insights into photography
30th April is the anniversary of the fall of Saigon, The Associated Press is recognizing the significance of the Vietnam War with an extraordinary photo exhibit in London. “Vietnam: The Real War, A Photographic History by The Associated Press” will open April 8 at the Guardian News and Media’s gallery at its Kings Cross headquarters.
The BBC seems to be upping it’s game in relation to photography, everyday there is a new article or feature and unlike most publications you rarely see a sunset or pictures of ducks. Today they have a series of pictures by Associated Press photographers from the Vietnam War, here is a link to the full article
Nearly 60,000 US soldiers died in Vietnam, with more than 300,000 injured. For the Vietnamese, though, the figures were far higher, with estimates of more than half a million killed and many millions wounded.
While in Saigon, Faas trained and mentored young Vietnamese photographers who made many of the war’s defining images. Their daily photos from Vietnam helped inform the world of the traumas faced by people caught in the cross-fire of conflict.
From a journalist’s perspective the war in Vietnam was unique. It was the first war in modern times without censorship, where reporters and photographers were allowed virtually unrestricted access to the battlefields.
Another was Nick Ut’s picture of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc – a young girl, running naked and terrified down the road after a napalm attack – which became one of the iconic images of the entire conflict.
During the conflict, AP’s Saigon bureau won six Pulitzer Prizes for its war coverage, four of them for photography.
See the rest of these powerful images here
Here is more from AP Explore The Real War
Our school gets at least one message a week from cheapskates who want us to recommend students to undertake photography work for free because it will be good experience for them, get them exposure and improve their portfolio. Yeah right and paying the bills?
A change in the law will allow photographers to pay rent on their homes & studios with ‘exposure’ instead of money. They will also be able to buy coffee, shampoo and other essentials, by mentioning to the checkout assistant that they did a big job last week for nothing, and are hoping it will bring them some paying clients.
Landlords and supermarkets are protesting this move, on the grounds that “Well what the hell am I supposed to do with ‘exposure’? I can’t pay my bills with fresh bloody air! Why can’t you just give me money like every bugger else?”
The controversial new change will allow photographers to pay for their homes and studios by doing freebies for people want pictures of their spoiled daughter at her expensive Sweet Sixteen party, pictures of their hair-brained new business idea, or a range of merchandise they plan to sell on EBay.
View original post 300 more words
We featured Huang Qingjun a little while ago with his series of earlier photographs of people with all their possessions showed the social changes that have taken place in China. “People’s lives have changed enormously,” he told the Magazine in 2012. “Maybe their incomes haven’t been affected as much as in the cities, but their thinking has.”
Now he has moved up a gear and as we learn from the BBC photographs the things people have bought on line
Liu Jun and his family have lived as nomadic herders for generations – he settled in a town but still lives in his yurt every spring and autumn. When he’s on the grasslands he shops online, waiting five days for orders to arrive at a nearby outpost.
Photographer Huang Qingjun is famous in China for his photo series, Family Stuff. Since 2003 he has been asking subjects to pose with everything they own, neatly displayed in front of their homes.
Huang has eyes that crinkle at the sides when he smiles. It’s a friendly face, and a huge asset when he asks people to do things that you might expect would result in a flat refusal.
“I look for people from all corners of China to showcase what they have. It’s a transparent and interesting way to look into people’s lives,” Huang explains.
“People usually only invite good friends to their homes, because it’s a private space, but my pictures show what people possess. They satisfy our natural curiosity.
Huang’s new project is based on a similar idea – this time, he asked people to display everything they’ve ever bought online. The results are a testament to the overwhelming popularity of online shopping, particularly China’s most popular internet shopping platform, Taobao.
“Taobao saw my Family Stuff project, and asked if I wanted to do a special series looking at online shopping,” Huang says. “I agreed to do the project, but I had a few of my own ideas in mind. I wanted to find people from all directions: east, west, south and north.”
This 28 year old woman in Beijing received some of her Taobao items as wedding gifts last year, including her favourite item, the mirror adorned with a decorative bird.
More than half of China’s 1.4bn population can access the internet via a broadband connection. Many also have access to mobile internet and can shop online using their smartphones.
