For this photoshoot, I went to Havre Des Pas and took images of the various landscapes seen around it eg natural and urban. I also took some panoramas of the beach and close ups of various textures seen on a wall. It was quite cloudy whilst I was taking photographs so I had to adjust the exposure and white balance of the camera. Once I had taken my images, I imported them into Lightroom and turned each of my images black and white as seen in Robert Adams work.
These images were inspired by the New Topographics. I think the area of Havre Des Pas successfully shows how mankind has ruined our natural landscapes eg the beach. As by building on the beach, it obscures the beautiful, natural landscape behind it. I think the clouds helped to create that dull, melancholy tone seen in the New Topographics’ images.
I also got to take images of an industrial area (La Collette), giving me even more variety in landscape types. I took pictures of Jersey’s incinerator and waste disposal buildings, which is a complete contrast to the natural landscape seen close by.
This image was inspired by Lewis Baltz. I like how this image looks as you can see a variety in buildings styles. For example, there are newer buildings and older buildings all in the same frame. This emphasises the clear contrast between how building styles have evolved as mankind has. Overall, I like the clarity of the image and I think I managed to successfully recreate the work of Lewis Baltz.
Overall, I like how my images came out as I managed to capture a variety of landscapes all within a small radius. However, one improvement I would make to my images is I would edit the sky in the photographs as due to the clouds, it caused my sky to be a dull, grey colour. I think by adding shade into the sky, it would make my images more interesting to look at as it would give them more depth.
An urban landscape means a dense accumulation of building structures with a rich stylistic variety of shapes, sizes and proportions located over a fairly extensive territory. Urban photography is a genre of photography concerned with capturing scenes from urban spaces, such as towns and other ecological spaces. It has become more popular over the years as the world has become more urbanised.
Urban landscapes refer to the physical environment of cities or urban areas. It includes buildings (residential or commercial), infrastructure (roads, bridges), public spaces (parks), transportation systems (subways), and other elements that shape urban living.
When taking good urban landscape photos, you should:
Robert Adams is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975.
Offering solemn meditations on the landscapes of California, Colorado, and Oregon, Adams’s black-and-white photos document the changes wrought by humans upon nature.
When Adams returned to Colorado to begin what he anticipated would be a career in teaching, he was dismayed by the changes he saw in the landscape. He bought a 35-mm camera, taught himself the fundamentals of photography, and began making pictures infused with a love for the geography of his home state.
Born on May 8, 1937 in Orange, NJ, his family moved around the Midwest throughout his childhood, finally settling in Wheat Ridge, CO in 1952. Adams went on to study English at the University of Redlands and received his PhD in English from the University of Southern California in 1965. It wasn’t until the near completion of his dissertation for USC that Adams began to take photography seriously, learning techniques from professional photographer Myron Wood and reading Aperture magazine. In the 1970s, he was released the book The New West (1974), and a year later was included in the seminal exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” Adams has twice been the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and once the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.
Robert Adams was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1937. His refined black-and-white photographs document scenes of the American West of the past four decades, revealing the impact of human activity on the last vestiges of wilderness and open space. Although often devoid of human subjects, or sparsely populated, Adams’s photographs capture the physical traces of human life: a garbage-strewn roadside, a clear-cut forest, a half-built house. An underlying tension in Adams’s body of work is the contradiction between landscapes visibly transformed or scarred by human presence and the inherent beauty of light and land rendered by the camera. his work also conveys hope that change can be effected, and it speaks with joy of what remains glorious in the West
Image Analysis
I think this image successfully captures how humankind have ruined Earths natural beauty by polluting it with various bland, repetitive houses. There is not a wide range of tones seen in this image which I think is on purpose in order to emphasise the idea of how mundane and dull we are making our planet by constantly expanding and building on natural landscapes, stripping the Earth of its beauty. This image is quite boring to look at due to the lack of range in tones and the boring houses which all look the same. However, I think it does make the viewer realise how much damage we are doing to the Earth, which is an important message to convey. This has inspired me to take images of densely built areas with a lack of tonal range as I feel it could help society to realise the flaw with constantly expanding and building on these landscapes.
