Framing/Presenting

After a bit of a stressy start of the day, thanks to the snow, I managed to pick up all my finals! First we went to the framing shop in Woking where I got my Succession photo framed. As mentioned in a previous post, I wanted to have a white frame, not too thick of overpowering, and a circular mount so it wouldn't be too layered. I wasn't too sure about the circular mount, but it looks amazing! In fact, it doesn't actually look like it has a mount, which is good, because nothing distracts you from the photo itself.



The top right and the middle left photo are both of the succession photo. You can't see the photo itself very well because of all the lights. I'm so so so happy with the white frame, I think if it was a black frame the photo would have looked a lot smaller and enclosed and the frame would be a main focus point. The glass looks beautiful as well. It makes the photo look very expensive (which it is...) and the glossiness of it makes the photo look more 3 dimensional.

The photo to the left is just a close up of the mount and the frame. It looks beautiful. Unfortunately I could only see the photo for a few minutes before it got wrapped up and put in the back of the car.





We then drove to Brighton to pick up my A2 photo for my motion blur project. I should really start to refer to it as 7591 Miles as it sounds so much more professional. Anyway, this also looks fantastic!! I printed it on matt paper so it wouldn't look like one giant mirror and it's mounted on diabond. The mounting is literally gorgeous. I'm so happy with it!! Diabond is basically the same as aluminium mounting, but a lot lighter in weight.

I can't really find the right words to describe it all, because both of these projects are the most professionally presented work I've every created. My Succession photo will be up in the Eldon exhibition in May/June, 7591 Miles will be handed in as my final for this project.

Printing and Mounting

Hi Elaine

As explained re telephone conversation. The original print supplied was made as a result of scanning the negative and outputting the image via a digital machine onto photographic paper.
As we were instructed to produce a hand print we were unable to match the supplied print as the colours and contrast on this type of digital print are greatly enhanced by the machine used.

I will return a test strip with your negative and sample print to show you the problems we encountered.

Bryan O'Leary

Unfortunately I couldn't get my image handprinted at the Artful Dodgers as somehow the negative was scanned wrong and the colours were changed. These are two photos to show the difference between the negative and the scan. I am not sure how this massive difference happened, as I scanned them in properly (choosing the right film, not editing etc). The difference between the images is that the scan has come out very red – something I love about the photo – whereas the hand print has more realistic colours to it – a browny grey.

After having seen the hand print, I have decided to stick with how I scanned in the photo. Although the colours in the hand print are more realistic to what I took a photo of, the redness of the photo is partially why I love it. I think it also better to stick with the scan as it fits in the with the sequence of the three photos and finally I feel it better portrays my concept. It’s about confusion and beauty. The colours from the hand print make it very obvious as to what you’re looking at. The redness makes it more abstract and confusing, but also more beautiful and special.

This is why I have decided to stick with the scanned image rather than the hand print. I do not want to sacrifice the outcome of my photo if the only reason is for it to be hand printed. 

I went to The Vault in Brighton today to get my scanned images printed. As explained earlier, I wanted to stick to my scanned image rather than getting it hand printed. I decided to get it printed A2, mainly as that’s all I can afford at the moment. It will come to £32, although the mounting will be another £45. I’m very excited to see the outcome of it. I was shown a different photo mounted on Diabond and it looks fantastic and incredibly professional.

I am only getting the red motion blur image printed A2 and mounted, and the other two photos in the series will be A3. Luckily I only need to have one image professionally presented and mounted, and the other two can be a smaller size (although still professionally done but not mounted). 

Succession Framing

Because I’m going to be presenting my Succession project for the Eldon show, I need to get that professionally presented. I had mounted it on thin mount board as that is all I could afford, but with the help of my parents (and because they want to hang it up in their house) we decided to get it professionally framed. We went to a framing shop in Woking to see what they could offer. Basically what’s going to happen is it’s going to get a white frame, as I didn’t want it to take away from the photo itself, and it’s going to have a circular window mount, so it doesn’t look too layered (first the white border of the photo, then the window mount and then the frame). Finally, it’ll have a glass front. It’ll be done in a week or so, but unfortunately I won’t be going home anytime soon so won’t see it for a while!! 

Comparison

I'm happy with the middle and the right image but am unsure which one to use for the first one. Both images are quite similar in colours so they both fit nicely with the other two images. The top photo is a bit more obvious, whereas the bottom one is completely obscure and unrecognisable. In the top photo, the trees go to the bottom of each of the photos, however in the second sequence the bottom of the photo is very dark and doesn't have as much detail.

If I go for the first sequence of photos, the first and third are quite obvious as to what the photo could be of, however in the second sequence, only the third photo is obvious. I think the next step is to get the photos printed and see what they look like in real life, rather than a screen!

