Unit 23 Colour Negative Film

Unit 23 Colour Negative Film

Shooting in film bought back memories for me! I remember waiting for weeks for holiday films to be developed!  I like instant results now because i am very impatient. However after looking at the quality and texture that the images from film can generate,I can see the beauty that film can bring to a moody shoot.  

For this exercise I used a Canon EOS 300 - 28 -75 mm to take images in and around the college.

After the film was processed I used the Epson Perfection V700 Photo Duel lens system to scan the film. This was linked to a Apple mac with Epson Scan Software. The resolution of the scanner was set at 2400 pixels per inch

Once scanned I transferred the images in to Photoshop. Selecting with marching ants I increased the size to view individual images.

Scanned Film

Individual Image

Another image from the scanned film

Same Image Different presentation. I prefer this

Film Verus Digital

Light is exposed directly to the film, the roll of film will  be developed. If The film stays in good shape, one can create endless amounts prints from the original negative. Film will never deteriorate in quality if properly cared for.

A digital photograph, captured by digital cameras,on the analog sensor creates a digital image and compresses it to JPEG or leaves it in RAW format depending on  settings. If your camera compresses the image, it may not be quite be as sharp as film.

Scanning Film and Quality

The advantageous of digital photography is that one can easily transfer the image files to a computer without losing any quality or data. The transfer is seamless and you will maintain quality.

If the original film negatives are scanned , regardless of the resolution or quality of scan, you may lose quality when transferred on to the computer. While scanning equipment is great, it is still not perfect. Essentially, when you scan the film to the computer you are making a copy of the original. That copy would then be printed from a computer printer, making a copy of a copy. The difference may not be entirely noticeable, but you will have lost some quality during the film to scan process, and again from the computer to printer process.

reference
http://www.guidetofilmphotography.com/film-vs-digital-quality.html

Documentary Photography

Documentary Photography

On any British high street, there are a variety of restaurants and takeaways. Britain has long had a historic passion for curry and  Manchester's  the curry mile in Rushlome is vibrant and thriving!  If you look closely there is a few new taste in food developing, I have noticed Lebonise ,Turkish, and even Afgan food on offer.It seems as Britain becomes more and more multicultural, this is reflected in our changing taste for exotic food.

Montage of food available in a 5 mile radius of Disdbury  

Various Choice available in Rushlome 

Small selection of what's on offer in Withington  

In Didsbury alone the choice of food a vast. There is curry, Chinese, Thai, Spanish, French,Turkish, Italian and of course the original British take away Fish and Chips!

Didsbury's choice of food

Unit 32 Experimental Unit - Double Exposure

Double Exposure Created In Photoshop

Unit 32 Experimental Photography Stephen Gill

Stephen Gill

Stephen Gill has inspired my experimental image below:-

*"Rostrum Camera  Set up" was used to create image
IMAGE 1

Posterised filter used in Photoshop

IMAGE 2

original montage image
IMAGE 3

Image 1 in my opinion works well because the colours and texture blend together and are visually appealing. It looks weathered and battered and gives the result that I was looking to achieve. Comparing images with my inspiration, Stephen Gill and his work; image 1 fits the bill.

Image 2 and 3 the colours are too bright and not weathered enough. They are interesting but don't quite work.
Rotation of image 1, seems more interesting and engaging as a viewer because it draws you in. This however doesn't happen in images 2 and 3 because you quickly realise that the circle is a bicycle wheel.

I can improve this task by printing a higher resolution image, or by using a better resolution camera.

Research on Stephen Gill 

Stephen Gill (born in Bristol, 1971) is a British photographer and artist.

Gill currently lives in Hackney, London, England. The area is featured in some of his work. I find his experimental work unique and exciting. His connection to the world around him and the incooperation of natural environmental things such as flowers, insects etc into his images is very innovative.


Gill's photographs have appeared in international magazines including The Guardian Weekend, Le Monde 2, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, Tank, The Telegraph Magazine, I-D magazine, The Observer, Blind Spot and Colors

Gill’s photographs have been exhibited at London’s National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Decima Gallery, Agnes B, the Victoria Miro Gallery, Galerie Zur Stockeregg, the Gun Gallery, the Photographers' Gallery, Palais des Beaux Arts, Leighton House Museum, and Haus der Kunst. He was exhibited at the Rencontres d'Arles festival in 2004.

According to Martin Parr (writing in 2004):
"Stephen Gill is emerging as a major force in British photography. His best work is a hybrid between documentary and conceptual work and for this international it is the repeated exploration of one idea, executed with the precision that makes these series so fascinating and illuminating. Gill brings a very British, understated irony into portrait and landscape photography."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Gill_(photographer)


*Rostrum Camera Set Up

References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rostrum_camera

Unit 32 Baldessari Inspired

Unit 35 John Anthony Baldessari Inspired Experimental Work

 I learned about this conceptual artist today. He is inspiration for the experimental unit because in my opinion
he takes ordinary images and converts them into contemporary art. The image below was inspired by Balbessari..  

