Assignment 5: Working the set

Since my last post I have spent hours sitting in front of Lightroom, flicking images back and forth, trying to decide upon a meaningful set that I can submit.  My problem, as usual, is too many photographs.

I can see a visual style emerging in the photos that I prefer, very square carefully managed symmetrical images, but occasionally broken up with something offering a different perspective or disorder.  Even once I have a set I like I am then confronted with the challenge of sequencing a process that will help to build a narrative to accompany the photographs.  I have now realized that whilst the photos must be sequenced the absolute order is not critical, each individual photo has its own story, whilst the set as a whole makes a statement.  


Here is what I currently have

  

The door opens into the set of images, it is the way into the Innenhof.  I then end with a photograph of a poster informing the neighborhood that this Innenhof will be demolished to make way for a wonderful new development, signifying the impermanence of these spaces.  In between there are loosely linked pairs of photographs.  I keep trying to pull away from the idea of sequencing in pairs, but it is too compelling to me and I think I will go with it for now.  I am waiting on some feedback from my tutor concering the overall theme, before I finally commit to the submission set.

Assignment 5: First 12 photos

This set of images is not intended as a final set or even as the direction it will eventually take.  I have selected 12 images from my first 3 shoots to demonstrate to myself that there is sufficient variety and narrative potential within the subject.

 Not a shot that I am likely to use, but an important element in why I chose this subject.  This is where I live about 4 doors down in the triangular row houses that were built in the center of this Innenhof.

 Just around the corner from my green and pleasant Innenhof is this bleak and forbidding space.  It is scheduled for a major rebuild, sad in a way as this is a good example of post war building.

 A key feature of most Innenhofs is provision of play areas for the local kids, an Innenhof is a very social space.

This almost Zen like garden provides a place for quiet reflection.  Some Innenhofs can be very elegant, clearly contrasting the grim space above.

 Whilst I have previously stated that I do not want to feature the people of these spaces, this was irresistible.

 I sincerely hope they never repaint these garage doors.

 Here there has been a major renovation creating an oddly colourful space.  As  a fellow student pointed out this is quite reminiscent of Op Art or even some Abstract Expressionism.

The engineering of an Innenhof can be quite elaborate, here a two story car park has been dug into the center of the Innenhof during a rebuild.  This very modern space is flanked on each corner by massive concrete WW2 flak towers.  Strange place, Munich.

I love this space, a maze of small gardens was filled with furniture and BBQ stations.  This is a place that looks fun to live in.  A green contrast to the more stark concrete filled spaces.

OK, this was weird, a table tennis table in what looked like an old "water feature" with a monkey statue overlooking the scene.  In the opposite direction was the same scene but this time the statue was a large dog.

In this Innehof someone has a small business running an Outlet store for climbing gear.  Closer in to the city many of the Innenhofs have business uses, often containing restaurants or cafes.

Finally not all are in pristine shape this space smelled as badly as it looked, however, a rebuild is clearly in process.  I am guessing the neighbours really do not want any intrusion with this 4m high chain link fence.

With these 12 images I have confidence that over the next few weeks I can build a good set of images that illustrate a subject I feel an affinity to.

Assignment 5: New Direction

Looking at my previous blog entries on Assignment 5, they are dated Feb 16, Mar 25, and Apr 16.  I have been thinking about this assignment for a very long time, mulling over different ideas, experimenting a little with the camera and photoshop, but most of all trying to figure out how to channel Gursky into my own work.  I started by taking his highly Digital style and trying to build my own composite images creating virtual crowds at a few Munich locations.  Whilst I could achieve some modestly interesting results, it rapidly became apparent that I would not be able to get vaguely close to Gursky's imagery, and also why would I want to?

