Fixing the shadows

Photography turns the ordinary into the extraordinary by what’s in the background of the image or the people that are inside the image itself. Original photography was based on the shadows that photographers saw in the surroundings that they were in. The term “fixing the shadows” was a chemical combination used in the final steps of processing an image onto paper, which stabilised or “fixed” the image, neutralising its sensitivity to light.

Camera Obscura

The Camera Obscura is an optical phenomenon that’s totally natural. It’s where the room has to be completely dark and then there is a small rectangle where the light can come through and then over time the image will be displayed in the room where you want the phenomenon to happen.

Camera Obscuras have been around for thousands of years and they started with artists using blank boxes and projecting an image on to a piece of paper or a piece of metal. The Camera Obscura can be presented inverted (upside down), or reversed (left to right).

Nicephore Niepce

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was a French inventor and one of the earliest pioneers of photography. He developed heliography, a technique he used to create the worlds oldest surviving products of a photographic process. He used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene.

Louis Daguerre

Louis Daguerre was a French artist and photographer, recognised for his invention of the Daguerreotype process of photography. He became known as one of the fathers of photography, however he is mostly known for his contribution to photography. He was also an accomplished painter, scenic designer, and a developer of the diorama theatre.

Daguerreotype

The image was printed on to a metal plate which meant the image was just lying on top of the plate which made these daguerreotypes very delicate and easily damaged. With the image being on metal and then having a glass plate put over the top of the metal he said that it was like the person in the photo was “on the edge of being present”. The daguerreotype was very expensive to make and took ages to produce one, this meant that they were not mass produced and they were very valuable and precious.

Henry Fox Talbot

Henry Fox Talbot couldn’t draw so he couldn’t make real life things he saw into 3D drawings, which led to him inventing the Camera Obscura so he could see the things he wanted to draw. His idea was to use paper negatives where the image would sink in to the paper and he could mass produce them and ship more of them out.

Richard Maddox

Richard Maddox was an English photographer and physician who invented lightweight gelatin negative dry plates for photography in 1871. He was known for photo micrography which is photographing minute organisms under the microscope. When he realised his health was at risk with the ‘wet’ collodion’s ether vapor, he came up with a new substitute with the sensitising chemicals cadmium bromide and silver nitrate and that they should be coated on a glass plate In gelatin.

George Eastman

George Eastman was an American Entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak company and helped to bring the photographic use of roll film into the mainstream. After a decade of experimentation in photography he patented and sold a roll film camera, making amateur photography accessible to the general public for the first time. Working as the treasurer and later president of Kodak, he oversaw the expansion of the company and the film industry.

Film/print Photography

Film/Print Photography is where the images are printed from a film in a camera. It shows how accurate and intricate the images taken on a film camera can be and is really rewarding to see how the photos develop from the film.

Digital Photography

Digital Photography is a process that uses an electronic device ( a digital camera ) to capture an image. Instead of film, it uses an electronic digital sensor to translate light into electrical signals. In the camera the signals are stored as tiny bits of data in bitmaps, tiny bits of data that form the image.

What is the Rohingya crisis?

The Rohingya crisis is about the ethnic minority group The Rohingya who have been denied citizenship in Myanmar and faced decades of persecution. Currently nearly one million Rohingya refugees reside in neighbouring Bangladesh’s district. They are living in highly congested camps which makes them prone to bad weather crisis’s, insecurity and disease along with not having access to basic services such as health, sanitation and education along with many other things.

My response to the exhibition

My Evaluation

This exhibition of photos made me feel incredibly fortunate as children and families are living in congested camps which puts them at risk of catching diseases and illnesses and there are also dangerous weather hazards that they could face where they are living. However the Rohingya have a great sense of community which is something that I value because they stick together and help each other out as a community instead of being an individualist community. The publics response to the photos shows how some people have strong emotions towards the images and other people just walk past and don’t even acknowledge that they are there which shows the importance of these images and by putting them on display in a public area like town they are encouraging people to take notice and take action about the situation that is happening in Bangladesh.

I used the tool to create a box where I then added the photos I wanted to use from my St Malo photoshoot in the areas of the page I wanted them to be. I used photos that link together and tried to use photos that were different kinds of shots like establishing shots and observed shots.

I then added a text box to the top right hand corner of the page layout and added a title, I then changed the font of the title to make it fit the way I wanted the page layout to look. After this I added a text box in the spaces I wanted to leave blank and filled them in with text.

I then did the same thing with a different set of images that told a different story and then created a title and filled in the blank spaces with text. I then wanted to get some colour in the background of the page spread so created a box and filled it with the colour I wanted and clicked move to background so the colour was behind the text and the images. I then changed the colour of the text to white so that it stood out more.

With this page layout I added a different set of images and then added a blank box and filled it in with a light green to put in the background of the page to make the writing stand out more.

This is my double page spread and I added two sets of images for each page and added text to both pages. After I added a blue colour box and sent it to the back and then added a red colour box on the other page and sent that to the back as well. I then changed the colour of the text to white to make the writing stand out.

This is another layout of my images showcasing the history of St Malo from the statues and sculptures to the historic buildings and cafes.

Evaluation

I like my final page spreads because they are all different are unique and tell a different story each time. I think that to improve them I would of added my own text about the decisive moment rather than use the prompt text. The page spread with the red and blue boxes in the background is my favourite because it emphasises the writing and the photos a lot clearer.

Mood board

These picture stories are all related to the Vietnam war and the war in Budapest. These picture stories show a lot of information about these events and describe what happened from these tragic photos.

