From my photography day-book…
Mark Durden, author of Phaidon’s Photography Today (2014), a survey of photography as art from the 1960s to the present, is joined by the Guardian’s photography writer Sean O’Hagan* and photographer Sarah Jones to discuss themes of the self, the face and the body in photographic works by modern masters such as Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, Nan Goldin and James Nachtwey. In association with Phaidon. Continue reading
Yesterday, two packets from Amazon landed on my desk at work. They contained:
After work, I stopped off at The King and Queen for a pint and to have a first look at the new books, having enough time to read the introductions before I went on to the tube and home. Continue reading
Nikon d50; 24mm lens; 1/15th sec
Having completed the static camera exercise with people on foot, I decided to try cyclists for the next one where I was to pan with the moving subject and observe the difference between different shutter speeds. I moved onto a wider lens (a nikkor 24mm 1:2.8 ais) to allow for the faster moving subjects to come into shot, be picked up by me and then followed as they passed through the centre of the shot.
It worked quite nicely, but I was out of the shade and in blazing sun and there weren’t enough passing cyclists. So I crossed the Lea to the tow path of the navigation, settled myself down on a bench and swapped lenses for an even wider Zenitar 16mm 1:2.8, giving a 35mm equivalent of 24mm, as the cyclists would be passing much more closely than before.
(I know that 1/40th of a second (4) is faster than 1/30th (5), but pretending it isn’t preserves alternating directions of movement)
Once again, the strength of the light and the limitations of my camera’s ISO settings meant that much slower than 1/15th sec burnt out too much.
Different parts of the image all combine to create a sense of movement. Everything does not have to be blurred (and indeed something frozen is definitely required). The differing levels of blur are created by distance, relative speed and steadiness of pan. As with the previous exercise, some experimentation is probably required to establish the correct combination of these for the effect you want.
Nikkor 1/1.8:50 AF-D; f22; 1/8th sec
Joggers, cyclists and dog walkers are found in abundance in the parkland that stretches down the Lea Valley from Tottenham Hale to the Lea Bridge Road. It seemed a good choice for the exercises featuring movement at varying shutter speeds. For the series taken with a fixed camera, I set up a Nikon D50 low on a tripod, pointing up the long stroke of a T-junction. The camera was triggered using an infrared remote. I used a 50mm lens, capable of stopping down to f22 as this would give me the widest possible range of slow speeds on what was a very bright day to be using a camera with a lowest ISO of 200. The resulting shots cover a range from 1/8th of a second to 1/400th of a second.
Nikkor 1/1.8:50 AF-D; f22; 1/8th sec
Almost melts into the air, leaving an elongated series of brushstroke-like traces as he goes. good for a highly abstracted sense of movement. His grounded foot remains stationary for the time the shutter is open (and will only begin to move as his trailing leg moves past it and the heel starts to rise) meaning that the Nike swoosh on his running shoe is the only fully identifiable part of him.
Nikkor 1/1.8:50 AF-D; f22; 1/15th sec
A more identifiably human presence – you can tell that a man in a yellow top and black shorts, wearing sunglasses has looked to his left as he passes the camera. He has been caught at a different point in his stride from the previous shot and his grounded foot has started to move although his trailing leg is less elongated. Against a more neutral background I think this would work nicely.
Nikkor 1/1.8:50 AF-D; f22; 1/30th sec
Neither figure is as pleasingly caught and blurred as in the previous shot, but the leading woman is the better of the two as she is further from the point where the two legs and arms cross the body rather than stretching out in front and behind. Gauging a shutter speed appropriate for the speed of movement is important, but so is timing relative to the stage of the action photographed.
Nikkor 1/1.8:50 AF-D; f22; 1/60th sec
He is crossing into the frame around the corner, rather than parallel to the plane of the sensor and so his relative movement is therefore less, and the effect is simply that he is out of focus. This creates a slightly troubling effect given that there are objects both behind him and between him and the camera that are firmly in focus. Given that his feet are both off the ground, this particular shot might have worked better with a much shorter exposure leaving him hanging frozen in mid air…
Nikkor 1/1.8:50 AF-D; f22; 1/250th sec
She is moving more slowly than he is but like the runner above she is simply a bit soft within a sharp frame. Presumably she has covered a similar distance relative to the camera plane. The timing of the exposure relative to her movement is nice however – she is obviously mid stride.
