Abstract Photography: how to shoot urban Impressionism

The trend of Impressionist photography has shown us the natural world as it’s never been seen before. But can it work in an urban setting?

Photography has witnessed an explosion of creative ideas over the last few years, primarily due to the advent of digital capture and processing via the “dry” darkroom. The digital photography age, due to the low cost of memory as opposed to capture on film, has above all allowed the individual to experiment far beyond what was previously possible. It has also allowed people to develop new methods of approach to their photography, here, leading landscape photographers  Morag Paterson and Ted Leeming talk about how to transfer your Impressionist photography techniques from the natural world to the urban environment. Read more….

Duane Michals

D U A N E M I C H A L S
Duane Michals (b. 1932, McKeesport, Pa.) received a BA from the University of Denver in 1953 and worked as a graphic designer until his involvement with photography deepened in the late 1950s. Michals made significant, creative strides in the field of photography during the 1960s. In an era heavily influenced by photojournalism and its aesthetic, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives using a distinctive pictorial technique. The sequences, for which he is widely known, appropriate cinema’s frame-by-frame format. Comprising single prints, each sequence depicts the unfolding of an event or reveals various perspectives on a specific subject. Michals has also incorporated text as a key component in his single and multipart works. Rather than serving a didactic or explanatory function, his handwritten text adds another dimension to the images’ meaning and gives voice to Michals’s singular musings. Balancing fragility and strength, gravity and humor, Michals’s work represents universal themes such as love, desire, memory, death, and immortality.
Over the past five decades, Michals’s work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, hosted Michals’s first solo exhibition (1970), and a year later the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY, mounted another (1971). More recently, he has had one-person shows at the Odakyu Museum, Tokyo (1999), and at the International Center of Photography, New York (2005). In 2008, Michals will celebrate his 50th anniversary as a photographer with a retrospective exhibition at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Greece and the Scavi Scaligeri in Verona, Italy. His work has been included in numerous group shows including, “Cosmos” at the Musée de Beaux-Arts de Montréal (1999), “The Century of the Body: Photoworks 1900-2000” at the Musee de l’Elysee, Lausanne (1999), “From Camouflage to Free Style” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1999), and “The Ecstasy of Things” at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.
In recognition of his contributions to photography, Michals has been honored with a CAPS Grant (1975), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1976), the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Art (1989), the Foto España International Award (2001), and an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, Mass.(2005). Michals’s work belongs to numerous permanent collections in the U.S. and abroad, including the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Michals’s archive is housed at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Monographs of Michals’s work include Homage to Cavafy (1978); Nature of Desire (1989); Duane Michals: Now Becoming Then (1990); Salute, Walt Whitman (1996); The Essential Duane Michals (1997); Questions Without Answers (2001); The House I Once Called Home (2003) and Foto Follies / How Photography Lost Its Virginity on the Way to the Bank (2006). Forthcoming publications include 50 (Admira Photography, June 2008); a collection of Michals’s writing (Delpire Editeur, Fall 2008); and his Japaneseinspired, color photographs (Steidl, Fall 2008).
Michals lives and works in New York City.

“Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be”. – Duane Michals – 1966

“I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody’s face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways”. – Duane Michals

“The best part of us is not what we see, it’s what we feel. We are what we feel. We are not what we look at . . .. We’re not our eyeballs, we’re our mind. People believe their eyeballs and they’re totally wrong . . .. That’s why I consider most photographs extremely boring–just like Muzak, inoffensive, charming, another waterfall, another sunset. This time, colors have been added to protect the innocent. It’s just boring. But that whole arena of one’s experience–grief, loneliness–how do you photograph lust? I mean, how do you deal with these things? This is what you are, not what you see. It’s all sitting up here. I could do all my work sitting in my room. I don’t have to go anywhere”. – Duane Michals “If I was concerned about being accepted, I would have been doing Ansel Adams lookalikes, because that was easily accepted. Everything I did was never accepted…but luckily for me, my interest in the subject and my passion for the subject took me to the point that I wasn’t wounded by that, and eventually, people came around to me.” – Duane Michals “And in not learning the rules, I was free. I always say, you’re either defined by the medium or you redefine the medium in terms of your needs”. – Duane Michals More about Duane Michals here

The Art of Travel Portraiture: 10 Tips to Get You Better Shots

Aloha Lavina is an Asia based photographer and has contributed this article to Lightstalking

Capturing travel portraits is one of the hardest assignments you can undertake as a photographer. Traveling to a new place where you may not be that familiar with the customs, there is no way you can predict who you’ll meet, and even less chance of developing some definite expectations of what images you can make and take home. You need to be open to anything and flexible enough to change focus at a moment’s notice.
To help you maximize your chances of capturing memorable portraits that have impact, there are some things you can remember.