New Topographics was a term 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. The New Topographics were inspired by Albert Renger Patszch and the notion of The New Objectivity.
They 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.
The stark, beautifully printed images of the 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. They began to take pictures in 1975 in America. This was just after World War II in which people began to come back to America from the war and lots of places were being rebuilt due to the destruction. The New Topographics wanted to highlight and criticise human kind’s desire to expand and to show the interactions between humans and non-humans (nature).
Robert Adams was a key figure in the New Topographics movement. He revolutionised the way in which the American West was depicted on film, highlighting the effects of industrialisation upon what was once a vast, imposing wilderness. Depicting the unwavering presence and beauty of nature in the face of human intervention was a key element of the project for Adams.
“we also need to see the whole geography, natural and man-made, to experience a peace; all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolute persistent beauty.” -Robert Adams.
The New Topographics highlights the presence of humanity in natural landscapes whereas Ansel Adams photographed only nature and separated it from human presence. His images intended to provoke feelings of awe and pleasure whereas the Topographics often create a sense of despair in their images through the use of straight on angles and lack of enhanced tonal range. The Topographics didn’t only focus on how their images would look but how it would make the viewer feel too. By foregrounding, rather than erasing human presence, the photographs place people into a stance of responsibility towards the landscape’s future.
Photo Analysis:
Overall, I don’t really like the aesthetics of the image as there’s a lack in tonal range and the straight on angle doesn’t give the image any uniqueness or allow the viewer to see the natural landscape behind it as the house is blocking it. However, I think the use of the straight angle is good for portraying the idea of humans expanding too much and covering these beautiful natural landscapes with their creations. This may cause the viewer to think more deeply about how their constant building of new places is destroying the earths beauty and may even lead to a change in society. The lighting seen in this image is quite monochrome and boring due to it being taken in the middle day not allowing for any soft lighting to be seen in the image. However, their images are more realistic than Ansel Adams because of their use of the normal daylight that people will see if they were to go to these places, not creating a false narrative about these places and creating unrealistic expectations.
Exposure bracketing is where you take a sequence of photographs with different exposure levels, and then blend them together to create a photograph with a much higher dynamic range. It gives you all the details you will ever need in your photographs so you can create the exact image you had in mind.
For this photoshoot, I went outside of Hautlieu School and took images of the building. I set up my camera so that it would take three images, each with a different exposure (+1, 0, -1). Once I had taken my images, I imported them onto Lightroom. I then chose the images I wanted to use by right clicking on the first image of the sequence then pressing the arrow button then clicking on the last image of the sequence. This highlighted them all. I then right clicked on the images and pressed photomerge then selected HDR. I then got to select my deghost amount, ranging from none to high.
Final images:
Overall, I think this photoshoot was a successful first attempt as I learnt how to do exposure bracketing. However, next time I would use a different location and test out different deghost amounts as I used none for most of them.
Ansel Adams (born February 20, 1902, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died April 22, 1984, Carmel, California) was an American photographer who was the most important landscape photographer of the 20th century. He is also perhaps the most widely known and beloved photographer in the history of the United States; the popularity of his work has only increased since his death. Adams’s most important work was devoted to what was or appeared to be the country’s remaining fragments of untouched wilderness, especially in national parks and other protected areas of the American West. He was also a vigorous and outspoken leader of the conservation movement. While photography and the piano shared his attention during his early adulthood, by about 1930 Adams decided to devote his life to photography. Adams believed that photography could give vent to the same feelings he experienced through his music. His first attraction to photography came from his love of the natural landscape and a yearning to capture something of that overwhelming experience on film.
He is renowned for his Western landscapes eg his views of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada. His photographs emphasise the natural beauty of the land. These images are often seen in black and white using the zone system which Ansel Adams and Archer created. There were 10 zones in Ansel Adams’ system. They were defined to represent the gradation of all the different tonal values you would see in a black and white print, with zone 5 being middle grey, zone 0 being pure black (with no detail), and zone 10 being pure white (with no detail).
