Field of View

Field of view refers to the angle of the image seen by the lens. A standard lens is meant to give around the same field of view as the human eye. Field of view is tightly related to focal length.

Focal length determines how much the lens alters the scene in terms of angle of view and magnification. Lower number focal lengths (such as 28mm) show a wider view, while higher number focal lengths (such as 300mm) magnify to parts of the scene.

 

 



 

Wide angle lens

 

 

Lenses with a low number focal length are called wide angle lenses, because they show a wide angle of view of the scene in front of you. They have a shorter focal length than a standard lens. They distort the image by pushing the distance away and increasing the amount of foreground. They also make closer objects seem much bigger than those in the background.

Wide angle lenses are useful for shooting interior spaces to give more depth to the image.

 

 

Standard lens

 

Standard lenses give a natural looking image that resembles what the human eye sees. They are best used when an accurate representation of a subject is needed.

 

 

Telephoto lens

 

Telephoto lenses compress the perspective and bring the distance a lot closer. They allow you to select a small section to photograph. Sports photographers and paparazzi swear by them!

 

 

 

 

 

Brief 1 - Photographers - Jorma Puranen

Jorma Puranen is a Finnish photographer. His most well known projects include 'Shadows, Reflections and All That Sort of Thing' and 'Icy Prospects'. I have had a look at images from both these projects and I am very much drawn to the latter.

His inspiration behind Icy Prospects came from reading histories of Polar expeditions and watching tourists in North Norway.

He said; 'For fifteen years I have been engaged in landscape projects in which I have prevented direct admiration of the landscape by putting something in between the viewer and the subject: transparent portraits, phrases in Latin, flags. They have served as obstacles of a kind, denying any admiration of Arctic landscapes as such. In Icy Prospects, the possibility of direct viewing is completely denied. What we see now is a mere reflection of the landscape/seascape'.

 To create the images for Icy Prospects, Puranen painted a wooden board with black, high-gloss acrylic and then took long exposures of the landscapes mirrored in its surface. The results are extremely painterly. I absolutely love them! I love how the brush strokes of the black paint and the reflections of the landscapes merge together creating a very painterly impression of nature.

I love these images of his below aswell.... I'm not sure what he has used but it looks like some sort of semi transparent material that the shadows of flowers and leaves have cast onto with the sunlight.






Looking at Puranen's work gives me so much inspiration. I really like how photographs of reflections can look like paintings and have that surreal, dream-like effect. I used to paint so can really appreciate these images. I find them so interesting. I think for my project, I will aim to create images that almost look like abstract paintings. I might experiment with using material between the camera and the subject to create these kind of effects. 

White Balance

All light sources give off different colour temperatures of light. White balance is a useful function on a digital camera because it acts as a digital filter to counteract the effects of colour casts.

All digital cameras have an auto white balance (AWB) setting which works by making the brightest element in the image white and then using that as a point of reference, adjusting all the other hues to create true to life colour. However, if there's no 'white' reference point, or the scene is dominated by one particular colour, the camera's AWB setting can be tricked into making the wrong decision. To counteract this, the digital camera also has a number of preset white balance modes; tungsten, fluorescent, daylight, cloudy, shade and flash.  

 

 These modes use a fixed temperature common to the specific light conditions and will usually produce more accurate colours that when using AWB.

There is also a custom white balance setting. With this setting, you take a shot of a white card under the light conditions you are in and the camera will record this as white. Then, it will use thats setting for all shots! Clever!

Some cameras will even allow you to input the exact Kelvin setting if you know the colour temperature of the light source being used.

If an image appears too warm or red, selecting a higher temperature setting such as 'daylight' or 'cloudy' and taking the picture again should give more accurate colours. Similarly, if the image appears to cool or blue,selecting a lower temperature setting will warm the image.

Here are some images I took to demonstrate the effects of the different white balance modes...

White fluorescent light

 Tungsten light

Cloudy

Shade

Daylight

Shutter Speed - Photographers - Bob Martin

Bob Martin is a British sports photographer who covers all sporting events. Sports photography has to be mentioned in this assignment because shutter speed is so important when photographing movement and there is lots of movement in sport!! Very fast shutter speeds are used in sports photography because the photographer will want to freeze the sports man or woman in movement. Sports photographers use a shutter speed of around 1/1000 of a second to freeze the motion and capture the action.

 

 

In the above photograph, it appears that Martin has used a slower shutter speed of maybe 1/80 of a second and he has panned along with the cyclist as he presses the shutter button. This creates a blur effect of the audience in the background but the clyclist is sharp, capturing the movement of the cyclist.