Two aspects of this settled in my mind, the first is that I do not have access to skilled photoshop professionals,  nor the ability to command access for prolonged periods of time to significant Munich landmarks.  However, it is the second problem that finally steered me away from this approach.  Whilst I admire Gursky's complex imagery I have no desire to replicate it myself.  His subject matter and style are not my own.  I have come to the realization that it is critical for me to NOT emulate Gursky.  What I need to do is to learn from his style and working practice, then use that knowledge to improve my own photography.  I must create my own photographs in my own style building upon my learning.

So what is it about Gursky that I can bring to my own work, what elements of his style most interest and inspire me?

1. Framing: Gursky very carefully controls the edges of the frame, rarely enclosing his subjects within negative space.  The subject matter usually spans the frame.
2. Compression:  In much of his earlier work Gursky compressed the image plane presenting the subject as a series of overlapping sheets of information.
3. Subject:  In his earlier work Gursky spent much time studying German suburbia.  I do not feel a need to deliberately select the same material, but I have an interest in recording the social landscape of modern Germany.
4. Series:  Today Gursky creates one-off highly individual works of art, however, he started creating serial work, typographies, under the guidance of the Bechers.

What becomes obvious is the it is his earlier work that has the strongest influence over me, perhaps this is because the later work is beyond my current skill set.

With this in mind I have been trying to find a subject that I can apply some of these ideas to, but also one that builds upon my previous assignments.  So far I have explored Munich's parks and aspects of the inner city.  I have considered a series of images within the city center, exploring the shopping streets and entertainment districts.  This did not work for me, I could be anywhere and somehow I found it hard to add any personality to the images.

Shortly before we went on holiday in early May, our tiny mother cat, Doro, went missing creating a major crisis.  We delayed our vacation for 3 days hoping that she would return, but also realized that we could not sit waiting for ever and so with a heavy heart we headed to the airport 6 days after she went missing.  3 hours before we were due to take off, an SMS arrived from our next door neighbour and cat sitter, Doro returned hungry but otherwise fine.  We guess she got locked in someones garage or basement.  With a few tears of relief we headed off for a slightly curtailed holiday.

This event provided the idea for Assignment 5.  During the time she was missing we hunted all over our neighbourhood, putting up posters and asking local people if they had seen Doro.  As we live in the center of a city this led us to search the inner courtyard of many of the apartments nearby.  Called Innenhofs in German, these spaces occupy the center of most city blocks.  In Germany most older apartments are built in a hollow square enclosing the Innenhof.  It was only on vacation still puzzling over Assignment 5 that I reflected on what I had seen in this search.  Each Innenhof was very different, some ornate others disorderd, some peacful green spaces, others grim concrete wastelands.  Each Innenhof had a personality of its own that some how reflected the people who lived there.

So with Assignment 5 I plan to turn my eye towards the inner landscape of the city, an exploration of shared and yet private spaces, spaces that speak of the personality of the city and the people who make it their home. I may turn this into a book as I did Assignment 3, but I am secure that I can find 12 images that can tell the story of these spaces.

There is one major aspect of this work that will differ from the working practice of Andreas Gursky.  I plan to shoot this with small compact cameras, a Fuji X100 with a fixed 23mm lens (35mm FFE) and a Samsung NX200 mirrorless system camers with an 18mm lens (27mm FFE).  Both cameras have an APS-C sensor equal to or even better than that found in many DSLRs.  Innehofs are private spaces, I need to be respectful and discrete.  If I start walking around with a Canon 5D Mark II with a tilt-shift lens on a tripod I am going to attract to much attention.  If challenged with the small camera I can easily say that I am looking to move to the area and want to get some photos of different apartment buildings, this will not hang with the DSLR.  So I am stepping far away from Gursky's 5x7 view camera.

The final point I need to address before presenting some initial photography is that I accept that this is on the borderline between Landscape and Social Documentary, however, looking back I realize that most of my landscape work has a strong social element supported by a narrative.  With this assignment I am turning my eye to documenting society through the urban landscape.

