Just spent some time lookiing at a little of the work of Andreas Gursky and Andrew Burtynsky. What is missing is seeing their work for real. The size that they are both printing to is big in Gursky's case often up to 7 by 5 feet. The images are very detailed and high resolution so part of their impact is the amount of content.

As an aside it is worth commenting that originals from these photographers have now become part of the sale room culture of modern art often generating enormous figures at auction.

The three images by Gursky tha I hve looked at are ;the grocery store;, The Kuwait Stock Exchange and the Nike stage. The grocery store has something of the work of Warhol in its use of repetition in blocks of colour mediated by the goods on the shelves. The Kuwait exchange seems almost to have a sense of mystery. There is the crowded space of figures all with the one exception in traditional arabic dress. Some reclining some in conversation hardly any watching the screens. The photographer has also used a longish exposure and captured a sense of movement in the flowing white robes.

The Nike Stage unfortunately I have not been able to find a high enugh resolution image to really appreciate all the story that is being told in the picture. There is enough to appreciate the huge numbers crowding along the hill climb in a hot arid landscape.

The Burytynsky is of a Chinese chicken processing factory and is from his series of Chinese pictures. Burtynsky has specialised in making large scale images of mans impact on the environment. I have ordered a film made of his work and will write further once this has arrived and been viewed. In the meantime the image of thechinese workers all busy filleting pieces of chicken made me think of battery farming. Here the battery animal is homospaiens rather than the chicken.

David

Rober Enoch suggested that I should look at Charlotte Cotton's book the photograph as contemporary art. This arrived this morning from Amazon. A first quick scan through and I am immediately reminded of the gulf between the current approaches in amateur photography and the contemporary art photgraphy world. Further posts on this as I work through the book

David

Robert Enoch my tutor made some suggestions for modifying some of the pictures  or trying a different interpretation.

First the white black pair.

The black needed to have the horizontal and vertical planes corrected. This I have done using the rotate and perspective tools in Adobe Lightroom

Before:-

After correction:-

With the white image the suggestion was to tone down the white cable which distracted from the image. This has been done by burning in the cable but it has not proved as successful as I wanted in making it less distracting.

Before:-

After burning in the cable:-

The "large" image of he boilers at Porth Wen. Robert suggested trying to reduce the intensity of the green of the foliage and also to try it generally desaturated and also to try it monochrome.

Original:-

Now with the greens paritally desaturated using Lightroom:-

Now in monochrome the conversion done in Lightroom 3 with colour balance modified and more contrast added with a tone curve.

And thirdly partially desaturated in Photoshop CS3 A desaturated copy layer was added and then overlay with blend of about 50% used.

The broad picture of the buildings. Robert suggested it was unbalanced by the loss of any sky. This had been cropped out as it was very uninteresting and quite a bit was burnt out. The crop has been modified to include a sky line and the picture converted to monochrome in a similar way to the picture above.

Before:-

After:-

David 27 August  2010

I am away in Ireland for a week and will not have internet access.

David

All the pictures are in the gallery titled contrasts.

With the exception of the pair diagonal/rounded all the pictures for this assignment have been taken within the last few weeks. Most were taken specifically for the project or on other assignments with the need to present pairs of images for this project in mind.

The black/white contrast was part of the process of making a pictorial record of my home village as well as being specifically taken for this project. I was looking for parts of the image that provided the dominant tones of black or white rather than pictures primarily made up of those tones.

Hard/soft. These draw on pictures from two separate occasions. We visited Dinas Bran above Llangollen on a blustery afternoon a week ago and the peony was in flower in our garden a few weeks ago. The castle image has been converted to monochrome and toned to emphasise the harshness of the rock the blue of the sky has also been darkened to mirror the rock. The peony has also been converted to monochrome and the background burnt in to remove the distracting patterns of other flowers. I wanted to bring out the contrast between the frilly soft shapes of the flower with the angular harshness of the rock at the same time linking the pictures by the use of a monochrome treatment. These two contrasts come together in the broader coloured picture of the ruined castle contrasted with soft fluffy sky and the surrounding vegetation.

Diagonal/rounded. A print of the former hangs in our hall. The contrast between the two shapes is clear but also I like the way the contrast is exaggerated by the diagonal image being in the one plane in contrast with the bulky rounded rocks.

Curved/straight From a day taking pictures at Llandudno (see earlier entry in the blog for the street photography) The contrast I hope speaks for itself.

Many/few. Parys Mountain provides the most extraordinary collection of colours and shapes. The contrast is about the difference between the many multicoloured rocks and planes in the first picture compared with the black rock with the quartz intrusion and just a touch of iron oxide staining in the close up picture of the rock formation.