Large Format Contact Sheet

These are all the images I took on my large format shoot. The three images that aren't moved are different techniques. The middle one in the top row is just a straight picture of the landscape, the right photo on the top row is a technique called tilt shift. I created this by keeping the back of the camera straight, and tilting the front part of the camera (with the lens) slightly up. The photo is blurry at the top, in focus in the middle, and blurry at the bottom. The right photo on the bottom row is also tilt shift, but slightly different. This photo is blurry on the left, in focus in the centre, and blurry to the right. I created this by, again, having the back straight, but the front of the camera is tilted left to right. I'm happy and relieved that all the motion blur images came out with the motion blur effect. The first image is very dark, but has the most movement out of all of them. The first photo on the middle row is definitely my favourite. The other two on the middle row are quite similar, although the third one shows the most resemblance to a real landscape photo. Unfortunately the middle bottom photo messed up, but that's just 1 out of 9!

Large Format Scans

Yesterday afternoon I spent an hour scanning my large format images and I'm so happy with how they came out! The colours look beautiful and very different in each of the photos. The photo above shows three of my favourite images. The first one is the most obvious as you can identify the most features, however the colours are so bright that it returns to the abstraction. The middle photo has completely different colours and is probably my favourite out of the three. There is no indication of what the photo could be of. The third photo has the colours an ordinary landscape photo would have, but is blurred in such a way that it's the most like a painting. The three of them look so different from one another, and that's why they work as a set.

Large Format Shoot

 I love large format, so when Daniel and Judy mentioned I should try the motion blur images with the large format, I was up for the challenge. I shot on the same film as last time, 160 ISO Kodak Professional, and bought a pack of 10 photos. Because motion blur is so extremely experimental, I have no idea whether the images have turned out nice or not. It’ll be the most frightening moment to get the photos back!

I shot the photos on the 26^th of January 2013 starting at about 10am. I shot the photos in Horsell Common. I tried out a bit of everything, different shutter speeds and apertures, quick and slow movement, different locations, lighting etc.

The first shot was taking in quite a messy part of the woodland, the birch and pine trees were scattered all around and it was quite dark. The main colours were dark brown and a copper brown. There were blue skies. I used the lightmeter and got a reading of 2 seconds and an aperture of 64. Since the field camera doesn’t have a shutter speed longer than 1 second I had to use bulb mode, my handy assistant helped out with the process. While holding down the shutter for 2 seconds, I’d move the front part of the camera (with the lens) up and down at a certain speed. For this particular images, I moved the camera in long quick movements. 

I chose the second location because it was very dark and dense. As you can see from the photo to the left, the image is very dark, and the main colour would be a very dark brown, as well as a bit of dark green on the bottom of the frame. I used a shutter speed of 8 seconds, so there will be a whole lot of movement in this photo.

Again, in quite a dense area, however for this photo I faced against the sun. This way, the main colour will be white, with dark straight lines (the trees) standing out. The three photos so far have had very different colours and settings, meaning that (hopefully) the images will be very different from one another.

The two images left and right are taken in exactly the same location, but have two different meter readings. This is because I loved the way the still photo looked through the camera and thus wanted to take a photo without the movement. The bottom light meter reading shows a shutter speed of 2 seconds and an aperture of 22, again very different from the other photos. This shot will mainly have medium browns and a bit of dark green. But what will make this photo stand out is the sunlight hitting the trucks and branches of the tree. It will create interesting shapes in the photo. 

Again, the two images to the left and right are taken in the same location but have different meter readings. One is a movement shot and the other is a straight shot. The main colour is this photo will be green, as there is a lot of shrubbery towards the bottom of the photo. The sun is still hitting the trees very nicely, which will hopefully create interesting shapes. The long exposure is 4 seconds at 32 and the still is ¼ seconds at 11.
I have never had the camera point this way, so the focus was incredibly interesting (blurry at the top, then in focus, blurry at the bottom).

One of the most popular photos that I showed in the tutorial was of the sky, no one could identify what it was. Therefore, I wanted to take another shot similar to that. Facing the large format camera up was quite difficult, and trying to view the image was even harder! The main colours in this photo will be blue and green, as the tops of the pine trees had this beautiful light green which was just hit by the sun, and the sky was a nice even blue.

Hopefully all the images have turned out nicely...

80x80cm Print

I originally wanted to print my picture acrylic mounted, however after quite a few tutorials Judy and Daniel both said that they'd prefer it if the picture was printed off massively. Having already spent lots and lots of money on printing pictures, I wanted to look for somewhere affordable. I came across Jessops photo printing service where they print XXL posters in a square format and decided to go for the 80x80cm print.