 

 

 

 

Shutter speed - Xavier Rey

 

 

I came across this self-taught, French photographer and it became clear in his work that he uses long exposures, so he is a perfect photographer to demonstrate shutter speed.  

 

The long shutter speed creates a dream-like effect in his images in my opinion. I think they evoke a feeling of relaxation and peace and time passing by. The clouds and the water look soft and blurred as a lot of movement has happened during the exposure but the still objects are clear and sharp because they have stayed static during the exposure. The blur of the water and clouds and things around, really isolate the still objects in the photographs.

 

He makes black and white photographs in square format and i think this works really well for his style and composition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shutter speed - Motion Blur & Abstract imagery

 

Last night I found a place to park my car by a busy road so I could experiment more with slow shutter speeds. The car lights, traffic lights and street lights were ideal for having a play around.

 

This was a bus going past. You really get that sense of movement in this image like it is zooming past. This was shot with a shutter speed of 6 seconds.

 

I could have improved this by using a tripod. Because of the long shutter speed (10sec), there is lots of camera shake. The pub and trees and everything in the background are blurry. If I'd have had a tripod, they would have been clear and the movement of the car would have been more effective.

 

These next few images are quite abstract, as I experimented with slow shutter speeds whilst moving the camera and zooming the lens.

 

With this one, I was moving my camera during the exposure, giving a real abstract image.  

10 sec

 

With this one I used a 13 sec shutter speed and zoomed the lense during exposure.

13 secs. I like that the road isn't totally clear on this one. I think it gives quite a hazey, dreamy feel to it. It feels a little bit like I was the one moving on the road on this one.

 

    6 sec.

  I noticed reflections in my car window. Again, i moved my camera during exposure.

6 sec

 

                                                                             6 sec

   Street light waves

 

 

6 sec

 

 

                                                                             4 sec

 This was a tree with fairylights on. Zoom during exposure.


Here are some images taken in the daytime, showing motion blur.

For this image (below), I put my camera on a wall and used a remote control shutter release to prevent camera shake. This meant that everything that was still, looks clear in the picture, but anything that is moving, looks blurred and you can see the motion.

 

 

 

 

Shutter Speed - Motion Blur

As well as aperture, shutter speed is another factor that controls the amount of light that reaches the camera's sensor. The faster the shutter, the less light reaches the sensor and, the slower the shutter, the more light reaches the sensor.

Shutter speeds are measured in fractions of a second or in whole seconds. A typical digital camera may have the following shutter speeds: 1/1000sec, 1/500sec, 1/250sec, 1/125sec, 1/60sec, 1/30sec, 1/15sec, 1/8sec, 1/4sec, 1/2sec, 1sec, 2sec, 4sec, 8sec, 15sec and 30sec.
Changing the shutter speed by +/- 1 increment changes the exposure value by 1 stop. By going up or down a stop, it will double or half the amount of light that reaches the sensor.  

As well as affecting exposure, the shutter speed can freeze a moving object as a sharp image and reduce camera shake. It can also do the opposite and capture movement in an image. For example, if you chose to photograph a car or a runner moving across a chosen viewpoint, you would need to select a shutter speed of 1/250sec or more in order for the moving object to appear clear and frozen in action on the photograph. Fast shutter speeds are often used in sports photography. If you were to select a shutter speed of 1/60sec or less, the moving object would appear blurred on the photograph. Slower shutter speeds would be used for more creative and abstract effects. 

So......the shutter speed plays a role in determining how an image will look. Depending on what you want to achieve in your images, you need to set the shutter speed and aperture accordingly. For example, the lack of a tripod in low-light conditions may well need a fast shutter speed of 1/125sec to reduce camera shake. Such a fast shutter speed in low-light will need a wide aperture to allow more light to reach the sensor and the wider the aperture, the shallower the depth of field.


Here are some images experimenting with slow shutter speed. I used a shutter speed of 6 seconds. I got my sister to do some 'lighht drawing'....

 
                                                          

 

 

 

Topography and Typology

In today's class with Richard we were introduced to the genre of Topography. Topography is the study of surface, shape and geometric forms. At first, when he showed us some of the work of photographer's that specialised in this genre, I wasn't too keen but it was interesting to learn about.  Many people think that Topography is banal, dull, cold, clinical and emotionless which I do agree with to a certain extent. I am more drawn to photography that is beautiful and about the aesthetics rather than just geometric observations.

