selection:

Robert Adam who was born in may 1937 in City Of Orange, New Jersey, United States and is currently 86 years old, was a talented photographer who discovered his love for photography at the age of 25 when he was an English teacher.

After he spent some time in Scandinavia with his Swedish wife, whose name was Kerstin, he realised the complexities of the American geography that merited exploration.

Adams reshaped the visual expression of landscape photography and injected purpose and innovation into his work. He brought that sense of harsh reality of landscapes and heightened the sense of purpose in the world of photography.

Robert did not care for the aesthetic side of landscapes, rather he directly engaged with the world highlighting the dynamic and profound significance. Instead of him romancing landscapes, he borough that context of reality to life, he showed the world what was real and what wasn’t.

He is widely known for inhibiting the landscapes of the America west after 1960, where he followed the footsteps of photographers like Timothy H. O’Sullivanand William Henry Jackson. However what distinguishes Adams from such photographers is his consistency in black and white photography and square formats in his arts work.

Throughout his 50-year professional career, he produced over 20 books that presented his work. Looking through these books will enable people to track the evolution of his approach to the art of photography.

Mind map:

Mood board:

What is Urban landscape?

Urban photography can be seen as a type of genre in photography that is concerned with capturing images from Urban space, things like towns and other ecological spaces. Over the years, Urban landscape has became very popular due to the world becoming more urbanised. It is a study which links to landscape and street photography.

Urban landscape can be also seen as a primal focus in an urban environment which basically means a man made environment, which highlights the background of landscape rather than the subject of the landscape.

What does Topographic mean?

New Topographic can be represented as a radical shift by reanalysing the subject that surrounded landscape photography as a fabricated environment.

It is Technique in which a scene, usually a landscape, is photographed as if it were being observed from afar. this was practiced most known by the 1970s ‘New Topographic’ photographers which included Robert Adams, Nicholas Nixon, Lewis Baltz, and Hilla Becher.

What is Topographic a response to?

The images that were beautifully printed of the mundane but strangely fascinating topography showed both the reflection of the world that was becoming massively suburbanised and also a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the element.

America struggled with a lot post-war.

Things like,

• Inflation and labour unrest. The main economic concern the country had was the immediate post-war years was inflation.
• The baby boom and suburbia. Because of the millions of people that died, returning veterans made up for lost time and got married and started a family.
• Isolation and splitting of the family unit, pharmaceuticals and mental health problems
• Vast distances, road networks and mobility

More

Many photographers associated with the topic ‘New Topographic’ were artists like Robert Adams, Nicholas Nixon, Hiller Becher etc…

New Topographic was inspired by the likes of Albert Renger Patszch and the notion of New objectivity.

Places like Parking lots, suburban housing and warehouses were all portrayed with a beautiful distinct strictness, almost in the same way that early photographers documented natural landscape. An exhibition in the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York features these photographers that revealed the growing apprehension about how natural landscape were being engulfed by industrial development.

The New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) was constructed as a style in Germany in the 1920s as a challenge to Expressionism. As seen on the name , it offered a return to unsentimental reality and a focus on world that was objective, instead of the more romantic and abstract, or idealistic likelihood of Expressionism.

Final images:

Presentation.

Presentation 1:

Presentation 2:

Presentation 3:

Evaluation, critique and comparing:

When it comes to thinking about my overall satisfaction with my finished products, I think that I did quite well. I believe that I’m satisfied with some of my final work.  

With reference to editing my photographs, I think that I was able to use my editing skills to edit my photos like Ansel’s work. I was able to show the different tones in my pictures just like Ansel did. The textured and evident clouds Ansel had in his pictures was something I really liked and focused on. In two of my pictures, it is apparent that I edited the picture so that it would peak the dark shadows.  

I’d say that I was able to clearly show my understanding towards Ansel’s work and how powerfully I was able to make my pictures reflect his work. I also made sure that most of my pictures were in black and white because the period Ansel produced his pictures was a time when colored pictures were just being introduced, so all of them were black and white.  

However, I admit that some of my pictures need improvement. In some of my pictures I don’t show that texture that Ansel’s work had. It was something that I didn’t realize when I was editing so I wasn’t able to focus on that and apply that technique on my pictures which is something that I will have to keep in mind in my future projects.  

Image 1:

Editing process

For this picture, I pressed on develop and increased vibrancy by +100 and decreased saturation by -100. Then at the top bar I pressed on an icon that looks like a paint brush that looks like this,

In this icon, I increased clarity by 16, dehaze by 55 and sharpness by 43

Image 2:

Editing process:

For this picture, I pressed on develop and increased temperature by +23 and tint by +25. Then at the top bar I pressed on a icon that looks like a paint brush and increased the dehaze by 33 and brushed the whole image making sure no spot is missed. This was all I did, in terms of editing, for this picture.

Image 3:

Editing process:

For this picture, I pressed on develop and increased vibrancy by +100 and decreased saturation by -100. Then at the top bar I pressed on an icon that looks like a paint brush and increased contrast by 23, shadows by 38, clarity by 16, dehaze by 45 and sharpness by 43. With these adjustments, I bushed the brush icon only on the clouds in the image, nothing else. This was all the editing I did in this image.

Image 4:

Editing process:

For this picture, I pressed on develop and increased vibrancy by +100 and decreased saturation by -100. Then at the top bar I pressed on a icon that looks like a paint brush and decreased the blacks by -21 and increased dehaze by 38 and then brushed the whole image, head to toe.

Image 5:

Editing process:

For this image, I pressed on develop and increased shadows by +53, texture by +42 and contrast by +5. Then I decreased exposure by -0.79. This was all I did in terms of editing.

Image 6:

Editing process:

For this image, I pressed on develop and increased vibrancy by +100 and decreased saturation by -100. Then at the top bar I pressed on an icon that looks like a paint brush and increased dehaze by 60 and only brushed the top part of the image (the sky).

Overall evaluation:

Selection:

What is exposure bracketing?

Exposure bracketing is where you take a number of photographs with different levels of exposure and with those different levels of exposure you then blend them together to create a photograph with a diverse set of higher dynamic range. It ensures that you have all the details you need in your photographs. it creates the exact image you had in mind.

E.g

What is HDR?

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and refers to a technique that highlights the details in content that has both very bright and very dark sceneries. It offers a more natural and realistic picture output with a more widened range of contrast.

How to create an image using HDR

First step:

I opened Lightroom and selected three images and I did this by pressing control and then right clicking on my mouse.

Second step:

After I pressed on photo and then scrolled down and found photo merge and pressed on it. Then I pressed on HDR.

Third step:

After I pressed HDR, this appeared. I left all the settings, seen bellow, just as that are and pressed merge.

Final product:

After I pressed merge, this was the end product of the three pictures merged together. I really like how some parts are illuminated but some parts show those dark tones. I think the end product is quite good. Just a little saturated but nothing develop can’t change.