I picked it up from the shop in the biggest tube I've ever seen, and when I got home it looked fantastic!! I'm really happy with the outcome and definitely prefer it being this size. You can really see all the detail in each of the four photos. It's printed on a semi gloss paper, as Daniel mentioned he thought the glossy print I printed was too glossy and the matt didn't look as good. 

The next issue is.... how will I present it? We always have to present our work in a professional manner, so just having this print hanging on the wall wouldn't give me a very good mark. I spoke to Judy he mentioned all these really expensive things, that would look great, but with the size of my print would be over £100. I did some of my own research and found a company that sold massive pieces of foam board. I double checked the size of the print, as on the Jessops website it warned you that the print might come out slightly bigger, and good thing I did, because it's actually about 82x82cm! I ordered a foamboard and with their special cutting option asked for it to be cut 83x83 (so there is room for mistakes). It should arrive tomorrow morning! 

Twisting

While I was asking people to comment on which image they prefer on Facebook, someone suggested that maybe I should turn the image so that the lines aren’t horizontal and vertical. I decided to test this out, as it’s something I hadn’t thought of before. As the image above shows, I copied that first layer (the original image) four times and twisted the image so that each different photo is up. I still had to bear in mind the sequencing of the image. Although it’s a continuous cycle and any image could come first, I didn’t feel like the overgrown stage could go up as that was really a middle stage, whereas the other three could be a starting point. I didn’t like having the trees pointing down or up so that only left me with one image: having the clearing up. I definitely like the look of it. I am so used to seeing the image with the horizontal and vertical lines that it’s quite weird to see it tilted, but I do prefer it looking like this.

Fixing images

At the tutorial it was suggested that instead of printing my image on acrylic I should go for a really blown up version of the print. I put my image into an A1 sized document in photoshop and zoomed in to 100%. This allowed me to see little dots and hairs on the film I didn’t previously see because of the size. The top image is the edited image where I got rid of any odd marks, and the bottom is the original image. It’s quite hard to see the difference, but there are some obvious marks I removed. I slowly went through every section of the photo and made sure everything was gone.

Testing Brightness

I went to get my images printed professionally in order to double check the brightness of the images. These are 5 tests and the original image. They have all been brightened in different ways so I added the number of the image to the top left corner so I could identify which one printed best.

I think 2 and 3 have the best outcome. They both look bright enough without having blown out the detail in the sky or of the landscape. 

Square vs Circle

After Daniel telling me several times that he prefers the square image, I decided to use my facebook page and see what other people had to say. I posted a post explaining a little bit about my work and asked if people could comment on which one they prefer. Lastly, I added my blog so people could have a look at what my project is about. First I posted it on my photography page, and then shared in on my facebook page. My brother and mum also shared it so I got a wide audience looking at the images in several different countries. A few people that I don’t even know commented on it too!

After the image being up for 24 hours, I took a snapshot of the results. Everyone wrote that they preferred the circular image to the square.

I prefer the circular image too, I think it’s a lot more interesting to look at and people want to know more about the subject matter. I wrote quite a while ago that I wanted to teach people about succession, and in order to do that I have to create something visually interesting – something that grabs their attention. Clearly, the circular image in much more popular, and I think if both of these images were in a gallery, people would be more inclined to read the accompanying text of the circular image rather than the square image.

Testing Brightness

Getting the brightness right of the photos has been a bit of a pain. The photos are coming out slightly dark when I print them myself, but nowhere near as dark as other companies have printed them. Because I want my final to be acrylic mounted I will need to get it printed somewhere. 

The photo above shows how I’ve been slightly changing the brightness in every photo. You can’t really tell a massive difference because of the quality of the photo (taken on my iphone). The largest photo is the print by photobox, and the smallest one is by white wall, the acrylic print. The rest have been tests. Nothing has come out as dark as the print from photobox, which is a bit odd, and therefore it’s hard to change the brightness as I don’t understand why the print has come out so dark in the first place.

I started off by just brightening the whole image (top left image on the sheet of 4), but it completely got rid of the colour in the sky. After than I started brightening each photo individually. I lost quite a bit of colour in the heathland and so while brightening I also added colour so that none of that detail would be lost.

The print with two images on it, is (for now) my final. The image on the left is the original (as you can see it’s not as dark as the photobox print) and the image to the right is the newly edited version. There is still enough colour in the photo, and it has also been significantly brightened. I might get some 6x4 prints from photobox in order to test whether the brightness has worked, before I think about ordering my final print.

Acrylic vs Aluminium

 It took quite a while for the acrylic and aluminium prints to arrive, but I’m happy that I tested it before spending lots of money on getting a big print. The aluminium (left) is quite disappointing. It could be because the image is meant to be a lot larger, but it seems the quality of the photograph is horrible! The paper on which the photo is printed isn’t very nice either. The acrylic on the other hand is fantastic. The photo looks amazing, and unlike the aluminium print the quality is great too.