Baldessari Inspired Experimental work 

original image

John Anthony Baldessari

Research

John Anthony Baldessari (born June 17, 1931) is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California

Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography.  He has created thousands of works that demonstrate—and, in many cases, combine—the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe.  His work influenced Cindy Sherman, David Salle, and Barbara Kruger among others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Baldessari

Baldessari is best known for works that blend photographic materials (such as film stills), take them out of their original context and rearrange their form, often including the addition of words or sentences. Related to his early text paintings were his Wrong series (1966-1968), which paired photographic images with lines of text from an amateur photography book, aiming at the violation of a set of basic "rules" on snapshot composition. In one of the works, Baldessari had himself photographed in front of a palm precisely so that it would appear that the tree were growing out of his head. His photographic California Map Project (1969) created physical forms that resembled the letters in "California" geographically near to the very spots on the map that they were printed. In the Binary Code Series, Baldessari used images as information holders by alternating photographs to stand in for the on-off state of binary code; one example alternated photos of a woman holding a cigarette parallel to her mouth and then dropping it away.

Another of Baldessari's series juxtaposed an image of an object such as a glass, or a block of wood, and the phrase "A glass is a glass" or "Wood is wood" combined with "but a cigar is a good smoke" and the image of the artist smoking a cigar. These directly refer to Rene Magritte's The Treachery of Images; the images similarly were used to stand in for the objects described. However, the series also apparently refers to Sigmund Freud's famous attributed observation that "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar", as well as to Rudyard Kipling's "… a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke."

In "Double Bill", a 2012 series of large inkjet prints,[15] Baldessari paired the work of two selected artists (such as Giovanni di Paolo with David Hockney, or Fernand Léger with Max Ernst) on a single canvas, further altering the appropriated picture plane by overlaying his own hand-painted color additions. Baldessari then names only one of his two artistic “collaborators” on each canvas’s lower edge, such as …AND MANET or …AND DUCHAMP.

Arbitrary games [edit]

Baldessari has expressed that his interest in language comes from its similarities in structure to games, as both operate by an arbitrary and mandatory system of rules. In this spirit, many of his works are sequences showing attempts at accomplishing an arbitrary goal, such as Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (1973), in which the artist attempted to do just that, photographing the results, and eventually selecting the "best out of 36 tries", with 36 being the determining number just because that is the standard number of shots on a roll of 35mm film.This work was published in 1973 by a young Italian publisher: Giampaolo Prearo that was one of the first to believe and invest in the work of Baldessari. He printed two series one in 2000 copies and a second more precious reserved to the publisher in 500 copies.

Pointing 

Much of Baldessari's work involves pointing, in which he tells the viewer not only what to look at but how to make selections and comparisons, often simply for the sake of doing so. Baldessari's Commissioned Paintings (1969) series took the idea of pointing literally, after he read a criticism of conceptual art that claimed it was nothing more than pointing. Beginning with photos of a hand pointing at various objects, Baldessari then hired amateur yet technically adept artists to paint the pictures. He then added a caption "A painting by [painter's name]" to each finished painting. In this instance, he has been likened to a choreographer, directing the action while having no direct hand in it, and these paintings are typically read as questioning the idea of artistic authorship. The amateur artists have been analogized to sign painters in this series, chosen for their pedestrian methods that were indifferent to what was being painted.  Baldessari critiques formalist assessments of art in a segment from his video How We Do Art Now (1973), entitled "Examining Three 8d Nails", in which he gives obsessive attention to minute details of the nails, such as how much rust they have, or descriptive qualities such as which appears "cooler, more distant, less important" than the others.

stonehenge (with two people) violet 

"Money With Space"

"Suppose it is time after all what then" 1967

http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/john-baldessari

Trees in Black and White

Trees

No Photoshop, no colour, just light and trees!

   Shots taken in Formby on 7.5.2013

A Tree

a tree that once stood alone
a tree that was unstable
and not very strong

a tree that didnt have much of a chance
for a tree for noone did understand

a tree that was so affraid to let go
for that reason
that tree never learned to grow

a tree that never felt the warmth of the sun
or made shadows in the moon
for a tree who could seem to never
blossom into something new

a tree with branches that snapped
with thunderstorms and hurricanes
beating on its back

a tree that never grew up to be all it could be
i wonder what was holding these tree back from
its dreams

Destiny Tatum

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-tree-17/

The beauty of trees reignites the passion!! 

Delicate/ textured

Delicate/ Textured