Internet sales rose 49.7% last year, according to Chinese government statistics, in comparison to a 12% rise in all retail sales across the country.
For people living in remote areas, internet shopping is a lifeline to the outside world – a way to access a host of products that would never be seen where they live. In some of China’s more inaccessible places, delivery crews must sometimes abandon their vans to drop off packages on foot.
Wang Jafeng runs a youth hostel near China’s border with Mongolia and has spent more than $35,000 (£22,800) online. He says internet shopping is a “big joy” in his life.
When he was four, Gyatsoling Rinpoche was deemed a reincarnation of a Living Buddha. Now 25, he graduated from the Tibet Medical College and works at the Buddhist Research Institute in Chandu, Tibet. He finds religious items, including yak butter lamps and candles, are cheaper online than in local stores.
A recent film school graduate in Beijing, 26-year-old Li Nian has been a model plane enthusiast since he was a small boy and now runs an aerial photography studio. He designs some of the equipment he needs and finds people online to build it.
Here is a link to the BBC article
And here is the link to Huang Qingjun’s website
I would say an L Series lens from Canon is a pro lens and hardly mid-range and given that all of these are getting close to a grand these would be a serious purchase. Last year I bought the Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L IS USM and have been extremely pleased with it. I decided the additional size and weight of the f2.8 was something I could do without, after all one stop of ISO is hardly a deal breaker although if we were still shooting film I would have gone for the f2.8. In a similar vein I have just bought a Canon 6D. This is a full frame camera and a couple of megapixels smaller than the 5DMk3. I chose it because it is smaller and lighter but with really excellent low light focussing and ISO results. Since having it I prefer it to my 5DMk2, the shutter is so quiet and it fits the hand beautifully. If you are looking for a full frame Canon don’t be seduced by the rather spurious advantages of the Mk3 and have a good look at the 6D
If you’re looking for an upgrade to your ‘budget’ telephoto but can’t stretch to a fully professional lens, there are some smart mid-range options to be had. We test 8 top optics to find out which is the best telephoto lens for your money. On test are:
Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L IS USM, £965
Nikon AF-S 70-200mm f/4G ED VR, £950
Panasonic G X 35-100mm f/2.8 Power OIS, £895
Pentax DA* 200mm f/2.8 ED IF SDM, £745
Sigma APO 70-200mm f/2.8 EX DG OS HSM, £800
Sigma APO Macro 180mm f/2.8 EX DG OS HSM, £1,300
Sony FE 70-200mm f/4 G OSS, £1,250
Tamron SP 70-200mm f/2.8 Di VC USD, £1,100
With prices ranging from abut £100 to £400, budget 70-300mm lenses can be a movable feast, especially in terms of physical length and aperture.
Indeed, as you move through the zoom range, these lenses stretch considerably in length, while the widest available aperture tends to shrink from f/4 to a fairly narrow f/5.6.
To keep shutter speeds fairly fast for minimizing camera-shake and motion blur, you can often find yourself having to combine the longest zoom setting with the widest aperture, which can really degrade image sharpness.
At the other end of the scale, fully professional telephoto zooms like the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS II USM, Nikon AF-S 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II and Sony 70-200mm f/2.8 G SSM II are much more refined.
The relatively wide f/2.8 aperture remains available throughout the zoom range, and the physical dimensions of the lenses remain fixed at all zoom and focus settings.
However, they can be heavyweights in two undesirable ways. Hefty price tags of nearly £2,000 for the Canon and £2,500 for the Sony put them beyond the reach of many photographers who aren’t taking pictures for a living.
Secondly, with their large front elements to enable an f/2.8 aperture, they have a big, heavy build, typically weighing in at around 1.5kg.
A popular compromise is to opt for a 70-200mm f/4 telephoto zoom, usually costing less than £1,000. These lenses are more compact, lighter in weight, yet still tend to have robust build quality and premium quality glass.
They also boast a constant-aperture design, albeit at one f/stop narrower than their f/2.8 counterparts. That’s less of a problem than it used to be.