I have already completed 3 photo walks in my immediate area.  This is an interesting process, I have to walk the streets actively look for entries into the building complexes.  When I find an access point (many Innenhofs are behind locked doors) I have no idea what I will find once inside.  Each Innenhof is a new exploration.  I have to move fairly quickly to avoid looking creepy, but each shot has to be very carefully lined up, parallel lines dominate the spaces, and there are a vast number of compositional options.  I typically set the camera to f/8 or f/11 and select an ISO that provides comfortable hand holding.  I cannot shoot in sun light, the contrast would be far too high, shadows hiding detail.  I must wait for overcast conditions.  The Fuji is excellent for this use as the high ISO capabilities of the sensor are superb.

Overall the feeling is one of street photography, but with space as the subject rather than people.  I am avoiding inclusion of people (except in a small number of cases) as I want the images to reflect the people through the space they occupy not there own appearance.

P40: coloured filters with black-and-white film

Once again I am approaching this project as an exercise in Digital processing, but this time actually taking the images to B&W.  In a former course, "The Art of Photography", I actually shot B&W using coloured filters but with a Digital camera. The effects were exactly as was suggested in the text.  Of course light is modified by the filter and whether the imaging place is film or silicon the affect is the same, but only if the white balance of the camera is established first for the scene without filter and then maintained at the same value for all shots.  My blog entry for this can be found at  

TAOP - Project 37

Having experimented successfully with filters and a digital camera, I felt it was more useful to approach this exercise from a fully digital stance, i.e. take existing images and exploring the processing options within my workflow tool, Lightroom.

The first shot was a dramatic sky shot in the Northern reaches of the Englischer Garten. The starting shot has been processed in Lightroom using my usual strong colour/contrast, becoming a bit of a habit or perhaps a visual style, who knows.

My next step was a straight conversion to B&W without any adjustments to the colour channels (in fact I took the default Lightroom conversion and reset all the colour channel adjustments to 0).  This produces a rather bland but acceptable image.

Next applying the yellow filter in software, the biggest affect is that the sky darkens and gains more contrast, but at the expense of also darkening the foliage at the bottom of the screen.

The red filter has a limited affect on the image, suggesting that the software implementation is not well tuned to the process

The Blue filter lightens the sky and darkens all else.

I did not find any of the software filters particularly satisfactory, they do not really emulate the affect of a "real" filter with B&W film.  Using a filter at the time of shooting also makes no real sense as all it does it reduce the amount of information in the resulting digital file, information that can be usefully exploited later in the process.  I finish with a conversion to my own taste, an image that looks very much more like a red filtered photo.  I have heavily reduced the blue channel whilst pushing the yellow channel to preserve the tree detail.

For the second photo, one with plenty of Green vegetation I have chosen a shot taken during the development of assignment 1 at the Olympic park.

No filter

Green filter

Red Filter

Once again the affect of the software filters is rather weak and unsatisfactory.  It is so much better to manipulate each colour channel directly.  I decided that I wanted a higher contrast image and so have pulled down the Yellow and Orange channels.  I left the green channel alone, for "Green" foliage the yellow channel has a higher impact as much of the luminosity of the leaves is a reflection of sunlight.

Finally I have dug into my holiday pics for a richly coloured sunset, this is from Gangga Island of the coast of North Sulawesi in Indonesia.  It is by far the most dramatic sunset I have ever seen.

No Filter

Blue Filter

Red Filter

With such strong primary colours in play the filters are having a far more dramatic affect than before.  The blue filter has made the image very dark as red was the dominant colour.  Conversely the red filter has brightened the image substantially.  Indeed the red and blue filtered images almost appear to be negatives of each other.  Once again by directly manipulating the colour channels I can arrive at a far more satisfying balance of tones within the image.

During the past 4 projects designed to build skills and familiarity in working with B&W film and printing I have taken a distinctly digital approach and in most cases actually considered the problem in colour rather than B&W.  I do work in B&W, indeed my second assignment was such, however the advent of digital means that many techniques from processing B&W film can now be applied to colour imagery.  These were useful exercises reinforcing skills I had already partially developed, but with some of the new learning I have been able to revisit portfolio shots and make some subtle but telling improvements using selective modifications to the tonality of regions of the photograph.  I suspect that any rewrite of the course will see changes to this section, however, it was very valuable even if I did change the rules once again.