Nikkor 1/1.8:50 AF-D; f22; 1/250th sec
Pretty much frozen, apart from the dog’s front-left paw. Not bad.
Nikkor 1/1.8:50 AF-D; f22; 1/400th sec
Frozen, but not as nicely timed as the previous shot; the man’s okay but the dog’s legs are a bit of a mess in timing terms.
Different speeds of movement will require different exposure times to get the desired effect. Similarly, different directions of travel relative to the camera will effect the impression of movement. Timing the shot relative to the stage the subject’s movement has reached is also important. There is an area between extreme motion blur and frozen that is less successful than either extreme, for movement involving legs at any rate. In every new situation, you will probably need to experiment a bit before you determine where the sweet spots are, based on time, direction of movement and the desired effect. I suspect it would be good to revisit Muybridge’s work…
The last 3 pictures feature a couple and their labrador who wondered what I was doing and then – after I explained – offered to do the last few passes, saving me some time waiting for someone to turn up naturally. Thank you, anonymous couple – I realise I should probably have got their names, and let them know somewhere where they would be able to see the pictures, like here!
Pentax Spotmatic F. Jupiter 9 1:2/85 1/250th sec @ f11. Fuji Superia 400 asa
(Notes on my shoot for the fourth exercise in part 1 – using different focal length lenses from a fixed position)
This weekend I had a couple of totally free hours that I filled by going to the Necropolis for the first time in around 30 years. Back then it was all fairly dilapidated – I think you weren’t even meant to go in in case a vault collapsed under you – but now it’s been cleaned up, made sound and become part of the tourist experience.
As I spend a fair amount of time in Glasgow, I keep a Pentax Spotmatic-F and a set of lenses there to cut down on the amount of luggage I need to take with me when I travel up from London. Glasgow is also where I get film developed, at the Snappy Snaps on Byres Road, so if I finished the film I already had in the camera, there wouldn’t be a delay in viewing the results.
The Necroposlis sits on a steep hill separated from the cathedral by a steep valley and if you look back as you follow the twisty path up towards the monument to John Knox, there is a fine view west. I realised that this was probably as good a place as any to work through lenses with a variety of lenses:
The camera was on a tripod, but some adjustment was made for composition as the frame tightened. All exposures, 1/250th second at f11. Film used 400 asa Fuji Superia.
The picture at the top of this post was taken later, on the other side of the hill looking east. It may form part of Assignment 1.
All three photographs were taken with a Nikkor 50mm 1:1.8 AF-D lens on my Nikon D50. Focal length equivalent of around 75mm on a full frame camera. ISO was set to 200. Shutter speed varied according to the aperture.
f1.8: A very narrow depth of field; almost everything except for a narrow band down the centre of the image is out of focus; moving out from the focussed strip the quickly becomes very blurred indeed.
f6.3: A wider area of brick is in focus, stretching with a greater increase to the right of the image, where the wall was further away from the camera. The entire image is now readable as brick.
f22: The strip widens again, and – unless you look closely – most of the picture seems clear, if not completely sharp. This time the increase seemed evenly spread on either side of the original in-focus area, which suggests maybe I knocked the point of focus off to the right when I was changing the aperture.
Nothing to add to this really; the smaller the aperture the greater the depth of field. It’s always interesting to do exercises like this and see in practice what the theory says…
For this, I made more than one series of photos, trying to get different relationships between the in and out of focus areas, and to try different types of subject matter. In all cases, I used a 50mm lens at f1.8 on my D50.