The latest SLRs usually deliver excellent image quality at raised ISO settings, putting less of a priority on ‘fast glass’. You can also get a tight depth of field when shooting at 200mm at f/4. READ THE FULL REPORT HERE
An amateur photographer has been scooping the international media with his photographs from the front lines of protests and riots in Baltimore.
The death of a black man fatally injured in police custody has sparked bothpeaceful protests and violent riots in Baltimore. Twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray died on 19 April – there’s more about what we know of his case here. The disturbances prompted the governor of the state of Maryland to declare a state of emergency in the city. A week-long curfew has been announced and as many as 5,000 National Guard troops could be deployed.
Hashtags such as #BaltimoreRiots and #BlackLivesMatter trended this week, but one of the most-shared pictures wasn’t taken by a local newspaper or by one of the legions of photojournalists based in Washington, just an hour away. Instead this photo by 26-year-old Baltimore native Devin Allen, has been retweeted more than 5,000 times:
‘I’m for the protesters but against the rioters,’ Allen says. Underneath this photo of a white protester he wrote: ‘He stood on the front lines with us and got pepper sprayed….a brother saw his pain and came to his aid with milk ::::: Deeper than skin and if you stand with us your my brother and or sister idc [I don’t care] what color you are’
Our Travel Photography course is stuffed full of advice, ideas and ways of improving your holiday snaps, so just 7 seems a bit mean. However all advice can be taken and used or discarded and the 7 points made here are all points we make too.
When traveling there are things that are not in your control, especially if photography is one of the main reasons you are traveling. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there is nothing to be done. Here are 7 things to keep in mind when doing travel photography. See the magnificent 7 here
Here is the synopsis of our Travel Photography Course
We have re-written this course to concentrate on the practicalities and desires of photographic travellers. The course will help you to think about why you want to take pictures when you are on holiday and how you are going to get the very best out of each situation. Whether you are enjoying a weekend city-break, a cultural holiday, a couple of weeks at the beach or trekking in remote areas, travel offers some of the most exciting opportunities for taking great pictures.
This course aims to help you make the most of those opportunities. Subject areas covered include: how to photograph city scenes, landscapes, buildings, monuments, people and wildlife. We’ll look at great images by top photographers and consider practical advice to help you make pictures that stand out from the crowd and which capture the essence of your destination.
We will consider the practicalities of travelling with your camera: what sort of accessories you might want to take with you, tips on safety and keeping your equipment working properly together with the need to be sensitive to local cultures and laws.
It is your cameras job to meter for you, right? Well every camera or phone has to measure the light reflected back from the subject so that it can get the balance of aperture and shutter correctly set, given that this is essential to taking perfectly exposed images it is surprising how few photographers fully understand the process. We teach about metering on our Understanding Your Digital Camera Course but a bit of follow up in the guise of this tutorial will help
Even for experienced photographers, metering and how to take an exposure reading on your camera can be confusing, but the basics are easy to get to grips with…
All digital cameras have a built-in light meter which is used to calculate the exposure settings for a given scene.
Without getting bogged down in aperture and shutter speed, the most important thing to realise is that built-in light meters are programmed to expose every image as an average mid-tone.
This is fine for most scenes, because they contain a mix of shadows, mid-tones and highlights that average out to a mid-tone.
But the meter will also expose very light subjects (such as snow) or very dark subjects (such as black card) as a mid-tone, so you need to be aware of this to avoid poorly-exposed images.
On our Understanding Your DSLR Camera course we explain all of these things so it is good to find them in one place and available for all those poor people who don’t live in Oxford and so can’t attend our courses. This comes from Digital Camera World
Digital SLR cameras are the preferred tool of most professional photographers and they’re the first choice of camera for enthusiast photographers for decades, but what is a digital SLR, how do they work and why are they so popular? Our head of testing, Angela Nicholson explains all you need to know.
The name single lens reflex camera seems rather odd today, but there was a time when twin lens reflex (TLR) cameras were very popular – there are still one or two models on sale today.
The two lenses of an TLR have the same focal length and their focusing mechanisms are linked, but they are used for two different tasks.