Large/small Porth Wen an historic brick works on the coast of Anglesey near Amlwch Again a contrast generated between a wide shot and a detail.

Broad/narrow. Porth Wen again. Use of the arch in the old brick kiln to pick out a detail of the building.

Rough/smooth A loaf fresh out of the oven caught my eye this morning as it sat on a rack to cool. At first I thought of pairing this with a cup of coffee with the idea of solid/liquid but then my eye lit on the bottle of red wine and the contrast between the rough wholemeal bread and the gloss of the bottle and the idea of the smoothness of the red wine came to me. The lighting is just available light from the kitchen window.

Visit today to the Tate to see the Picasso exhibition. Some very fine work but the exhibition feels too full and over inclusive. A lot of the later stuff does not seem to my eyes anything like as good as his early work and the work he made immediately after WW2.

The other snag of such a big exhibition is visual fatigue just to much too look at. Ideally would like to go back and select a small number of paintings to explore. Quite difficult to do in a busy gallery.

David

Thursday last week rquested to cover the concert given by Cor Merched y Gaiman in Cilcain Chapel. No extra light in the chapel so I needed to use as much flash as possible with ISO1600. Colour really difficult to balance afterwards because of teh casts from teh coloured walls and ceiling.

Gaiman is one of the Welsh towns in Patagonia. The choir had travelled 8000 miles to sing at the Llangollen international festival and then visited our village from where, one of the early settlers in Patagonia had left in the 19th century.

The concert was sold out wice the number of tickets could have been sold with members of the audience coming from all over North Wales.

The local village choir Cor Cilcain joins with Cor Gaiman at the end of the concert to sing the National anthem.

For this exercise I am using some pictures taken whilst on holiday in Scotland in April this year.

The first was taken at Glenfinnan after paying our tribute to Bonny Prince Charles.

The first always had struck me whilst viewed on the monitoras best in the full frame version. However I cropped the left hand side of the frame and some from the grasses in the bottom. The resulting printed image is much stronger (both were printed A4 on gloss paper)

The cropped image cleans up the bottom left of the picture and the sweep of the river to the bottom left corner is more pleasing. Losing the grasses at the bottom leads to a much better emphasis of the circular movement through the limbs of the dead tree and the Scots pine on the left.

Uncropped image

Cropped image

Again having uploaded these to the blog I find myself doubting my previous preferences. I wonder if that is because I have become attached to the original having done most of the initial processing on it. I can't really claim that it is because that is how I had initially visualised it as my visual memory is not that good to remember what I was thinking over four months ago. I will look at the two prints again in the morning.

The day after Sunday the 18th I have tried a second crop just taking off the grasses at the bottom and not cropping in on the left. This seems perhaps the most satisfactory. It keeps the tree on the left feeling less crowed to the edge and at the same time emphasises the curve of the river and loses the distracting grasses in the foreground.

The second picture is of a stand of young birch trees alongside Loch Leven with the Mamores in the background. The original intention was to feature just the trees as a pattern so the picture was going to need cropping. The original uncropped is pleasing in its own right and others at home prefer it because of the memories it carries and the way the snow and blue sky add a pattern which is balanced by the dry grasses in the foreground.

Note the above pictures were taken with a Panasonic GF1 with 20mm lens. The picture of the trees same camera with 50mm f2 Leitz Summicron with an adaptor.

The last of the three is of the afterglow. The picture was taken on a spring evening looking over Loch Linnhe. Camera as before Panasonic GF1 with 50mm lens at ISO 100 1/20 sec at I think probably f2 or f4 there was very little light left and I did not have a tripod so the camera was jammed up against a convenient tree to steady it.

The first full frame has quite a biggish area of relatively uninteresting sky so the crop homes in on the centre of the picture so that the red afterglow becomes much more the main feature framed by the dip in the hills. The lowish band of clouds now frames most of the top of the picture rather than running across the centre. Hmm either the printer is playing up and putting some drops of ink on to the paper or the paper I am using is faulty and the ink is not being absorbed properly. Need to run some checks tomorrow Glad these prints are for exercise purposes and not for general show.

David Sunday 18 July

Well the more detailed examination of the images from yesterday suggested that at least one is really pleasing in its own right. As a group they tell quite a story about the architcture of the villae. Today repeated the exercise in landscape format. Several of the pictures have been spoiled because of water on the lens. It started to rain hard. When the opportunity arises I will go back to retake the pictures.

What strikes me most about the process of taking these in horizontal format was the need to think about balance and how the other elements would add contextual inforamtion about the door.  So in some the door was placed well of centre and in others it stayed central with balancng elements on both sides.

A selection of pictures from this exercise is now in the Gallery called Frames