Here we have just a few of the 10 tips, go here for the full article

1. Wait for the decisive moment.
Cartier Bresson once said, “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.” Finding this decisive moment is one of the most exciting things you can search for in your quest for portraits. Being patient and waiting for moments can result in expressive portraits.

2. Provide context for your subject.
Using the environment can help you tell the story of your subject. Whether it is about work, play, or other themes, giving bits of the surroundings can add impact to the story because the elements around the subject add to the narrative of who they are, what they do, linking their story to the viewer’s story.

4. Interact with your subject.
It helps a traveler to interact with their subject. Some would argue that interacting with your subject changes the image; that by imposing yourself into their lives, the photographer changes the natural way a local person would act. But you could also argue that travel is one way to get to know other people whose lives are different from yours and make new friends, and that certainly doesn’t hurt anyone.

 

 

 

Creative Industries Qualification

We received information about a course that the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) runs that might be of interest to those wishing to study photography with an aim of achieving a qualification.

The Royal Photographic Society’s Imaging for the Creative Industries qualification provides a structure leading to professional qualifications with particular relevance for those in the media including picture editors, art directors, curators, and designers as well as those within elements of education…..This could provide a qualification for educators, offering a focused opportunity for the academic community. Within this umbrella, the relevant academic disciplines from the fine arts to design as well as their applications can be interpreted widely. Specifically it will include areas of photography and imaging that embraces both those who make and those who use the medium(s).

 I have no idea what that means so   READ here for further details  here is a picture from Wildlife Photographer of the Year to cheer you up

 

How to take a photography portrait in 10 minutes

When time is short or the location is a disaster, every photographer needs some tried and tested ideas to fall back on. Here are a few tricks of the trade

David Bailey once said, “I’m very quick. Ten minutes, that’s about enough time for a portrait.”

How long should it take to shoot a portrait for the Guardian? Probably longer than the time our photographers are often given: interviews run over; subjects are busy people; it’s a daily newspaper, and arrangements are often made at the last minute; the pictures are wanted for a pressing deadline.

So you’re the photographer who has been assigned the job, you’ve rushed at the last minute to arrive at an unprepossessing building where the subject is finishing an interview in a dull room. It could be in a bland hotel or an office decorated in an even blander shade of beige. What do you do next?….READ MORE HERE

This useful article in The Guardian doesn’t really tell you anything you couldn’t work out for yourself by looking at pictures of important people in newspapers and magazines. Most photographers have their style, their go to way of photographing and rarely shift far from it. Jane Bown, who photographed for the Observer was a case in point. See how she always uses light from one direction with preferably a dark background. Very effective.

We teach about natural light portraiture on our Portrait courses

One photographer who makes is living photographing the very important and to whom 10 minutes would be luxury is Ander McIntyre his website is absolutely full of images of presidents, politicians, scientists, artists and others in the public eye and all photographed in about 2 minutes. Go and have a look at his remarkable portraits and learn.

 

 

All images ©Ander McIntyre

Photography is the art of our time

The old masters painted the drama of life and death. Today photography captures the human condition – better than any other artistic medium of our age

Jonathan Jones writes in the Guardian It has taken me a long time to see this, and you can laugh at me if you like. But here goes.

Photography is the serious art of our time. It also happens to be the most accessible and democratic way of making art that has ever been invented. But first, let’s define photography.

A photograph is an image captured on film, paper or – most commonly now – in digital memory. Photography also includes moving images captured on film or video. Moving or still, we all know a photograph is not a pure record of the visual world: it can be edited and transformed in infinite ways

OK you might agree or want to shout at the page but here is the rest of the article, I think it is worth reading

Photography is the successor to the great art of the past … an English lesson in Pakistan Photograph: Muhammed Muheisen/AP

What is photography?

