The Queen by Matt Brown

Not much to say really, except that this made me laugh.  I don't generally like portraits, however this is verging more on Street Photography or a candid shot than a classic portrait. An unusual perspective of Her Majesty and one that I think shows a lot more character than official photographs.  She's obviously hacked off with something, but what really works is the colour scheme with the greens/yellows and that bright shot of lipstick.  If I were taking a picture of the Queen, I'd also want to take one like this!

I saw this image on display outside the Museum of London in November this year.

Excellent :)

(c) Matt Brown

Colours into tones 2

Choose a landscape in which you emphasise the depth (aerial perspective) by strengthening the visual effect of haze.

Original (unprocessed)

 Standard black and white:

I then figured that to make more of the mist I needed to darken the blue and green.  To do this, I used a combination of increasing darkness and saturation.  It has made the cloud stand out more.

Colours into tones 1

Take and image which contains at least two strong contrasting colours:

and create two opposite versions in black and white - one with the first colour (blue) lightened and the contrasting colour (red) darkened, and the other the same in reverse.

Black and white - no treatment:

Black and white - red darkened/blue lightened:

Black and white - red lightened/blue darkened:

Well this was a pain to do, it took me a while to work out, but the last version with the red lightened and blue darkened is more dramatic - it's improved the contrast behind the silhouette!

Strength of interpretation

This exercise involved making low key and high key conversions - one set in black and white, and one set in colour.  I figured that for this a strong silhouette would be effective (as in the course materials).  The images needed to be dominated by tone, line and shape.

Here is the original JPEG as shot (average exposure - SD Picture Control) - Auto White Balance):

I then created copies for processing, changing only key and exposure (no colour changes) by moving exposure up or down 1 stop and also changing brightness or contrast.  I have exaggerated the effects for the purposes of the exercise, more so than I probably would in reality.  You can also see a splodge on my lens...

High Key:

Low Key:

For the high key images, I think the effect is too much.  I found a better effect by adjusting exposure only and not touching the brightness:

The most successful of these I think is the second high key black and white (exposure only adjusted).  I think if I had got lower and made more of the shadows it would have been a great image.

Black and White

The exercise required an image to be shot that at the time I imagined would look better in black and white.  I think most of the images I took in Highgate Cemetery, I imaged in black and white because of the masonry and Gothic or Victorian potential.

Here is the original JPEG as shot:

I imagined this to be interesting in black and white because of the strong curve, the repetition of pattern, the texture of the masonry and the outline of the trees behind.  The image was taken at one stop under exposed (so as to avoid blowing out the sky) and subject framing from right with the initial carvings in the post then left to right up the curve.

Here is the straight forward conversion:

which I think works quite well, however - particularly with the alternating tones of the triangular doorways, but it lacks a bit of vitality.  I then brought back some shadow protection and sharpened slightly to produce this (tiny difference but slightly better):

Photography - The Key Concepts by David Bate

I read Photography - The Key Concepts with the objective of finding out more about "connotation and denotation", as recommended by my tutor.  Bate deals with a variety of topics in this text, including some history and evolution of photography, and definitions of genres of photography, but my concern was mainly understanding connotation and denotation.

What I learned was that connotation is about the meaning of the photograph - what messages does it convey - and that denotation is what you can actually see - what are the technical elements - the physical objects.  Denotation is therefore quite simple: it is the structure of the photograph or as Bates says "the visual signifiers" - the reality of the image. Denotation can be rhetorical - particular if a series of contrasts or antitheses are used to convince us of an argument.  Connotation however could be quite complicated, and open to interpretation.  I imagine that the meaning the photographer wants to convey may be different to another person's understanding of the image.  And photographers can use symbology or semiotics to convey meaning, that might be lost if the audience does not understand the symbology or metaphors used, or has a different meaning in their culture to the one of the photographer.

So with the commentary on the hippo photograph (figure 2.1) in mind, I set about identifying the connotation and denotation of one of my images:

So here we have a scene comprising bricks and mortar, some fencing, some landscaping and a doorway.  The denotation is therefore quite simply a doorway that is closed.  We don't know where it is going but we can see that it's been tunneled under some landscape (or that grass has been planted on top of it).  The connotation for me when I shot it was that I was capturing an inside outside prison.  I was on the outside yet I was imprisoned from what was behind that door.  The door to me felt like a place of no return.  I wanted the viewer to be drawn into the doorway and then blocked.  This image feels to me to be quite sinister and oppressive.  If you look closely, you can see that the doorway is in a state of disrepair, this implies that the area is neglected, abandoned maybe.  And why is the landscaping and structure upside down?  What does that mean?  Why is it so dark?  The fact that there is no lighting around the doorway tells us that the door might not be used that often.  Rather than a blocked entrance hiding something (sinister), is it in fact an escape route (hopeful)?  How would someone familiar with the area see this image?  Culturally what does it mean?  What do people do behind these structures?

Feedback to Assignment Two

Feedback on Assignment Two was largely positive in terms of technical skills, however my tutor felt that I needed to use more variety in composition techniques.  I think for this particular Assignment that I struggled to get into, that was a fair comment, however, I see a lot of photography that is very successful with central composition, so I will continue to use it when appropriate, but will aim to include more variety in my next assignment.

