom to fix the lighting and just make the image brighter.

Carolle Benitah Inspired

One of the photographers that I have chosen, often used different materials such as paint, embroidery or beading to create her pieces. On photoshop I have tried to recreate that but I have experimented with different colours and brush types. In Benitah’s photos she used gold paint but I have chosen red as it links with the other photographer I have chosen and will link with the other ideas that I have. I decided to paint over the people in the background as I thought it was to plain to leave with it just over my dads face.

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I like that is Benitahs style you are taking old photos and creating and giving them a new meaning, You are also able to direct the attention of the viewer to whoever/whatever you want in the photo.

I have taken some ideas from Benitah and adapted them into what suits my photos, I didn’t just want to leave this photo with just a red streak over the eyes so I outlined her body so that it stands out from the background. I used the same tools on photoshop as the ones above as well as a mixer brush over the eye so that it replicates a brush stroke, light at the beginning and slowly gets more pigmented.

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Yoshikatsu Fuji Inspired

I am planning on adapting one of Fujis ideas the ‘Red String’ book which they have got many awards and recognition for. Once my final outcomes are printed out I would like to put them into a black frame and connect each one of them with red string. I am going to be using the red string as a link between all of my final images. I like how Fuji crops his photos, on the front cover of his book he has his parent wedding photos with their heads cropped off, even without the key feature of someone’s identity the photo still tells a big part of their story. There is also a photo where their coloured wedding photo is crop off at his mum and layered on another black and white photo years later of his mother at the beach, this shows how his mother has aged and matured but is still the same person who his father married. I have tried to do something similar with one of the old headshots of my mum and dad, I had already edited half of their faces together but I got two photos from a few years after and edited their eyes onto the headshots.

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Once these have been printed I would like to add embroidery to the bottom half of the photo which is taking from Carolle Benitahs style. I would do it at an angle which would go from the bottom left to the middle of the right side of the photo. I didn’t want to do this in photoshop as I thought I would look better with a different material added onto it.

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For this image I exported it from Lightroom and into photoshop where I used the line tool which I coloured red so that it would link in with the other images and the red string that I will be using once they are framed. I made triangles which came from the sides of the photo and crossed over many parts which highlighted different elements of the photo like my dads face, hands and legs. I then used the lasso tool to select the triangle which I turn black and white so that they would standout more against the coloured background. With some of the triangles I slightly moved them so they wouldn’t be lined up exactly to make the final piece more interesting and eye catching.