The ‘viewing lens’ is used for focusing while the photographer looks in the waist-level viewfinder, while the ‘taking lens’ sits in front of the film, ready for exposure in a separate chamber.
The word ‘reflex’ in the name stems from the fact that TLR and SLR cameras have a reflex mirror, essentially a mirror at 45 degrees, that reflects light from the lens into the viewfinder.
In a TLR the mirror is fixed and the scene is visible in the viewfinder throughout the exposure.
In a digital SLR camera, however, the mirror flips up during exposure to allow the light to reach the film or sensor, this blanks out the viewfinder for the duration of the exposure.
The last remaining camera shop in Oxfordshire is to host the Canon Roadshow. This is an event with limited places so if you are interested you need to register and book with those nice people over at T4.
The event is on Tuesday 26th May 2015, there are 2 sessions, morning and afternoon
To register call T4 on 01993-702687. Their address is 50 High Street, Witney, Oxfordshire, OX28 6HQ
Also their shop in Swindon has a special day coming up
The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2015 is an annual prize established by The Photographers’ Gallery, London in 1996 and in partnership with Deutsche Börse Groupsince 2005. The annual award of £30,000 rewards a living photographer, of any nationality, for a specific body of work in an exhibition or publication format, which is felt to have significantly contributed to photography in Europe between 1 October 2013 and 30 September 2015.
This year’s shortlist reflects a diversity of attitudes towards the medium underpinned by an exploration into new and unexpected modes of presentation incorporating video, text, object and wall-based photographic displays.
Nikolai Bakharev’s ambiguous images of Russian bathers on public beaches in the 80s and 90s, at a time when photographs of nudity were forbidden, play on the tension between acceptable and unacceptable imagery, public and private realms. In the work of Zanele Muholi, the personal and political are also interwoven in her tender, unflinching portraits and testimonies of the South African LGBTI community.
South Africa further provides a location and point of political departure in the work of Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse. Their collaborative publication presents a, ‘photo/graphic’ album of images and text which uncover the history of a once elite, now abandoned high-rise apartment block in Johannesburg. Finally, Viviane Sassen’s sculptural, abstracted, darkly sensual images continue to effect the blurring of genres, which characterize her work and position her as a leading force in contemporary art photography.
Viviane Sassen (b. 1972, Netherlands) has been nominated for her exhibition Umbra at Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam (8 March – 1 June 2014).
Encompassing abstract photography, drawings, light installations the work is accompanied by specially commissioned poems from artist and poet, Maria Barnas. Sassen’s distinctive and experimental approach to image foregrounds vivid colour alongside stark contrasts of light and shade in sculptural compositions where form and content verge on abstraction.
Mikhael Subotzky (b. 1981, South Africa) and Patrick Waterhouse (b. 1981, UK) are nomimated for their publication Ponte City (Steidl, 2014).
The 54-floor apartment block in Johannesburg was built in 1976 for white sophisticates under the apartheid regime. During the political transition in the 1980s and 90s, it became a refuge for black newcomers to the city and immigrants from all over Africa before decline and neglect led to it being positioned as the prime symbol of urban decay in the city and the supposed epicentre of crime, prostitution and drug dealing.
Nikolai Bakharev (b. 1946, Russia) has been nominated for his exhibition at the 55th Biennale of Art in Venice (1 June – 24 November 2013).
Bakharev trained as a mechanic before working as a Communal Services Factory photographer in the 1960s. Bakharev’s portraits of bathers on Russian public beaches blur the boundaries between the public and private and set up a tension between composed and spontaneous groupings.
Zanele Muholi (b. 1972, South Africa) has been nominated for her publication Faces and Phases 2006 – 2014 (Steidl, 2014).
A self-titled visual activist, Zanele Muholi’s black and white portraits offer an insight into black LGBTI identity and politics in post-apartheid South Africa.
Emphasising a conceptual and personal approach, the uncompromising images and accompanying first-person testimonies reflect the impact of homophobia, discrimination and violence, most notably the ‘curative’ rape of black gay women, which often results in murder. Muholi’s archive of photographs forms an important force in female gay activism.
Oxford School of Photography 