First I tried framing something with no obvious subject that demanded focus – a section of my neighbours’ privet hedge, focussing on different areas of leaves, working from left (near) to right (far):
None of them particularly wows me, but the third, with a narrow in-focus area to the right of the frame is the least interesting with the nearer, out-of-focus leaves creating a sense that I’m pressed up against something, trying to see beyond it. It might work if there was an obvious “thing” that was partly obscured, giving some sort of spying/surveillance feel to the shot, but here there’s nothing to suggest that sort of narrative. The second (focussed on the middle of the frame is okay, but unengaging; the first comes closest to working by dint of having an identifiable, in-focus subject (some foreground twigs) and also, I suspect because I am conditioned to scan pages (and pictures) from left to right and here I don’t start off with an area of no focus before settling on an in-focus area to the right of the page.
Next I took a subject where the planes we more obviously distinct – a swing in a playpark – and focussed on the textured matting beneath the swing (far) the swing itself (middle) and one of the supporting ropes (near):
There is something to look at and treat as a subject in each of these , with the texture of the in-focus area helping to settle the eye, but the middle picture with the swing in-focus between two out-of-focus planes is probably the most easy to project into some sort of three dimensional space while the other two are less complex, consisting of something on top of, or in front of an in-focus object. This preference is probably enhanced by the strength of the blue and red versus the more muted colour of the faded red rope and the green matting.
My final go at this exercise involved setting the focus on different people in front of me on the long escalator down from the 2nd level at Tate Modern:
Again, all three work in the sense of giving subject status to the thing in focus with the least successful being the one where that subject is not doing something (the one on the right, which was in fact the first to be taken). The centrally focussed picture with the man kissing his girlfriend is probably the most comfortable to look at; the one on the left with the young man looking off to the upper right of the frame is also good, but there is an element of tension introduced by the man on the up escalator (who I wasn’t really aware of as I took the picture) who is equally in focus and looking up into the frame, causing the eye to move back and forth over the central out of focus couple.
In all three series there is a sense that the thing in focus needs to be worthy of the attention before the picture works. Where this happens, the viewer is placed into a relationship with the subject that locates both of them within three dimensional space. Further to this, there is also a sense that other elements – colour, contrast, the possibility to construct a narrative – can support or undermine the effect of where the area of focus starts and stops. Lastly, there comes a point where the in-focus area can be too close to the edge (the third swing picture with the focus on the rope is a good example) where your eye is drawn out of the picture, away from the centre and other side of the frame.
You’ll know at least one photograph by Jane Bown; she took the picture of Samuel Beckett staring into the camera like an eagle in a white knitted polo neck. And it’s in the small exhibition of portraits taken by her for The Observer at the Guardian Offices by Kings Cross Station marking the release of a film documentary about her. Continue reading
I started at the first suggested stop on my tutor’s list of places to go for thoughts on the current state of photographic theory, The Ethics of Street Photography – Joerg Colberg 03/04/2013 (Conscientious Extended) about whether Garry Winogrand’s profession that he never asked permission to photograph people was ethically ok (Colberg felt that no, really it wasn’t) Continue reading
It was a spectacularly lovely morning with the sun beating down from a cloudless sky, and I realised as I set up the tripod for the first exercise of the day, that my D50 was beginning to show its age when it came to its ISO range. Not able to go lower than 200, meant that anything slower than 1/30th of a second was beginning to burn out. This was fine for the two exercises (and anything slower than 1/15th second ran the risk of the moving subject disappearing totally, like it was Paris in 1830-something) but if I ever want to do something like this for people to see, I need to either get a camera that can do lower ISO speeds or – far less exciting – buy some ND filters. There are various things that argue for a new camera – the 3000 x 2000 pixel image isn’t that big any more; I got it in 2006 so it’s obsolete by now; it’s nice to have new gear – but I hadn’t expected to be thinking quite so seriously about upgrading for a year at least…
And then there’s the issue of the two spots that are apparent on the sensor when you shoot something tonally flat, like the sky:
I can clean the sensor (or pay for someone else to do it), and I can clone them out when they’re annoying, like here. But, ugh. So soon…
Simon Chirgwin's Learning Log 