 

(all above by Donovan Wylie)

 

One husband and wife team of German photographers who had a huge part in Topography was Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, both born in the 1930s. The couple were heavily devoted to the 1920s German art movement of Neue Sachlichkeit or new objectivity. They photographed an extensive series of topographies which focused on German industrial landscapes, architecture and structures. Subjects included mining sites, cooling towers, blast furnaces and gas tanks. They photographed all the structures straight on and from a height that gave a neutral vantage point to emphasize the impersonal aesthetics of the buildings, reducing the potential for politicizing them. They created a catalog of types of structures which they referred to as 'typology'. The images of the different types where organised and displayed in large grids.



Becher, Gastanks


The Becher's taught 'New Objectivity' photography at the Dusseldorf school which has promted an article by Grant Scott headlined 'Has the Dusseldorf School killed photography?'. In this article, Scott comments on how the Bechers and 'the disciples of the Dusseldorf school', gave the stamp of approval on a kind of work that is 'easy to do'. He believes that new photographers will look at this work and be influenced to take the easy option and stick to the comfort zone. He says 'These are photographers who have given no thought to how they are going to make a living from their photography or who they are going to work for. They are documenting for the sake of documenting'.




Becher

For me, it was good to read this article because now I know that I'm not the only one with this opinion!! Although, I do find typology quite interesting the more I look at it..........I don't know, I think I have mixed feelings about it now. Maybe I just don't have an interest in what the Bechers chose to photograph and because they didn't aim to produce beautiful images.

We looked at the works of Donovan Wylie (images at the top of this post), an Irish photographer who became the youngest ever member of Magnum Photos at the age of 26. At first, i wasn't blown away by it, however, the more we spoke about it and after watching some youtube clips of him, I became more interested as he really went into detail as to why he was photographing these things and he was really passionate about it whereas Becher's work to me, seems quite regemented and thoughtless. Wylie concentrates on the architecture of conflict. Some of his well known works include The Maze prison on Northern Ireland and British and Afghanistan watchtowers. 

After learning about topography and typology, Richard set us the task of creating our own typologies. You could definately have fun in choosing what types of things to photograph as some things can be really interesting to look at and actually tell a story or get you thinking, unlike Becher's works. I chose to photograph different types of leaves. I'm quite happy with the end result because I chose subjects that are colourful and warm and it is something that I could put up on my wall as I find it aesthetically pleasing but i certainly wouldn't have chosen a series of gas tanks!!

Here is is......

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brief 1 - Photographers - Rut Blees Luxemburg

Rut Blees Luxemburg is a German photographer who mainly explores urban landscapes and public spaces at night time. She uses long exposures which allows her to use the light from the street only; such as street lights and lights from office blocks for example. 

 

 

 I really love these images because she looks at things that a passer by would usually ignore, for example the relflections in puddles on the road or path. The green and yellow tones in her work really lend that urban, street kind of feel because they are all lit by the light provided by the street. I like that she shoots at night because it shows another side of the street that is quiet, peaceful and serene. I think you can really tell her work apart from others which is a hard thing to do in photography!  

 

Like Saul Leiter, this work is classed as location photography because it is a public environment with obviously no studio lighting or equipment.  

 

During my experimental shoot for this brief, i tried the idea of shooting the relfections in puddles. However, mine are different because I did it in daylight and in a rural environment.

Brief 1 - Photographers - Saul Leiter

Saul Leiter is an American photographer who started out in fashion photography, but then became known for his street photography mostly shot in New York and Paris. He also used to be a painter. One art critic said: "His painter's instincts served him well in his emphasis on surface, spatial ambiguity and a lush, carefully calibrated palette".

Here are some of my favourites of his work...

  

 

 

I like the way he captures those in-between moments and looks at the world in a different way. Some of his work is very abstract and artistic. He looks at reflections and rain on windows in the street which create a really interesting image.

 

I also like the colour and the feel it gives in his work. I read an interview he did and he was asked how would he characterize the emotional tone of his colour work, where he replied: "I must confess that I have never devoted five seconds to thinking about the tone of my color work". He just has a natural eye for it!

 

Leiter's work is categorised as location photography because no matter what in particular he choses to photograph, the images are shot in the street using the available lighting. He captures people in the street, reflections in the street, abstract images in the street, and so on...

 

I think I will take the aspect of reflections and maybe people for my exterior brief but focusing more in a natural, rural environment rather than urban.