I can usually work to a deadline but the flexibility of the OCA courses is one of the major reasons why I am able to continue to work full time & study at the same time. My1st assignment is due next week but my planned sessions and project work have been put on hold & delayed for the past couple of weeks. First Mum's fractured finger , now I have been unwell since last Friday. I feel awful and have been coughing all day and night--I sound like I have croup! I have managed to keep going to work but have been in bed by 8.30pm each night. With Xmas approaching I know , realistically , it will be a real struggle to complete the assignment before then, so I have emailed Russell , my tutor, and hope I feel well enough this weekend to battle on with project work and assignment planning. I have managed to browse through, but not digest, a couple of library books I picked up recently and will write about these later.
French Vogue caused some controvesy earlier this year when these images of a 10 year old child, who has clearly been made-up and dressed to look like an alluring young woman, were published. They communicate an illusion of idealised beauty and sexuality.I love taking photographs of children and I took many of mine as they grew up in the 1970's and 80's , and continue to do so of my grand-children , but am very aware of what is now considered acceptable , or even safe, to share . Sadly many of mine taken in the seventies would be considred unacceptable now.But whilst my analogue snaps were seen by only a few family members and friends digital imagery is easily distributed and then viewed around the globe. But is sexualisation of children a new phenomenon in photography unique to the 21st Century or has it always existed? All imagery needs to be looked at in the context it was taken and to carefully consider the photographer's intent . Social mores change , what is acceptable for one generation is not for the next. http://uk.lifestyle.yahoo.com/parents-fury-at-10-year-old-supermodel.html
Shocking ?
French Vogue January 2011 Xie Kitchen , July 1873 | Alice Liddell as a beggar girl, 1858 |
Paperback: 144 pages Publisher: Thames & Hudson (6 July 2009) . Many of the images to modern eyes may look suggestive. I find the photographs very carefully considered and posed, the exposure times ran to minutes , how he managed to persuade his younger subjects to remain so still I have no idea. Unlike his compatriot Julia Margaret Cameron, whose images were often deliberately out of focus, his are technically good. The work of the Pre-Raphaelites inspired him , his images are beautiful and I feel show a passionate quality. Although some are quite innocent the subjects rarely smile and have an intensity that still manages to disturb me. Why is this I wonder , would I feel so uncomfortable if I knew a woman had taken them? The images were never ntended for public consumption , but does that somehow make his pastime of photographing young girls (often nude) even more dubious? What I need to consider before labelling him a pervert are the circumstances at the time the images were taken, the context. The book suggests the provocative pose of Alice Liddell posing as a beggar girl is the result of his model needing to steady herself during the long exposure. Viewing them well over a century later I have no idea if his motives were salacious or not ,how can I possible judge him by today's standards ?
I have had a vile week! Mum shut her finger in a car door on the evening of the 5th after a family bonfire party so any college work has been totally abandoned . I have had trips to A & E and fracture clinic ,work has been awful, and my new iMac has driven me to despair. I am sure once I get to grips with the different OS I will be fine but I spent most of Wednesday loading my new Mac versions of Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom and then trying to work out how to get them in the dock area of my desktop. I have yet to actually process any photographs on my sparkly new machine ! But on a high note one of my images ( the 1st in a series of work in progress hopefully towards my final DPP assignment ) has been chosen to be used on the OCA website this month (see below). So a good end to a horrid week.
Three bracketed exposures of low, average and high contrast scenes are needed for this exercise. I do routinely check the histogram on my camera LCD screen and when reviewing the images in LR. Additionally the highlight and shadow clipping warnings are always left on. However a histogram is just a guide , low or high key scenes will have very different histograms but this does not make them bad images. I am not a very technical person so describing how I see and interpret histograms is actually rather difficult for me to write about so please excuse any rather un-technical terminology I may use in my efforts!
A histogram grap below showing tonal range from very dark on the left to very light on the right.
Low contrast. I shall call these my boring collection- a brick wall taken early morning !!! My camera indicated that all three images had little tonal contrast with the values close to each other spread over only a small proportion of the histogram graph.They each have a pyramid shape. None showed clipping but the values move towards the right hand side as the exposure is increased. All images F4.5 @ 14mm ISO 200.
| Darker exposure. The tonal range is restricted to dark and medium tones. here to edit. @ 40 secs | Average exposure. The values have shifted slightly right towards the mid range tones.
@ 30 secs | Brighter exposure. The values have once again moved right towards the lighter mid range tones.
@ 25 secs |
High contrast. All images taken @ 50mm ISO 200 1/500. The camera and on screen histogram indicated that all 3 images were clipped in the highlight and shadow areas. Unlike the low contrast graphs these are spread all across the tonal range with high and low peaks indicating a wide range of very dark to very light tones that will create a high contrast image.
| The graph indicates a darker toned image than the other 2 exposures.
It shows much lower peaks in the mid and light toned areas but a very high peak in the darkest area of the graph.
F6.3
| The graph has shifted towards the right with very high peaks in both the dark and light areas
F5.6 | The graph's peaks are less prounounced moving towards the right. I actually expected this histogram to move further towards the right than it did using the larger aperture. However it does indicate there are now less dark and medium tones than before.
F5
|
Medium contrast. Looking at the medium contrast graphs I can see that although the tonal range is quite broad it creates a smoother gradual curved graph than that of the dramatic high and low peaks created by the high contrast images. All images taken @ 50mm ISO 200 F 5
| The tonal values are spread across the graph but indicating a greater amount of dark tones due to the shorter exposure.
1/320 | This graph indicate less dark and more mid tones with some highlight clipping. here to edit.
1/250 | The slower exposure time has increased the overall brightness and amount of clipped highlights.
1/200 |
Ghosts of the Black Chamber: Experimental, Dada and Surrealist Photography 1918-1948
(Solar Art Directives) Paperback: 136 pages Publisher: University of
Chicago Press (23 Dec 2010) Language English ISBN-10:0982046448 ISBN-13:
978-0982046449 During my first OCA course TAOP I visited an exhibition of surrealist work and commented at the time I found it difficult to understand and actually found some of it totally ridiculous! However as my photographic studies continue I find myself being drawn more towards this genre. This is a VERY slim book , much smaller than I imagined when I ordered it , but it does contain some interesting images. Surrealist art is frequently used to create erotic/pornographic images, but the book suggests that "even porn can be creative" pg 5. The Surrealists used photography as a medium to signify and reveal a more complex truth. Spanning from 1918-1948 I find viewing the analogue images taken prior to the digital age all the more intriguing for the skills used to create them.