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Friday, October 3, 2008 -
FOTB: Chris Orwig
On Monday I had the opportunity to borrow a colleague's ticket for Flash on the Beach to attend Chris Orwig's talk The Art and Craft of Photographic Impact. It was a really good way to spend an hour and I came away feeling quite inspired.
A couple of things that he mentioned gave me a different viewpoint - instead of A picture is worth a thousand words and trying to tell an entire story, how about using a photo as a poem - so more open to interpretation, and based more on emotions and interpretation. Another thing was about the photographers use of prediction skills - when photographing a child with their birthday cake, you want to take a photo as they blow the first candle out, or whilst their cheeks are puffed up ready to blow, not when the candles are all blown out. Similarly when photographing someone jumping or diving into the sea, you want motion. All fairly obvious, but quite nicely put.
One of the interesting tactics he used was that half way through the talk he turned the lights up and made us talk to our neighbours about what we thought of the talk so far. Quite a good way to liven it up.
He also made the point about photographing what really happens, not what should happen - he used weddings as an example, its all very well having the posed group shots, but what about the fun ones - this reminded me of my own wedding photos and the fact that we have photos from the 2 minutes that Richard's Dad wore his Mum's hat, and of me comforting my little pageboy who thought he was going to marry Aunty Jane and how much I still love these photos for keeping the memories alive. This is what I tried to do when I did some photos for my friend's wedding in April.
Finally he described some projects that he'd assigned for us all. They are available, along with some book recommendations and kit recommendations here.
A couple of things that he mentioned gave me a different viewpoint - instead of A picture is worth a thousand words and trying to tell an entire story, how about using a photo as a poem - so more open to interpretation, and based more on emotions and interpretation. Another thing was about the photographers use of prediction skills - when photographing a child with their birthday cake, you want to take a photo as they blow the first candle out, or whilst their cheeks are puffed up ready to blow, not when the candles are all blown out. Similarly when photographing someone jumping or diving into the sea, you want motion. All fairly obvious, but quite nicely put.
One of the interesting tactics he used was that half way through the talk he turned the lights up and made us talk to our neighbours about what we thought of the talk so far. Quite a good way to liven it up.
He also made the point about photographing what really happens, not what should happen - he used weddings as an example, its all very well having the posed group shots, but what about the fun ones - this reminded me of my own wedding photos and the fact that we have photos from the 2 minutes that Richard's Dad wore his Mum's hat, and of me comforting my little pageboy who thought he was going to marry Aunty Jane and how much I still love these photos for keeping the memories alive. This is what I tried to do when I did some photos for my friend's wedding in April.
Finally he described some projects that he'd assigned for us all. They are available, along with some book recommendations and kit recommendations here.
Labels: event
Sunday, July 6, 2008 -
Team Madgex photographer
My position as Madgex Photographer came into play again yesterday when I fired off a load of shots of Team Madgex during a mountain bike race, The Long Good Saturday. The race was held at Stanmer Park, here in Brighton, and was an 8 hour endurance race. We had 3 teams entered, one pair, one mixed team of 4 and one all male team of 4. They chose to raise money for local charity StreetSmart and can still be sponsored.
I arrived at about 11.30 (the riders had been there since 10), giving me half an hour before the race to get some team shots, and pre-start shots. When the race started I headed off with the team videographer, and videographer's assistant to find some places along the route to shoot. Unfortunately for me, that meant being in dense woodland with little or no ambient light. The photos from this section aren't great, but do at least capture our guys in action.
We then headed back down to the start/finish area and spent more time with the team preparing for their changeovers, and recovering after their laps. The teams all worked well, and hard, and there was always someone at the changeover point with the riders swapping over which I think showed great support - admittedly I was also there pointing a camera in people's faces, but hey, they should all be used to that by now :-)
I headed off home at 5.30, leaving them with another 2 and a half hours to survive, but I'd ran out of space on my cards, and also knew that I had 450+ photos to process before Monday to ensure that they could see them first thing. The results for the race are available thanks to TimeLaps and I think that the 3 teams making up Team Madgex did a great job. Well done guys!
Labels: event, photo, photo essay
Saturday, April 26, 2008 -
Contemporary Photography : Lydia Yee
On Wednesday evening I attended another of the Contemporary Photography talks. This time it was Lydia Yee, curator of the current Barbican exhibition Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art.
She showed imagery of exhibits, as well as of some of the signage that has been used, and explained how they'd organised the exhibition of contemporary art according to anthropological categorisation. So, the exhibition is broken down into sections such as "Kinship and Descent", "Magic and Belief", "Ritual" and "Communication". Amongst the exhibits is a copy of the calibrator that Damian Hirst created to go to Mars on Beagle 2 - it is present because it might well have been one of the first earth based objects that a Martian would come across.
Lydia was a very engaging speaker, and did an excellent job of explaining how the exhibition came together, as well as describing the taxonomy and organisation of it. There are another 2 of these events to go. Next week is Anne Hardy, and the final talk, on the 7th May is Julian Germain.