My tutor also commented that I need to reflect on my own work more and those of others.  My reflections on other photographer's work is available from this link but I will try to build this more into my assignments.  She also recommended I read Photography The Key Concepts by David Bate (follow link for my reflections on this).  Going forward I need to think more about connotation and denotation in my work, and also to think more about who might see the work, what feelings it evokes, and the purpose of the image.  I find this slightly incongruous given the technical level of the course (i.e. still teaching about white balance yet expecting us to produce conceptual art?), but I will try to do this.

A good point my tutor mentioned was that my image of the statues from Reykjavik was beginning to show personal voice as it had shown a perspective that other people may not have chosen.  This is great to hear, and a step in the right direction for travel photography!

I am however seriously considering whether it's worth reshooting the whole assignment.  Since submission, I had the idea that I could shoot the same subject matters but to do a study of London landmarks, or even New York or Washington DC landmarks (if I'm lucky enough to get a trip in the near future!).  I am going to Tokyo at Christmas, but hopefully by then I will be deeply ensconced in People and Place.

Interpretative processing

This exercise involved choosing an image that is open to different creative interpretations and presenting it in three different ways.  For this exercise, I used an image taken on my recent trip to Highgate Cemetery.  When I shot it, I had gothic imagery in mind.  Unfortunately, I was on a guided tour and got hurried along before I could get the angle I wanted (looking up).

Original:

For my first reproduction, in ViewNX2 I cropped to square, changed white balance to Cloudy, changed picture control to Vivid and applied some colour booster. 

For my second reproduction, in Elements, I cropped to square, correct Brightness and Darkness (using auto function), then converted to Sepia and added a white vignette.  This gave the image more of a Victorian feel:

For my third reproduction, I used the vivid JPEG from number Two, then in Elements converted to Black and White, added a vignette, added a yellow tone, and added texture.  This now looks like a bad newspaper reproduction:

Managing colour

Find two or three images that have a significant colour cast and correct them.  As I always work in RAW I also carried out this exercise in RAW.  This was hard to do as my White Balance is permanently set to Auto, so I hardly ever get errors in hue.  I had to think about images where the colours where accurate, but where the final result might benefit from some enhancement.

An obvious place to start was with a photo I used in the assignment for Part Two and wasn't able to correct.

The photograph was taken with the white balance set to Auto, and it provided an accurate representation, however, it lacks impact.  By changing the white balance to Direct Sunlight using View NX2 in the RAW file, immediately made the sunset warmer and more dramatic, particularly in the colours in the water:

The second image I found where I wanted to affect the colour was this one, which I also used for Assignment Two.  I felt that again, although accurate, the blue of the sky wasn't great.  It needed to be bolder without adjusting the exposure.

For this repair, I also used ViewNX2.  I changed the white balance to Daylight, this increased darkness though, so I used the Shadow Protection to bring some of the detail back.  I then cooled the image a little bit more, so the overall temperature was 5270.  I then applied some colour boost to increase the blue.  The overall result is probably a little too blue, but I think it looks a bit more vibrant.

My final image came from my recent trip to Iceland.  Here the problem wasn't so much a colour hue, but a colour veil.  The whole image needed an injection of colour and contrast.  This is the original (note already straightened and cropped).

I opened the image in Nikon Capture, changed the white balance to cloudy, which immediately brightened it up, then I set the white point, and then moved the hue towards more red.  Overall, this has taken away all the dullness.

I also had a play in Elements (no idea what I did) - here is the result:

Finding myself

Well I think I'm getting closer to working out what direction I want to take my photography in.  I have enrolled for this course: http://lsptraining.co.uk/phandstreet/ over two weekends in July.  Yay!!  

I did also look up the MA in Photojournalism at Westminster but I'm not sure I'm ready for that yet.  Think I should finish OCA first!

Assignment Two - Reflections

Well, if I'm brutally honest, I'm not sure this was my greatest assignment to-date.  I don't think this assignment shows a progression in conceptual thinking in the way that Assignment One did (and hopefully Assignment Three will).  The photographs submitted feel more like study/experimental photographs than a piece of work.  I may (undecided yet) reshoot this exercise completely before formal assessment.

I am still not clear on what benefit using Spot metering brings, apart from when you are shooting a backlit portrait and want the subject exposed correctly.  I understand it's useful to focus on a grey point to get the exposure when you are shooting dynamic extremes, but my camera (Nikon D5000) copes very well with matrix metering, and I can still use it to focus on a grey point.  Using Spot metering seems to me to cause exposure problems...so it might be that I need to do some more work on this.

I think I fulfilled the brief, but, have I fulfilled the Assignment criteria? 

Development of technical and visual skills

I think the only photograph that demonstrates a real improvement in technical ability is the Thames Barrier big stopper shot: (this one is cropped to show what it would have looked like if processing had been allowed):

Quality of Outcome and Demonstration of Creativity

Again, I think these images are of a study quality rather than a coherent piece of work, or an attempt at producing original thought.  But, that seemed to me also to be the nature of the assignment.   Of all the images submitted, I think the one above and also this one shot in Reykjavik are the best in terms of producing Landscapes photographs.

Context

I didn't bring context into this assignment for the reasons stated above.  If I did decide to reshoot the entire assignment, I would perhaps produce a study on a theme that all four categories will be relevant to.


I also thought back to some images I'd taken previously that showed good treatment of dynamic range (all matrix metered):

Paddington March 2013

From Broadgate Tower October 2013

Castlerigg Circle December 2013