Photostory

Since I started this class with euphonium pictures, I figured I might as well go out with them as well. I present to you "A Day in the Life of a Euphonium" -


Comments and Image credits:

1. Levels adjustment & cropping in Lightroom. Text added in Photoshop.
2. Levels adjustment (including darkening windows) & cropping in Lightroom. Text added in Photoshop.
3. Levels adjustment (including changing color balance to make an afternoon shot look more morning-like)) & cropping in Lightroom. Text added in Photoshop.
4. Levels adjustment & cropping in Lightroom. Text added in Photoshop.
5. Levels adjustment & cropping in Lightroom. Text added in Photoshop.
6. Levels adjustment (including darkening windows) & cropping in Lightroom. Text added in Photoshop.
7. Levels adjustment & cropping in Lightroom. Text added in Photoshop.
8. Levels adjustment (including changing the backgrouns sky) & cropping in Lightroom. Cutting, assembly, lens flare, and text in Photoshop.
9.  Levels adjustment in Lightroom. Cutting, assembly, and text in Photoshop. Image credit: PP-Pixelpro
10. Levels adjustment in Lightroom. Cutting, assembly, and text in Photoshop. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
11. Levels adjustment in Lightroom. Cutting, assembly, and text in Photoshop. Image credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA)
12. Levels adjustment in Lightroom. Cutting, Euphonium Warping (blur and twirl filters), assembly, and text in Photoshop. Image credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
13. Levels adjustment in Lightroom. Kaliedescope effect (cutting copying and assembly), lens flare, and text in Photoshop.
14. Levels adjustment & cropping in Lightroom. Cutting, assembly, and text in Photoshop. Image credit: clipartbest.com

Portraits

This weekend my family visited Melvín - a friend of ours who works as a trainer on a fancy horse farm down in the Mad River Valley. I figured this would be a good opportunity go get some pictures of people - both because it's a beautiful place, but also because it's interested to see people at their work.

With Melvín there's added political resonance since he's an undocumented worker from Nicaragua. I think a lot of folks in Vermont don't know that much about undocumented immigrants in our state and I wanted to take the opportunity to show him as a real person, not just a statistic or political point.

In terms of my photographic progress, there were some posed photos (The picture of my son Zeke by himself on the pony), but I mainly just followed around Melvín and Zeke taking lots of pictures. Looking back at the pictures, the thing I wish I had payed more attention to at the time was some of the mid-range backgrounds - I was concentrating on capturing moments in the foreground with good scenery in the background, but sometimes thing in the mid-range (fences, trees, etc.) were distracting and I didn't notice them at the time.

Dodge/Burn and Filters

To play with the dodge and burn tools, I went back to this picture I took up at Green River Reservoir.

 

I didn't want to do anything too obvious, but I wanted to darken the sky and lighten the water to bring them closer to the same brightness. I also lightened up the trees on the left a bit.

 

For my filters, I started with the liquefy filter to make my euphonium from the first week a bit more  Dr. Seuss-ish :) I like the disconcerting contrast between realism and surrealism in this one. 

And here is the solarize filter used to create a photo border - by selecting a rectangular section with the subject of the photo, inverting the selection and then applying the filter.

 

Color Adjustment.

I just came back from a kids birthday party. There was a lot of color there!

This first photo comes from a series of bubble blowing pictures. This one I cropped to just the bubbles in Adobe Lightroom and optimized the white balance, tone (exposure, contrast, highlights/shadows, & whites/blacks), and presence (clarity, vibrance, & saturation) controls to bring out the refraction colors in the soap bubbles.

I've actually been doing basic tonal adjustments like this on most of my pictures throughout the class, so I figured I would try something a bit more extreme for this assignment. So here is another picture from the party I call "Portrait of my son as the young Lord Krishna" :)

I increased the contrast and bumped up the saturation a bit for the picture as a whole and then used Lightroom's Adjustment brush to "paint" my son with a different white balance.