Ansel Adams honed his vision for his photographs through a process called visualisation. Visualisation requires the photographer to take in a subject without a camera and imagine how the final photo will come out. Ansel Adams described it as “the ability to see the scene you photograph and recreate in your mind the print you will produce”. Meaning see your developed image, relying on the information you receive from the scene and on your developing intentions.
Group f/64 was created when Ansel Adams and Willard Van Dyke, an apprentice of Edward Weston, decided to organise some of their fellow photographers for the purposes of promoting a common aesthetic principle. The group was formed in 1932 and it constituted a revolt against Pictorialism, the soft-focused, academic photography that was then prevalent among West Coast artists. The name of the group is taken from the smallest setting of a large-format camera diaphragm aperture that gives particularly good resolution and depth of field. The original 11 members of Group f.64 were: Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, Henry Swift, John Paul Edwards, Brett Weston, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Sonya Noskowiak, and Preston Holder.
Though members of the group represented a wide range of subject matter in their work, they were united in their practice of using the camera to record life as it is, through unmanipulated “pure” documentation. Works associated with Group f.64 include Adams’s dramatic images of Yosemite National Park, Edward Weston’s close-up, high-detail photographs of fruits and vegetables and of sand dunes and nudes, and Cunningham’s studies of calla lilies.
Ansel Adam’s photographs link to romanticism. He used a black and white film in his images and would photograph a variety of different landscapes eg mountains, lakes and hills. The black and white film he added to his images differentiated his work from other photographers as he manipulated his photographs to create a darker sky, making the once blue, comforting sky into something terrifying and mysterious. He casted chilling shadows over the landscapes he photographed which made his scenes look more unnerving. This is an example of romanticism as he managed to create pictures that would leave people in awe but also slightly terrified by his dark ominous sky.
Photo analysis:
For this image, Ansel Adams used a small aperture (f/64). He did this as it allowed him to capture small details from the environment and let these details be seen in his photographs. This small aperture also made his images clearer. This image clearly displays the zone system as you can see shades ranging from pure black (0) to pure white (10). When taking this photograph, he first used a yellow filter and then used a red filter. He noticed that the type of filter that he used changed how the image looked (with the red filter making the photograph look more like how the environment did in real life and enhancing the tonal range of the image). From this, Ansel Adams came up with the idea of visualisation, which allowed him to show in his image what he saw in his ‘minds eye’. He used his talent in photography to take these pictures of different natural landscapes to which he then used these images to try and persuade the government to not destroy these beautiful places. Overall, I like how this photograph looks as you can see lots of detail and texture on the mountain and the manipulated sky which has been darkened gives the image a more intense, scary feeling but is also beautiful at the same time. This image successfully portrayed the idea of romanticism.
Ansel Adams Inspired Photoshoot:
For this photoshoot, I took pictures of various natural landscapes. I ensured that I took an equal amount of vertical and portrait photographs in order to get more variety in my images. To edit them, I used photoshop and edited the levels, curves and made the images black and white, adjusting the different colours to make the blue sky more darker as seen in Ansel Adams images. This dramatic dark sky makes my images look more scary, successfully portraying the theme of romanticism. I mainly focused on mountains and cliffsides as this is what Ansel Adams typically took pictures of.
Overall, I like how my images came out as I think they have a good tonal range in which you can see shades from pure black to pure white. Additionally, my images also have good detail and clarity. If I were to do this photoshoot again, I would try take more photos in different whether conditions eg fog as I think this would help my images look more creepy, furthering the idea of romanticism in my work.
Edward Weston
Edward Henry Weston was an American photographer. He has been called “one of the most innovative and influential American photographers” and “one of the masters of 20th century photography.” He was born in 1886 and died in 1958. He is best known for his carefully composed, sharply focused images of natural forms, landscapes, and nudes. Edward Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois. He 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 1902, Weston received his first camera for his 16th birthday, a Kodak Bull’s-Eye #2, and began taking photographs. Weston’s first photographs captured the parks of Chicago and his aunt’s rural farm.