Returning to the subject of this project, B&W filters.  Whilst they can be used with a digital camera, there is limited value in doing so and their use probably removes much needed processing latitude that can be applied later in the process.  The so called filter presets provided even in software as good as Lightroom also have a limited value.  Why emulate static effect when you have an almost infinitely adjustable toolset.  Digital B&W brings with it a far greater ability to place an images tonality wherever the artist wants it to be.  This can be overdone and purists religiously adhering to the zone system would disagree with anything I write here, however, the ability to adjust colour channels individually has brought B&W alive for me and provided me with a new form of graphical expression.

Given the benefits from Digital workflow to B&W expression the introduction of a digital camera that captures no colour information at all, the new and hideously expensive Leica monochrome, makes so little sense, I wonder what the point is.  OK digital is still faster than film, but if you want to abandon the post processing benefits why even bother to shoot Digital, a second hand film Leica will probably outperform the new digital model and has the benefit of being able to shoot different film types.  These can be emulated in processing, but only if the colour channels are present as the emulation requires information about colour as different films have different sensitivities to colour.  Perhaps a toy for the wealthy experimenter.

GAA in Munich

As I turn my thoughts towards my next course, most likely Social Documentary, I need to start engaging with the community around me and build some relationships that might develop into opportunities for prolonged projects.  One group is the Munich Gaelic Sports Club, the "Munich Colmcilles".  My long time friend and neighbour is a leading figure in the club and has invited me on a couple of occasions to photograph tournaments, a great chance to experiment with Sports photography, not something I do very often.

Recently an opportunity came up to promote the club and participate in a global GAA activity.  The brief was to take a photograph that juxtaposed the Gaelic players against the city they lived in.  A first glance this sounded quite easy, but it was not so.  The first challenge was getting enough people to show up and spend 2 hours on a hot Sunday afternoon being prodded into position in front of Munich's landmarks.  The second was, what landmarks?  Munich is a very attractive and historical city, but it has few significant landmarks that shout Munich.  The stadiums at the Olympic Park or the new football arena were possibles, but too far out of town and isolated. Having selected a few possible landmarks the further issue was to photograph the players in such a way that they were not too prominent, but equally not invisible at the bottom of the frame.

 The initial plan was to pose people in small groups in front of major landmarks.  The first is the town hall, nice photo, but not very informative

Another idea was to use the blue and white flag of Bavaria and the Lowenbrau brewery to contrast with the blue and white of the team uniform.  This one is better, but might create issues with the GAA as they are trying to downplay advertising of alcohol at games

This one is possibly even worse, but then again the Hofbrauhaus is the most famous Munich landmark.  The problem is that it is not terribly photogenic.

An alternate strategy was to have the guys actually do something with a ball.  The first of these is primarily interesting due to the tourist standing in the background, she must have been puzzled. 

This is the best of those we took, the two guys jumping for the ball frame the 3rd in the background and the ball is clearly visible in the sky.  It could be improved, the ball is too high in the hot, but given limited time and a group of people desperate to get to the beer garden this was not bad.

When we finally got to the beer garden we took the obligatory shot of the team in front of the Chinese Tower, the band stand for the beer garden.  

Was a fun day and nice to have couple of Mass glasses (1 litre) of beer afterwards.  I think with more planning and better direction of the people involved we could have done better.  I only found out an hour in advance that we were going to do this.  

Longer term it was good to support the club and Niall in particular.  They are a fun group and in need of promotion which I can support through photography.  In return I hope to be able to do some more candid work to document the people involved and how an Irish sport is finding recruits amongst the German population.  I have no expectations from this, it is simply good to support the club and get involved.

Back from Borneo

It is good to be back writing my blog.