Selection tools and photo editing

This first photo is from a stone wall with a "porthole"in it on the Yestermorrow campus in Warren. Unfortunately, there's really nothing interesting lined up with the hole, so I put some sy begind it from one of my lake photos from last week. While I was playing with positioning I revealed a stripe of the lake at the bottom and decided to keep it that way - I liked the earth/air/water theme. It makes makes the whole think very vexillographic (For readers who aren't as geeky as me - vexillography is the art and practice of designing flags.)

I also like how old-school collagey this ended it. It looks like something I would have done as a teenager in the 90s cutting pictures out of a National Geographic.

This next picture is an experiment with the Adjustment Brush selection tools in Adobe Lightroom. I've used Photoshop for years and am pretty used to  how to do things there, but am really trying to explore Lightroom for this class. This is an attempt to adjust the exposure/levels for the background and subject independently.  In this case, I used this technique to abstract the background while leaving the subject alone. (The subject is the goat that lives in the pasture across the road from our house. My son and I visit him whenever we get the mail.)

Landscapes - Green River Reservoir

This weekend I was camping at Green River Reservoir, so this weeks landscapes are lake pictures. I love taking pictures of lakes - the possibilities that reflection brings to landscapes are a lot of fun to play with.

These first two pictures are all about reflection. They are both from a set taken at dusk from the shore next to our camp site. I waited for the colors to deepen and the lake surface to become still enough for good reflection. (Waiting's often an element of good photography, I'm finding.)

This one features a leaning tree and it's reflection. As the reading mentioned, landscape photography is sometimes about noticing what sticks out in a landscape. In this case, I liked how the diagonal was reinforced by the angle and placement of the clouds.

Here I focused just on the reflection of the clouds. To add in a focal point, I included some wood sticking out of the water. I liked how the texture of the wood contrasted with the water. The water bug (and associated ripples) provides a secondary focus (especially when viewed large).

I liked how this picture looked like a stage set. I did a lot of playing with contrasts between land masses at different distances, though it was hard to really separate them. I think this was one of my better attempts.

This one's all about the clouds! Good clouds can make some pretty exciting landscape photos, certainly. The curve of the shoreline makes it look like the clouds.sky are bulging down against the land a bit too.

This last one introduces a human element. Here's our canoe parked on an island. I took this one because I liked the gradient of color from the bright yellow of the canoe to the reflection of the canoe to the sandy bottom of the shallow water into the darker blues and greens of the deeper water. (I'm thinking about editing out the cloud, though - I find it a little distracting.)

misrepresentation, imperfection, and distortion

I’m posting this a bit late in the game (I was out of reach of a good internet connection most of this week), so I’m going to bypass some of the more obvious discussion of aesthetic techniques and composition to focus on the role of misrepresentation, imperfection, and distortion in photography. 

If photography is a fundamentally representational technology (a tool for capturing reality), what makes one photograph more pleasing or interesting than another must be either in how that reality is chosen, framed, arranged, etc (i.e. composition) or how that reality is distorted or changed in its capture. These distortions can be byproducts of the photographic process (e.g. the extremely shallow depth of field in macro photography), characteristics of specific photographic tools (e.g. the special feel of old Polaroids) or effects added in the developing/processing process. 

This photograph from my marcos assignment is a good example of how the photographic process can distort reality (and hopefully do so in an aesthetically pleasing way).

The misrepresentative aspects of photography are especially interesting to me. The use of photography not to simply record images but also to abstract and recontextualize reality seem like an important part of photography as art and not just snapshots/documentation.

In doing some research for this post, I happened across a fascinating blog post from German cultural theorist Bernd Stiegler on the role of imperfection in modern photography. Stiegler notes the prevelance of conscious imperfection in current photography, from deliberate technical errors to use of outdated and imperfect outdated cameras (e.g. the Lomography craze). He argues that “photography has become enamored of and committed to inaccuracy, because it enables a form of representation that aims to conceptualize reality in a unique aesthetic manner.”

I’m sure that this trend is in large part a reaction to the precision and relative simplicity of digital photography. When it becomes easy to produce “perfect” images, then next step is to explore the “imperfect” ones. What is interesting to me within the realm of digital photography, however is how the “perfect” and the “imperfect” can be brought together – how we can use both representation and misrepresentation as tools in our art.