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.

Who is Ansel Adams?

Ansel Adams was an incredible American landscape photographer and environmentalist who was known for his black-and-white images which showed the different perspectives and places of the American West. He was born on the 20th of February (San Francisco) , 1902 and died on the 22nd of April, 1984. An only child in a rather comfortable family. four years after Adams was born, a deadly earthquake of a whopping magnitude 7.9 struck the city. It was claimed that it cost more than 3,000 lives and pretty much left the city in absolute ruins. Adams family was majorly effected and was going through hard times in the unrelated financial crisis that followed in 1907, where New York Stock Exchange lost half of its value over the few weeks.

Adams did not fit it at school, his shyness was fuelled by his severely broken nose which he suffered during the earthquake, an unforgettable change that remained with him for the rest of his life. After Adams constantly changed schools, his dad had enough and finally decided to get him a tutor. During those years where he was tutored, Ansel took comfort in nature. He would take long walks in the forest and sand dunes that surrounded his family home. This is where his passion for nature started.

Although he was just as interested in music and photography, he later realised that he was not more suitable to be a professional musician, so with that conclusion, he poured his heart into photography, a skill he’d earned since he was 14. He gained this when he was given a Kodak Box Brownie Camera to take on family trips to the Sierra Nevada mountain range and the majestic Yosemite National Park.

Ansel achieved many things, one of the things being the fact that he helped found and renew a revolutionary group called Group f/64, an association of photographers that preached “pure” photography which advocated sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. The history behind this group was when Adams met photographer Edward Weston in 1927. They became really important to each other as colleagues and friends. This group was merging around the conceding greatness of Weston and the dynamic energy of Adams. Although the group was loosely organized and relatively short-lived, Group f/64 definitely brought the new West Coast vision of straight photography to national attention and influence. 

With the mention of Edward Weston, in terms of the f/64 group, him and his son Brett, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and a handful of other photographers, formed the famous group f/64, the name honouring an aperture setting on a lens one might stop down to in order to attain the sharpest focus on photograph. The successful group introduced their work in an exhibition at San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum.

Edward Weston (who was born in 1886 and died in 1958) and Ansel Adams, were two of the more influential American photographers of the twentieth century. These talented Californian artists launched their unique work during the years between the two world wars. Over the course of their lives, they became great friends who shared the same aesthetic.

Edward was an American photographer who was called “one of the most innovative and influential American photographers” and “one of the masters of 20th century photography.” Weston photographed some unique things, and over the course of his 40-year in the photography industry Weston photographed a set of subjects, including landscapes, nudes, still life’s, genre scenes, portraits and even whimsical parodies.He was very focused on people and placed of the American west and developed a “quintessentially American, and especially Californian, approach to modern photography”.

He was born in Chicago but at the ripe age of 21, he moved to California. He knew he wanted to be a photographer at an early age and from the start he wanted his work to typically focus on soft and Pictorialism which was what was popular at the time. Later he ditched that style and went on to be one if the foremost champions of highly detailed photographic images.

However, in 1947 he was sadly diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease soon stopped photographing. He then spent the rest of his 10 years of his life overseeing the printing of more than 1,000 of his most famous images.

Edward Weston work:

Zone system

Ansel would later create a system called the Zonal system (with 10 different tones) so that it would ensure that all tonal values were represented in the images. A tool for controlling an image based on a four interlocked variables distinctive to photography: the sensitivity of the negative paper, exposure time, lighting and studio development.

Etc…

Ansel Adams was a supporter for environmental protection, national parks and forming an on going legacy of feedback to the power of nature and the feeling sublime.

How does Ansel Adams images link romanticism?

It is evident that Ansel empathised romanticism in his work. Not only was that said but it was seen physically in his work. With his techniques, he was able to romanticise his inspiring work. Adams did this by using black and white film in his photos. He used this when he detained pictures of tall mountains, frosted hills, angelic lakes. Because of this, it added a certain uniqueness and produced a unique set of shades, tones, textures, lights, shadows and tonal value to his work, differentiating his work from others. This is an example where Ansel Adams created a romanticised example of landscape photography.

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it” Ansel Adams.

“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept” Ansel Adams

What is it?

The term “rural landscape” is a set of a variety of geographic and geological features such as forests, cropland, deserts, swamps, pastures, grasslands, lakes, rivers.

In more depth, “rural landscape” narrates the various pieces of a land that is not populated or majorly developed, and not set aside for preservation in a natural state.

What is the difference between bucolic and pastoral?

Bucolic, as a noun may be seen as either an individual who lives in the country or it can also mean a poem that celebrates the pleasures of living in a country life.

Pastoral is the Eclogues of the Latin poet Virgil (70-19 BCE) are sometimes referred to as his Bucolics

Mood board:

Mood board:

Mind map:

Definition:

Romanticism, perspective or intellectual induction that was characterized in many works of literature painting, architecture, music, criticism and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. 

In landscape perspective it is typical “moody” in atmosphere; it is more about the subjective feelings of the artist, than an objective record of the observable world.

Examples: (referring to romanticism in other art forms)

Explanation: when an extradionary romantic era in landscape art , moved artists to capture nature and infusing it with emotion and drama. This pivotal period gave rise to a new form of artistic expression, one that sought to reveal the emotional depth and sublime beauty inherent in the world around us.

Definition of sublime and picturesque

Sublime: The sublime is the understanding of the quality of greatness or glory that stimulates awe and wonder. From the 17th century onwards the concept and the feelings it inspires have been a source of creativity for artists and writers, especially when it comes to the art of natural landscape.

Picturesque:  an aware manipulation of Nature where it creates foregrounds, middle grounds, and backgrounds so that it can highlight a variety of provocative formal elements.