For my final I will definitely get the photo mounted on acrylic. The photo, again, did turn out quite dark. On my screen the photo looks fine, but everytime I get it printed it looks really dark so I’ll have to fix that before I get the final printed.

Order Prints

This is the order confirmation. I ordered one canvas and used a digital woodland photograph. I also used two credits on 15x10 prints. I used the circular panorama images (digital and large format) so they are in the middle of the page. One of them is printed on glossy paper and the other on matt to test out the quality of each. 

I found a website called White Wall. It prints aluminium and acrylic prints for a very low price if you print a small size. I wanted to print my two circular panorama images off, one on acrylic (large format) and one of aluminium (digital). I’m very excited to see the results of all of the prints. 

Editing

I watched a video on youtube on how to make photo look better and got some useful tips from that. I brightened up the woodland in the back and made the heath a nicer colour of purple.

I did similar things to this image. I felt it was still too green, so reduced that. I made the heath within this area a nicer shade of purple and finally I edited the sky so that it doesn’t have such a strange colour. 

The woodland looked a bit odd to me as well. The trees were too green, but when trying to edit it how I usually do it reduced the green colour of the grass. In the second photo you can see that I made the tree trunk brown but kept the leaves and grass a good colour of green.

Finally, I put the new images in a circular panorama, and I think it looks a lot nicer. I left the clearing photo alone because I liked that the way it was. The woodland photo looks much better and the purple in the overgrown and heathland stage are a lot more defined, like how it was in real life. I’m very happy with this new outcome and this is probably the image I’ll use as my final. I also made sure that the circle matched up better from the clearing stage and the heathland stage. 

Digital vs Film

This snapshot is a quick comparison between the digital file and the large format file. The large format is on the left and the digital is on the right. I like the colour of the heathland in the digital file, but the sky is much better in the large format file. Every photo has a blue sky (and the woodland has sun, so obviously the same sky), whereas the digital file has a different sky in every photo. For the large format, I used a clearing photo with a lot of grass in it, so that in matches better with the other three photos. 

Large Format Testing

After researching circular panorama’s on Flickr, I found a couple that looked like an inverted globe. I decided to try out something similar with the large format photographs.

I quite like the result of it. The panorama isn’t perfect as there is a white dot in the middle where some of the photo is missing. But I do like the outcome of the panorama. You can see a lot more of the landscape, rather than the sky. Although I do like it, I prefer the globe-like panorama. I decided to go for these four photos because they were all taken on the same day, therefore the sky was similar in each of them. I also much preferred the composition of these four rather than the other 5. 

This is a snapshot of the globe panorama. I wasn’t quite sure if it was going to work with the large format photos, but it looks great! The photos look much better in this format than they do lined next to each other.

Large Format Shoot

For some reason I was unable to create a contact sheet in Bridge, so I just took a snapshot of the photos. The first four pictures were taken on the first shoot and the last 5 were taken on the second shoot. As you can see one of them is messed up. This is because I didn’t close the film holder properly, I didn’t think that light had come in, but obviously it did. Luckily I took 3 woodland photos, so it’s not that big of a problem. I scanned the images in on 2040ppi.

Scanning was quite difficult because the last time I used to scanner was in the first year for the workshop. I tried to get the colours right, but it was quite tricky for some of them. I have had to do little edits to some of the photos, but luckily most of them turned out fine.

I am incredibly happy having done a large format shoot, but I’m not too happy with all of the photos. I like the chopped down areas and the woodland, and the final photo, but I don’t like the heathland photos or the first overgrown photo. I think for my final project I’d like to combine both digital and large format in order to get the best result. 

Group Tutorial 3

For this tutorial we did a quick version of the 6 thinking hats and reduced it to three major points of discussion. We did look at all of the 5 we looked at last time, but only recorded three of them and added further research.

Information:

·         Project on succession

·         Time, endless process

·         Woodland to heathland

·         Time lapse – landscape changing

Positive

·         Time lapse – positive

·         Figure walking – interesting

·         Music – brother composes

·         Add text

·         Circle image works

·         Think of size and scale

·         Produce text on a leaflet

·         Speak to volunteers, think about having them in the project

·         Look at more scientific work

·         The circle images looks like a clock – representing time

·         The people in the time lapse shows that it isn’t a natural process

·         Divided opinions of whether to have people in time lapse or not

Critical/Move forward

·         Circle shape – do test prints

·         Experiment with scale

·         Look at the converging lines (fish eye)

·         Move the time lapse slower

·         Make the time lapse into a continual loop

·         Test prints – especially acrylic

·         Analyse large format images

·         Do more time lapse videos and make them more fluid

Research

·         Malcolm Andrews

·         Landscape into Western Art

·         Andy Goldworthy