Well in this instance it is Phil Coomes of the BBC talking about the use by photo-journalists of Instagram as a way of increasing the awareness of a more serious set of pictures about a subject.

Yet what is photography if not something that shapes the world? It captures a moment in time and renders it in two dimensions; it’s down to the skill and authority of the photographer to select the right moment and view that will ensure the tones and shapes in the frame lead the viewer to want to know more about the subject. writes Coomes

Mendel released a number of pictures via the photography app, Instagram….This has created something of a split among photographers and editors as to whether such an approach is acceptable.

So what do you think, read Phil Coomes on the BBC website here, see if you agree

Drowning world by Gideon Mendel

The debate about what is photography was one we had during the most recent Intermediate Photography course, new dates are now available for the next term, you can see those dates here

How Art History Can Improve Your Photography

I like Lighstalking because they often have articles that are not just equipment or the obvious how to type tutorials. This piece By Tiffany Mueller is a perfect example of that and one which I wholeheartedly agree with. There is no doubt that we can all learn from the masters of photography but why stop there, image making has been with us since almost the birth of mankind, think of the cave painting is Lascaux. So this article lays out the importance of art in general to photographers. I am always surprised when someone tells me they are interested in photography or more, that it is their hobby, but show no evidence of this other than owning a camera. What about exhibitions, master photographers or monographs or books about photography?

During some part of your training as a photographer, whether self taught or classically trained, you’ve probably been told to study images taken by photographers whose work you admire. You can learn a lot about your personal style this way, zeroing in on what it is exactly that makes you favor it. Discovery, after all, begins with observation. Keeping that in mind, let’s take our artistic observations one step further and we can see how the old masters of painting have influenced not the just the eyes of master photographers, but also the entire artistic medium that is photography.

There is no doubt about it, painting has had a significant impact on the way that photographers use light. The first thing that comes to mind is Rembrandt lighting. The style was named in honor of the painter and is still widely used in portrait photography for the simple fact that, when done correctly, it looks really good.

Vermeer – The Milkmaid [Public domain], by Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675)

Click Here: How Art History Can Improve Your Photography

Click Here: How Art History Can Improve Your Photography

Selling Your Photographs Through Stock Libraries: An Introduction

This useful article By Jason Row  comes from the well thumbed pages of Lightstalking

“Before the advent of digital photography, there was no micro and macro in stock photography, royalty free was a little used term and image catalogues were large glossy books with just a selection of the best images. To purchase an image you either asked one of the library’s researchers to look for it or you went in person and trawled through thousands of transparencies on light boxes. Apart from a few big stock agencies there were hundreds of smaller ones each dealing in their own niche’s such as music or historical images.

The face of traditional stock photography was changed beyond recognition by two major developments, the advent of the digital camera and the rise of the Royalty Free license, both of which lead to the development of the microstock agency . So if you wish to offer your images for sale at a stock library, which should you choose, micro or macro?”..….MORE

An image that has sold well at a macrostock agency

Here are some links to stock libraries

http://www.istockphoto.com/

http://www.alamy.com/

http://www.reflexstock.com/index.cfm?&DIS=1

http://www.corbisimages.com/

Click Here: Selling Your Photographs Through Stock Libraries: A Primer

Setting Up A Successful Photography Business

Diane Smyth writes in the BJP  ”

“Do you know your legal obligations on a commercial shoot? Do you know what the CAP codes are? And do you know what a Recce Fee is? If not, maybe you should take a look at Lisa Pritchard’s new book, Setting Up A Successful Photography Business.

Aimed at emerging or amateur photographers making the transition to professional life, it’s broken down into 11 concise chapters on subjects such as Business basics, Marketing and promotion and Pricing photography. Pritchard focuses on commercial photography so it’s geared towards that world but, with clear advice on legal issues and breakdowns of the finances of photography, it should be useful to photographers working in other areas too. Some of the UK’s most successful photographers have contributed their thoughts and photographs to the publication, including Harry Borden, Tom Stoddart, Steve Bloom, Nadav Kander, Laura Pannack and Perou.”

Setting Up A Successful Photography Business by Lisa Pritchard is published by A&C Black, ISBN 978–1-4081-2577-9, priced £12.99. For more information, visit www.acblack.com.

Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2137846/set-successful-photography-business#ixzz1jirWLfIB
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