William Eggleston Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery

Time Out reviews the William Eggleston Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery until 23rd October 2016

©William Eggleston

Legendary Memphis photographer William Eggleston has created a whole genre of psychologically ambiguous Americana, much of it centred on apparently mundane bits of his home town. I expected that isolating his portraits from the rest of his work wouldn’t work. How would they fare, without all those existential landscapes and unanswered questions to problematise them? In fact, this show really makes you realise all over again this man’s extraordinary genius and oddness.

Two photos in this show, both from the early 1970s, really nail the whole Eggleston thing. The first is a tiny photobooth black-and-white self-portrait. In it, Eggleston seems remote: a fine-boned, bespectacled, Mahleresque face, a foppish college scarf, one of those monied, long-all-over haircuts. The second is a photo of his friend, weirdo Memphis dentist TC Boring. Boring is in the house in which he would later be murdered and incinerated. He is standing naked in a moment of reflection. The bedroom is blood red, with ‘God’ and ‘Tally Ho!’ sprayed on the wall. The colour hums, as though the print itself were struggling to keep Boring alive: it’s terrible, hilarious, disturbing and uncontrived, all at the same time. How did that man take this photo?

It’s one thing to imply alienation and dread with a grim motel room or a deserted parking lot. It’s quite another to manage to do so – as Eggleston does here – in a picture of your nephew sitting at home in an armchair. A portrait of the dead blues musician Fred McDowell in his casket is way less troubling than a shot of Eggleston’s wife taking a nap on a bed in front of a buzzing untuned TV and a sinister open closet. Time and again, Eggleston shows us that a picture of a person is never a simple thing.

This is not a big show, for a man who is supposed to have taken more than a million photographs, but I could spend a week in it, happily. Or a year. You have to see Eggleston’s work edited in this way. And you have to see his photos in the flesh (including Mr Boring’s knob). If I could give it six stars, I would.

BY: CHRIS WAYWELL

©William Eggleston

©William Eggleston

National Portrait Gallery St Martin’s Place London WC2H 0HE 020 7306 0055 Contact us Opening hours Daily 10.00 – 18.00 Thursdays and Fridays until 21.00. Last admission to the exhibition is one hour before the Gallery closes. Exiting commences ten minutes before the closing time.

Visualize for Black and White While You Shoot

The very best black and white results are achieved by shooting RAW and converting to monochrome in Photoshop but to see your bw image on your camera monitor you have to set the camera up to show bw but record in RAW. This short tutorial explains how…

Paul Fowler, Black & White Digital photography course OSP

Jay Tomasso Black and White Digital course OSP

 

Top Ten Tips for Posing Couples

If you are an aspiring wedding photographer or just like taking pictures of couples this article could be valuable to you, it talks a bit of sense and of course a bit of dogma but is well worth the read. You might also think about our Portrait course which spends time talking about posing and making your subjects feel comfortable so that you get the best images.

Top Ten Tips for Posing | Professional Photography Blog | Pictage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

24 Blue Hour Photographs for Inspiration

From those nice people at LightStalking The blue hour is that beautiful period of time that isn’t quite day time and isn’t quite night time. The quality of light thrown off is an absolute gift for photographers who can really use that quality of light to produce special colors in photography. It’s had enough of an impact on the general public for at least on restaurant in every city to be called L’Heure Bleue too. This collection should show you why it’s such an inspiration to people.

dreams part 2

These are really great, by Michal Giedrojc from Poland, they will make you wonder and ask why, from his photographyserved page

Series of portraits –photo montage where author puts people in unreal places. Situation presented in photographs have never happened and were only created by imagination and dreams. Person is isolated from reality with the imaginary world around him. The author freely transposes a person between two different worlds as if one tried to adapt to them.

Jennifer in paradise: the story of the first Photoshopped image

From The Guardian

It hardly looks like an image that shook the world. But this photograph, taken in 1987 by John Knoll, could be as central to the modern visual vernacular as Eadweard Muybridge’s shots of galloping horses or the first use of perspective.

Its subject is Knoll’s then-girlfriend Jennifer, topless on the beach inBora Bora, gazing out at To’opua island. The young couple worked together at Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm’s special-effects company, and were enjoying some well-earned R&R after working 70-hour weeks on the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Looking back, Jennifer says: “It was a truly magical time for us. My husband actually proposed to me later on in the day, probably just after that photo.” Little wonder that John would name the photo Jennifer in Paradise.

But the image was to become much more than a record of a perfect moment. At ILM, Knoll had encountered a cutting-edge piece of hardware known as the Pixar Image Computer, one of the first that could be used to manipulate images. “I thought it was amazing,” he says. “The fact that you could take an image from film, scan it in and turn it into digits and then manipulate those numbers and put it back out on to piece of film – it meant that there was literally no limit to what you could do to it in the middle.”