She showed imagery of exhibits, as well as of some of the signage that has been used, and explained how they'd organised the exhibition of contemporary art according to anthropological categorisation. So, the exhibition is broken down into sections such as "Kinship and Descent", "Magic and Belief", "Ritual" and "Communication". Amongst the exhibits is a copy of the calibrator that Damian Hirst created to go to Mars on Beagle 2 - it is present because it might well have been one of the first earth based objects that a Martian would come across.
Lydia was a very engaging speaker, and did an excellent job of explaining how the exhibition came together, as well as describing the taxonomy and organisation of it. There are another 2 of these events to go. Next week is Anne Hardy, and the final talk, on the 7th May is Julian Germain.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008 -
Contemporary Photography : John Stezaker
This evening I attended a talk as part of a series on Contemporary Photography being staged by Photoworks in conjunction with the MA Photography course of the University of Brighton.
John Stezaker isn't an artist I've come across before, but from this talk I felt I got a really good understanding of the evolution of his works, where he started from, and how his more recent work (the marriage and betrayal series) builds on his work of the past. As with the Joachim Schmid exhibition I saw last year at the Photographers Gallery there still seems something slightly sacrilegious to me about the deliberate destruction of photographs, even to then use these elements to produce something more. In fact, a member of the audience this evening asked John about this, and John accepted this, and said that he couldn't use photos of his family or loved ones in this manner, but was more than comfortable using film stock and postcards. He mentioned that he liked using damaged photographs, and has also used postcards and images from his own past - postcards from his parents when he was a little boy, a picture of Queen Victoria from a book that he scribbled all over as a child.
John recorded a video interview with Tate Britain for Tate Triennial 2006 which gives a flavour of the content of his talk.
There are three more talks in the series, all being held at the Friends Meeting House in Brighton over the next 3 Wednesday evenings. To reserve a place, all you need to do is drop an email to events@photoworksuk.org.
John Stezaker isn't an artist I've come across before, but from this talk I felt I got a really good understanding of the evolution of his works, where he started from, and how his more recent work (the marriage and betrayal series) builds on his work of the past. As with the Joachim Schmid exhibition I saw last year at the Photographers Gallery there still seems something slightly sacrilegious to me about the deliberate destruction of photographs, even to then use these elements to produce something more. In fact, a member of the audience this evening asked John about this, and John accepted this, and said that he couldn't use photos of his family or loved ones in this manner, but was more than comfortable using film stock and postcards. He mentioned that he liked using damaged photographs, and has also used postcards and images from his own past - postcards from his parents when he was a little boy, a picture of Queen Victoria from a book that he scribbled all over as a child.
John recorded a video interview with Tate Britain for Tate Triennial 2006 which gives a flavour of the content of his talk.
There are three more talks in the series, all being held at the Friends Meeting House in Brighton over the next 3 Wednesday evenings. To reserve a place, all you need to do is drop an email to events@photoworksuk.org.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 -
Digital Photogaphy 101 - Skillswap Brighton
When Danny was planning the week of Skillswaps during the Brighton Digital Festival he asked me if I would be prepared to do a Photography 101 to go along with the other events he had planned. I decided that I'd give it go, and so last night saw me presenting on "Digital Photography 101". I initially wrote this talk for Barcamp Brighton but didn't have an opportunity to present it.
A pdf of my slides can be downloaded here (warning: it's 32MB in size which is the only reason it isn't on slideshare) and my accompanying notes can be found here.
I felt the presentation went well and I was glad that I'd done a quick around the room to find out experience levels to gauge what level to aim at. I enjoyed the discussion at the end - some of the topics raised were watermarking, digital watermarking, multiple exposures/exposure bracketing and HDR.
We then moved on to considering whether a "Geek Camera Club" or something would be worthwhile, and there certainly seemed to be some people who thought they'd be interested in a monthly meetup. The preferred format seemed to be based around photographic challenges - things like: taking photos using only a fixed aperture, a fixed focal distance, in black and white, etc. Certainly I find that having other people issuing me a challenge makes me think more. If you're interested in a "Geek Camera Club" or similar (based in Brighton probably), then leave me a comment and I'll try and see if I can get something organised.
As is typical for a skillswap, we continued the conversation in the Victory.
A pdf of my slides can be downloaded here (warning: it's 32MB in size which is the only reason it isn't on slideshare) and my accompanying notes can be found here.
I felt the presentation went well and I was glad that I'd done a quick around the room to find out experience levels to gauge what level to aim at. I enjoyed the discussion at the end - some of the topics raised were watermarking, digital watermarking, multiple exposures/exposure bracketing and HDR.
We then moved on to considering whether a "Geek Camera Club" or something would be worthwhile, and there certainly seemed to be some people who thought they'd be interested in a monthly meetup. The preferred format seemed to be based around photographic challenges - things like: taking photos using only a fixed aperture, a fixed focal distance, in black and white, etc. Certainly I find that having other people issuing me a challenge makes me think more. If you're interested in a "Geek Camera Club" or similar (based in Brighton probably), then leave me a comment and I'll try and see if I can get something organised.
As is typical for a skillswap, we continued the conversation in the Victory.
// posted by Jane @ 7:46 PM
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