Types of photos used in picture stories

• Establishing Shot
• Detail Shot
• Relationship Shot
• Observed Shot
• Environmental Portrait
• Formal Shot

Analysis of Picture story

In this photo page spread there are four different photos and you can see that there is a few detail shots which have been taken close up and show clearly what is happening. There is a relationship shot at the bottom right hand corner which shows a man and a woman walking along the street after the war that has just broken out in the street. Most of the photos that have been taken are observed shots and have been captured when no one knew they were being photographed there were no formal shots of anyone in the photos. The establishing shot is the largest photo at the top of the page which shows what is going on in the series of photos.

I cropped this image to get rid of the brick floor to frame the image better. By making the image cropped and getting rid of most of the floor I’ve created a more interesting image as you cant see what is being looked at and it creates a unique composition.

I cropped this image so that the only thing that would be in frame would be the ladies eating their lunch. This narrows the focal point of the image down as now its just them in the image.

With this image I cropped the photo to get rid of the stone step and then added the banana peel to make it look like he was disgusted by the banana peel being on the floor.

For this image I added a peacock to the original image as the lady who is sat down eating was directly looking at the empty space where the peacock is.

For this photo I duplicated the layer and made the original background layer black and white and with the duplicated layer on top I selected the red outfit that the lady was wearing and pressed select and inverse to delete the rest of the image and leave just the red outfit. The one bit of red colour in the all black photo makes The Decisive moment of the image stand out so that its really clear what is happening in the image.

For this image I duplicated the background layer again and used the quick selection tool to select the people in the image and then used Alt if I selected too much of the image that I didn’t want to blur. Then I went to select and inverse which deleted the background, after I clicked on the duplicated layer and filter then blur and motion blur to blur the people in the image.

Her I did another motion blur image and selected the man and his child to blur in the image. This contrasts really nicely against the clear background with all the boats in the background.

Summary

The photos that were taken in St Malo were inspired by Henri-Cartier Bresson whose photography looked at “The Decisive moment” Where he world capture certain things that were about to happen like a child jumping over a puddle or someone drinking a coffee outside a café, his photos capture these unexpected moments by him waiting in anticipation for the exact right time. All of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photos are all in black and white and some have high levels of exposure to them making them brighter in some areas of the image and causing there to be a lot of shadow in other areas increasing the contrast between light and dark.

Contact Sheet

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Evaluation for edited images

All these photos are taken with the decisive moment in the image and trying to capture unexpected things. The images I took are a mix of architectural images and images with people which creates a good variety of images.

Biography

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup France and travelled around the world with his camera and became totally immersed in his environment. He was the oldest of five children and his family where wealthy, Bresson was educated in Paris and showed an early love for literature and arts which showed how creative he was as a young adult. His great grandfather had been an artist and he had an uncle who was a noted printer. This influenced his love for photography. His photography covered some of the worlds biggest events such as The Spanish Civil War and the French Uprisings in 1968.

The decisive moment

The decisive moment implies the constant flow of events, there are moments in which the arrangement of everything within the frame is perfect. These moments are spontaneous so the photographer must be ready to take the photo in the moment right away.

Mood board

Image Analysis

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photos are all about capturing unexpected moments at the perfect time and the perfect moment. The colour in Henri Cartier-Bresson photos is black and white and there is a lot of shadow. There are a lot of geometric shapes and patterns in Bresson photography which draws your eye to the image making it more interesting and aesthetic to look at. The lines in the image also help to draw your eye to the image as the geometric shapes and lines act as leading lines for the focal point. This photo has a slow shutter speed which makes the figure of the person a little blurry. The arrangement of the image creates many geometric shapes and lines which makes the image more aesthetically pleasing to look at. The lighting in this image is very bright and there is a lot of exposure in the puddle that the person is jumping into. There is also a lot of shadows in the image which contrasts against the high exposure in the puddle.

Light Pollution

For this photoshoot I took photos of the sunset above fort Regent that overlooked the town and the harbour and the image presented both natural light and artificial light. The photos were taken at sunset at about nine o clock and so the buildings are all in shadow and the sky had the sunset colours which gave a really nice contrast between light and dark. I also took photos of the lights on the runway by the airport, I captured this image through a wire fence which looked really interesting as you could see the coloured bright lights through the diamond shaped gaps in the fence.

My Favourite Images

Mandy Barker

For my Mandy Barker photos I collected plastic and bits of rope from the beach and took photos of them on an all black background, then on photoshop I used all the different photos I took and layered them on top of each other and changed the opacity of the ones in the background to make the image look fuller and to make it look like there is a lot more plastic waste in the ocean. Then I kept on layering the edits until it became a montage of edits.

My Favourite Images

Overall I think my Light Pollution photos were the strongest because they capture what light pollution is and they look the closest to the image I was trying to recreate. I think my Mandy Barker inspired photos could of been stronger by collecting a lot more objects along the beach and getting a bigger variety of images but I do think they represent Mandy Barkers images well and when they were layered up as a montage the final result looked similar to one of Mandy Barkers montage images.

This is my Mandy Barker Virtual Gallery. I chose these images because they represent her work the best and relate to the theme of Anthropocene because they relate to plastic pollution and just how much plastic there is in the oceans.

Anthropocene Light Pollution Virtual Gallery

This is my Anthropocene virtual gallery. I chose these images because they capture light pollution the best and showcase what light pollution represents. The balance between the natural light and the artificial light contrasts really well making the concept of the image balanced.