May was only the second month since September 2009 that I did not post an update to one of my OCA blogs.  2 weeks traveling and then a couple of weeks extra time away from the OCA have recharged my batteries and renewed enthusiasm that was beginning to flag.  The OCA has transformed my life, providing an all consuming hobby and a sense of purpose outside of my career.  However, it is hard work, I have to keep reminding myself that I am studying for a degree not a simple correspondence course in Photographic technique.  I am doing as much or sometimes more work each week than I did when studying for my first degree in Mathematical Physics, granted I was a lazy git back then.  The big difference was that I had a 3 month break each year when in full time study, a luxury I no longer enjoy.  I have contemplated taking a break from the course for June-September, but the truth is I wouldn't know what to do with myself.  In the end a 1 month break was just the ticket and something I need to do once a year around my vacation.

Back to that vacation, how did it go and what did I achieve.  When I set out this year I was very conscious of wanting to apply artistic thought to my underwater photography, but at the same time try and kick back a little and enjoy the holiday.  In previous years I would spend 8 hours a day preparing for and completing 4 dives, then spend at least 2 hours downloading 300-400 frames to evaluate and edit.   This year I abandoned my laptop and took instead an image tank that connected to my iPad.  Instead of 4 dives we did 3 and typically shot 50 frames versus 100 per dive.  Downloading and a brief look took place in the bar over a chilled beer.  MUCH BETTER!

Another reason for taking fewer shots was that I spent far more time underwater thinking about what I wanted to shoot and how I was going to shoot it.  I went from being reactive to proactive.  This is nature photography, so chance played a large part, however, I still could predict from the dive site what I would encounter and prepare accordingly.  I had two overriding objectives, the first to portray the underwater environment as I see it and to place the animals I found in their environment.  Much underwater photography is highly stylistic and formulaic, photographers have adopted a small number of popular shot styles and then done them to death.  It is a little like an underwater camera club session, cliches abound. There are two current trends:

1. Use of a fisheye for wide angle, distorting reality, but allowing very close up shooting
2. Extreme macro, producing ever more detailed images of the strange animals that inhabit the reef.

Both have their place, but are being done to death.  I consciously tried to step away from this and do my own thing, not always successfully, but on the whole I am pretty happy with what I achieved.

My first goal was to capture the reef and the incredible beauty of Sipadan.  This is very much harder than it looks as the dynamic range of the scenes can be immense especially when the surface is present.  I balance this by using flash guns to provide some fill light, however, it is very easy to blow out the highlights.  The challenge is a maximum sync speed on the flash of 1/250s.  Typically I shoot in Aperture priority, however, when including the surface I had to move to Shutter Speed priority which risked a very small aperture and then losing the flash - I could go on, it is hard to do, but when it works...

Another priority this time was to portray the act of diving

Turning to the animals I encountered, their environment was key, I wanted the viewer to have a sense of where they lived and the threat they faced.  This is not always so easy, most of the following shots use a 60mm macro lens, which does not have a terribly large field of view when shooting at 50cm from the subject (pretty much the maximum effective working distance for the strobes in water).  A further challenge is that I wanted the world to look real, which meant blue backgrounds, i.e. what you expect to see underwater.  This means a wide aperture, much beyond f/8 and the background would render nearly black, precisely the type of stylized imagery I wanted to avoid.  Again keeping the shutter speed below 1/250s became a challenge, but with a macro lens a much more workable one.  Low apertures bring other problems such as making focus far more critical and also the flashes illuminate more of the water and also the crap that is in the water. Thank goodness for the spot removal tool, tedious but essential.

Having said that close up was not my thing, I could not resist a few goes at portrait shots:

On the whole I feel I met my brief and have around 150 good images that now need to slim down to around 100 shots that will become part of the book of the trip.  One reason all of the aspect ratios are the same in this post is that I plan a very strict format for the book retaining a horizontal 3:2 aspect ratio for the included photographs...