Photography Assistant Wanted Oxfordshire

Photography Assistant

Company: Mark Brome Photographer

Description: Hi, I am looking for an assistant to help out on a location promo shoot for a theatre company in Oxford on the 30th Jan 2011 as my regular assistant is away on holiday. Around 5-6 hours work for £100 fee. Would suit a photography student looking for some hands on experience of a hectic location shoot. A love of imaging, fantastic with people and their egos, and knows their way around a camera is more important than experience. Email only please and tell me why you would like to be considered.

County/Area: Oxfordshire

Contact: Mark Brome
Website: www.markbrome.com

Date Posted: 22/December/2010

The ecstasy of street photography

“Some feel that street photography robs people’s privacy, but to me the thrill of the hunt felt more like creation than theft” From The Guardian

Street Photography Now Project is a collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery, London and Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren, authors of Street Photography Now (Thames and Hudson).

Each week from 1 October 2010, a leading contemporary street photographer will issue a new instruction, written to inspire fresh ways of looking at and documenting the world we live in.

Over the following six days, photographers around the world are invited to upload one photograph in response, to a special Flickr Group. After six days the next instruction will be issued. See the Take Part section of this website for more details on how to contribute.

Many people hold the great French photographers, Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau or Ronis as the ideal of street photographers

Willy Ronis

Robert Doisneau

via The ecstasy of street photography | Sarah Bakewell | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

The last darkrooms

“Richard Nicholson spent three years photographing commercial photographic darkrooms in London. When he began his project in 2006, there were more than 200 thriving darkrooms dotted around the city; when he completed it in 2009, there were 12.”

The Photographers Workshop was one of the very first darkroom and studio hire centres to open in Britain. We established in 1982 and for about 20 years everything stayed the same and was simple. Then the change came and as we had to leave our beautiful old building in St Marys Road Oxford because of property developers we downsized to smaller darkrooms in a new home in Cave Street Oxford. As the use of our darkrooms reduced we increased our use of digital and then when property developers again moved us on we found our new home in Collins Street Oxford but had no space or need of darkrooms.Now as you will be aware we concentrate on our commercial photography and teaching.

In some ways it is sad that there has been such a loss of demand for film based image making but I think that digital is just another development in the history of photography. We have seen continual changes to equipment and processes throughout the life of photography and although I don’t refute the values of film it will eventually only have the nostalgia value of any of the old photographic processes mostly followed by those who admire and craft of image making. This article includes an interesting interview with Brian Dowling of BDI in London. He argues with great persuasion about the performance that is part of making a print in a darkroom.

“Making a complex print in the darkroom is physical activity and it is often accompanied by a burst of adrenaline as the printer races against the clock,” says Nicholson. “With digital, there is post-production interpretation, but it can’t be called a ‘performance’. Photoshop work is non-linear and is not time-restricted. And, once that work is done, each print is identical.”

 

 

 

 

Analog – review | Art and design | The Observer.

Lomo Look

A while ago there was a great interest in poorly engineered Russian cameras that gave distortions in terms of colour and sharpness to the images it produced. The Lomo camera became a short lived star towards the end of the film era and the main factor affecting the way it produced images was the plastic quality of the lens. Even today there are many websites that laud Lomo images, there are fans and followers of things Lomo. In recent years the company was bought to save it from extinction and of the basis of the cult of Lomo has had significant success in many ways including introducing a range of film based cameras that could take multiple images at the same time.

 

The Lomo look is coveted by some digital users and there are many tutorials on how to get the Lomo look. As the choice of film and processing had a great impact on the way that the image looked it is less to do with the camera than the process so there may be many different Lomo like tutorials. These two are a before and after on one type of photoshop conversion and here is a YouTube vid tutorial on how to achieve the result.

Bruce Elder, journalist, Sydney Morning Herald

What do you think? Is this a technique that might freshen up some of your images? Let me know if this tutorial is useful and the sort of thing you want brought to you via this blog.