Edward Weston was instrumental in establishing an identity for the West Coast school of photography in the early years of modernism in America. His eloquent combination of expansive landscapes and other natural subject matter with precise, unembarassedly technique created a prototype for the f/64 group’s purist style. Most of his work was done using an 8-by-10-inch view camera.
Through his promotion of straight photography and his daybooks, in which he recorded his artistic growth, Weston helped cement photography’s place as a legitimate modern artistic medium and influenced an entire generation of American photographers.
The beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque are three key concepts in aesthetics and philosophy of art.
Romanticism was an artistic, literary, musical and philosophical movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. It gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. It was characterised by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. It incorporates a deep feeling of emotions such as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe. Romanticism was a huge step away from the subtleties of photography and instead looked very bold and striking. Romantic landscapes are typically “moody” in atmosphere; they are more about the subjective feelings of the artist, than an objective record of the observable world.
Romantic artists often sought to capture the moods, feelings, and emotions of their subjects, using expressive compositions, vivid colours, and dramatic contrasts of light and dark to do this. Photographers who also took up the romanticist approach aimed to sensationalise the overall look of their images by enhancing certain colours in order to make their images surreal, glorified and to dramatize certain areas of their photographs.
Romanticism first showed itself in landscape paintings, where British artists in the 1760s began to turn to wilder landscapes, storms, and gothic architecture.
The Sublime
The sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation.
It is defined as a pleasure in the way that nature’s capacity to overwhelm our powers of perception and imagination is contained by and serves to vivify our powers of rational comprehension. It is a distinctive aesthetic experience. For Romantics, the sublime is a meeting of the subjective-internal (emotional) and the objective-external (natural world).
The sublime is closely associated with the Romantic movement, the concept of the sublime began to be employed by those who wished to challenge traditional systems of thought that were couched in the old language of religion, a rhetoric that now seemed founded on outdated conceptions of human experience.
Edmund Burke noted that there were certain experiences which supply a kind of thrill or shudder of perverse pleasure, mixing fear and delight. He shifted the emphasis in discussions of the sublime towards experiences provoked by aspects of nature which due to their vastness or obscurity could not be considered beautiful, and indeed were likely to fill us with a degree of horror.
At one extreme was the sublime (awesome sights such as great mountains) at the other the beautiful, the most peaceful, even pretty sights. In between came the picturesque, views seen as being artistic but containing elements of wildness or irregularity. One of the earliest theorists of the picturesque, Uvedale Price, situated the picturesque between the serenely beautiful and the awe-inspiring sublime. A picturesque view contains a variety of elements, curious details, and interesting textures, conveyed in a palette of dark to light that brings these details to life.
Romanticism inspired photoshoot:
For this photoshoot, I went to different places around Jersey and photographed various different natural landscapes eg La Corbiere Lighthouse. I took my images in both portrait and landscape in order to get a variety of outcomes and make my images more interesting to look at instead of them all being in the same rotation. I think I successfully managed to capture the beauty of these places in my photographs through the bright colours and detail in each image. I enhanced the colours on photoshop using levels and curves. One improvement I would make for next time, is I would try and photograph some landscapes in other whether conditions as most of my images are sunny. But, if I photographed some in other whether conditions like fog or when its cloudy, I could enhance this feature in order to get more of a romanticised image as the scary whether conditions would provide that theme of fear in romantic images, given to the person who looks at my images.
Rural landscape photography is in many ways similar to photographing urban landscapes. The difference is rural photography is about capturing the “life” in the countryside. Rural landscapes include a variety of geological and geographic features such as: croplands, forests, deserts, swamps, grasslands, pastures, rivers and lakes. This style of photography serves as a narrative, telling stories of places and lifestyles often overlooked in our fast-paced modern world. Unlike urban landscapes that often focus on the grandeur of architecture and the complexity of human-made structures, rural landscapes focus on the beauty of simplicity.
Bucolic= a bucolic may be either a person who lives in the country (cf. rustic below) or a poem celebrating the pleasures of country life,
Pastoral= is the Eclogues of the Latin poet Virgil (70-19 BCE) are sometimes referred to as his Bucolics