The Pixar machine cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and the image-processing software was so complex it required a specially trained operator. So Knoll was somewhat taken aback when he visited his brother Thomas, who was reading for a doctorate in computer vision at the University of Michigan, and discovered that he’d developed some similar software that could run on a much cheaper Macintosh Plus. Knoll began to chivvy his brother into pushing the application further. “It was really just a hobby at first,” he says, “but I kept asking him to add more features.”  It is worth reading the full article and watching the video to see just how little has changed from the very first version, go here to do so

Photography Courses for 2014

We have our new schedule for the coming year, we are currently writing a couple of new courses, one on art photography, but these will not be ready for the new term. We have all the usual favourites from Understanding Your Digital SLR Camera, Composition In Photography, Portraiture, Flash, Lightroom, Photoshop,

you can see the full list here

Understanding Your DSLR Camera Evening Class £85 Start Dates: 21.01.2014; 05.03.2014

Understanding Your DSLR Camera Saturday Morning Class £85 Start Date: 9.11.2013; 08.03.2014

1 Day Understanding Your DSLR Camera £95 Dates, 27.10.2013; 26.01.2014; 23.02.2014; 30.03.2014; 27.04.2014

Understanding Your Digital Compact Camera £85 Start Date: 5.03.2014

Intermediate Photography £97 Start Date: 24.02.2014

Flash Photography £85 Start date 29.01.2014

Understanding Lightroom £85 Start Date: 27.02.2014

Introduction to Photoshop and PS Elements £97 Start Date: 18.02.2014

Composition In Photography – Seeing Pictures £85 Start Date: 4.03.2014

Portrait Photography £85 Start Date: 27.01.2014

 

Adobe hack: At least 38 million accounts breached

The BBC is reporting a problem with Adobe. “It had previously revealed that the source code for its Acrobat PDF document-editing software and ColdFusion web application creation products had also been illegally accessed.”

Adobe has confirmed that a recent cyber-attack compromised many more customer accounts than first reported.

The software-maker said that it now believed usernames and encrypted passwords had been stolen from about 38 million of its active users.

It added that the attackers had also accessed details from an unspecified number of accounts that had been unused for two or more years.

The firm had originally said 2.9 million accounts had been affected.

Adobe has also announced that the hackers stole parts of the source code to Photoshop, its popular picture-editing program.

Read the full article here

Related articles

• Adobe hack: 38 million users affected, not 3 million (theguardian.com)
• Adobe hack worse than first reported (bbc.co.uk)
• Adobe hack actually affected 38m, not 3m (pcpro.co.uk)
• Adobe user data breach massive, 38 million compromised by hackers (electronista.com)
• Adobe hack: At least 38 million accounts breached (itandtechnology.wordpress.com)
• New York Based IT Firm Weighs in on Adobe Security Breach, Says Customers’ Credit Cards Have Been Decrypted (prweb.com)
• Adobe data breach more extensive than previously disclosed (fedcyber.com)
• Photoshop source code stolen, 38M users affected in Adobe hack (net-security.org)

OVER 200 SEMINARS TO HELP YOU BECOME A BETTER PHOTOGRAPHER

This event in London in October might be something you would find interesting, we over here at OSP Towers don’t know much about it but we have the links for you to check it out and decide for yourself. Personally a photography event that only has pictures of people with their cameras on the website leaves me a bit cold but I don’t really care about kit I care about photography

PhotoLive 2013 is the UK’s biggest and best photography training event.

Taking place over the weekend of 26-27 October at the Hotel Novotel London West, PhotoLive 2013 brings the experts to you, with over 200 big name-led seminars designed to help you improve your photography.

THE PASSION

Whether you’re passionate about landscapes, portraits, wildlife, travel, macro or Photoshop, you’ll come away fromPhotoLive 2013 inspired and informed.

We’ve designed the show to suit everyone. Tickets start at just £20.

You can attend as many seminars as you like and there’s an identical programme on both the Saturday and Sunday, enabling you to come on both days and take in as much as you can. See the Schedule page for more details.

THE PEOPLE

Sign up today to receive expert tuition and insight from legendary photographers and Photoshop experts including Steve Bloom, Kate Hopewell-Smith, Glyn Dewis, David Noton, Andy Rouse, Tom Mackie and George Cairns.

Our aim is to help you become a better photographer, so if you love photography and want to take your skills to the next level, meet like-minded photography enthusiasts and have a brilliant day (or weekend) out, then PhotoLive 2013 is for you!

Hotel Novotel London West, 1 Shortlands, London W6 8DR

 

the Art of Split Tone Photography

Rob over at Lighstalking has put together these useful resources for anyone interested in split toning

Split tone photography is a technique that has allowed photographers to produce some of the most amazing shots you will ever see. Done well, it can transform a scene into an eerie or stark movie-like scape. Done poorly, it doesn’t look too great at all. We decided to trawl the internet for the best resources on the art of split tone photography so that you can hone your own skills……..

What is Split Tone Photography?

Split toning uses more than one colour to tone an image.

Backgrounder: In traditional print photography, toning was a way to change the basic colour of black and white photographs (traditional toning still creates a monochromatic image). Perhaps the most popular type of toning done traditionally was Sepia which produced a brown to orange cast and warms the overall photograph.

Experimentation with traditional forms of toning such as sepia eventually lead to several ways to “split tone” a photograph. For example, with sepia photographs, if the final bleaching was incomplete, the result was that the highlights would be sepia with the mid-tones and shadows remaining grey. This was one of the original ways to “split tone” a photograph.…..MORE

 

 

©Keith Barnes Port Arthur, Tasmania

Click Here: Some Really Useful Resources for Making You a Master at the Art of Split Tone Photography