Before creating my photography pieces i wanted to learn more about photography.
Leading Lines These images consist of lines which our eyes are naturally drawn to when viewing the photos. Here are some of my examples of leading lines photos. Rules of thirds Rule of thirds is on of the main rules when taking picture. The human eye is naturally drawn to intersection points when an image is split into thirds with two imaginary horizontal and landscape lines. By doing this you add balance to the image which draws the viewers attention to the main subject of the picture. Balancing Elements When using rule of thirds, it can cause the rest of the image to look bare leaving a noticeable space in the image. This void left can disrupt the balance of the image which is where balancing elements comes into place. You can do this by introducing activity in the blank spaces which will add more balance into your picture. Framing When taking a picture there are many opportunities to create a frame for your picture examples can be trees, hole sand archways etc. By placing a frame around the edge of an image, you will isolate the subject of an image which brings the viewers attention to the subject. Lighting Lighting can be key to setting the mood in the pictures and the way they look. Light direction can change the way the subject of a picture appears in a picture depending on the light and colour. The lighting can be altered when taking images by using equipment such as reflectors and diffusers to try and get the ideal lighting for the images you are going to take. Macro Macro Photography is when you take photos of a smaller object and magnifies it in size. Macro images can help you find smaller details in the images due to the enlarged size and make fine images. You need the right equipment to be able to take macro images, usually being from special types of camera to enable to take these types of images. Macro photography are especially good for taking images of insects and know for taking pictures of plants. My Project For my project i decided that i wanted to take pictures that show nature taking over man. I researched into pictures which show this from the internet to give me an idea of these images when i am taking pictures of my own. In these pictures i have got for my research i have identified ways in which nature taking over man can be portrayed through image. These involve natural happenings such as rust, wind, growth of trees etc. affected objects made by man such as statues, houses and cars for example. Obviously some of these pictures are from foreign countries meaning it is unrealistic i will be able to take photos of these places. How ever i will take the ideas of these images and replicate the effects in my pictures.
Nick Brandt is an English photographer, born in 1966 London, who is well known for his fascinating images from Africa. He takes the pictures of animals and places before they are destroyed by man. This photographer holds similar interests to what i am focusing on my project. He photographs on medium-format black and white film without telephoto or zoom lenses. Brandt uses photoshop to edit his photos typically by burning images and giving his separate look to who his images. The images he produces are as they take them and haven’t had anything removed or placed into the images. Below is a web article talking about Nick Brandt. “Nick Brandt has established himself as a powerful new voice in photography who focuses on documenting Africa’s endangered wildlife, writes David Clark For Nick Brandt, photography is both a means of artistic expression and a way of focusing attention on endangered species. His beautiful, elegiac and often melancholy photographs are driven by his passion for animals and his ambition to help save Africa’s dwindling wildlife population. He began working in photography in 2000 after a successful career as a director of commercials and pop videos. He worked with artists such as Moby, XTC and most famously Michael Jackson, and he first visited East Africa while filming Jackson’s Earth Song video. It was the beginning of a passion for this region and its wildlife that has changed Nick’s life. ‘There is something profoundly iconic, mythological even, about the animals of East and southern Africa,’ he wrote in his book On This Earth (2005). ‘There is also something deeply emotionally stirring and affecting about the plains of Africa – those vast green rolling plains punctuated by graphically perfect acacia trees under the huge skies. It just gets you. Gets you in the heart, gets you in the gut.’ Brandt approaches his subjects from a fine-art perspective. While mainstream wildlife photographers shoot in colour, his images are black & white; instead of using digital kit, he chooses a medium-format Pentax 67 II film camera; and although most of his contemporaries use long telephoto lenses, Brandt prefers getting closer to the subject using much shorter lenses. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of his work is that he completely avoids dramatic animal action shots, such as the chase and kill. Brandt’s images usually take the form of static and meditative portraits that show animals as individuals. ‘I want to get a real sense of intimate connection with each of the animals – with that specific chimp, that particular lion or elephant in front of me,’ he wrote in On This Earth. ‘I believe that being that close to the animal makes a huge difference in the photographer’s ability to reveal its personality. You wouldn’t take a portrait of a human being with a telephoto lens from 100 feet away and expect to capture their soul; you’d move in close.’ In doing this, Brandt invites us to look afresh at familiar species and to recapture a sense of wonder at how truly extraordinary they are. The originality of Brandt’s photographs has inevitably led to speculation about exactly how they were created. He uses only three lenses – 55mm, 105mm and 200mm (the latter is equivalent to around 100mm in 35mm terms). He prefers using Kodak T-Max 100 film, and shoots through heavy ND grad and red filters. After conventional development, the images are further refined at the post-capture stage after being scanned into Photoshop. Although he uses digital techniques to improve his images through greater shadow detail and tonal range, he rejects more overt tampering, such as ‘cloning in’ additional animals or replacing skies. Sometimes the perfect placing of animals in a scene has led some critics to question whether his images have been digitally altered. However, Brandt insists that his photographs result from many hours, days and sometimes weeks of patiently waiting for all the elements to come together, rather than using a post-processing quick fix. His first exhibition, in 2004, followed by On This Earth a year later, rapidly established Brandt as a major new voice in fine-art photography (he, however, was extremely unhappy with the book’s printing quality and has since disowned it). His second collection, A Shadow Falls (2009), further cemented his reputation, and this was followed by On This Earth, A Shadow Falls (2010), a collection of the best images from the two books with greatly improved printing quality. In 2010, Brandt started work on the third in his trilogy of books and is currently around halfway through the project. These images are much darker and bleaker than those shot in previous years, and reflect Brandt’s growing anger and despair at the accelerating pace of the destruction of African wildlife. Brandt says he was always pessimistic about the animals’ future, but that after 2008 things deteriorated even further than he anticipated. For example, according to some experts, the greatly increased demand for ivory, particularly from China, has resulted in as much as 10% of the elephant population being killed each year. The animals killed have included many of the particular elephants featured in Brandt’s earlier work. His most recent images include a photograph of a long line of park rangers holding the tusks of elephants killed by poachers (a grim update of his earlier photograph of a herd of elephants walking in line), a giraffe skull in an empty, dried-up landscape and the calcified remains of dead animals that Brandt has resurrected in a macabre re-creation of the creatures they once were. These photographs are a powerful condemnation of our collective failure to put an end to the destruction of these once-plentiful species. Brandt’s belief that urgent action is needed to halt the dramatic decline in animal numbers led him, in September 2010, to set up the Big Life Foundation, a non-profit organisation that aims to put an end to poaching and conserve animals in their natural habitat. Big Life has financed the hiring of a number of rangers to patrol Amboseli National Park in Kenya, with the result that many poachers have been arrested. In fact, the Foundation’s efforts have been so successful that Brandt plans to extend its area of operation.”
Eve Arnold was born April 21st 1912 in Philadelphia. She was known for photographing many iconic figures in the 20th century. Eve also photographed the poor and migrant workers, civil right protestors and disabled war veterans. She was responsible for the famous Marilyn Monroe image which is very iconic. Even Arnold died January 4th 2012 – London, England. “What drove and kept me going over the decades? What was the motive force? If I had to use a single word, it would be curiosity.” This quote from the pioneering photojournalist Eve Arnold, who died in January, aged 99, is among the various first-person wall texts that punctuate All About Eve, a retrospective of her work. Just how curious she was is evident in the timeline of the projects she undertook in her long career. It takes up one whole wall and makes for an illuminating read, not just because of the longevity of her career – from the late 1940s to the 90s – but for the range of subjects she tackled. In 1978 alone, for instance, she shot several portraits, including Dirk Bogarde, Francis Bacon and Irene Papas, alongside advertisements for Optrex, the English Tourist Board, Pentax and Rolex as well as assignments on the White Jews of Cochin, Indian troubadours and the London Symphony Orchestra for the Sunday Times magazine. Her work rate was relentless – she was still travelling on assignments well into her 70s – but as this potted history of her career shows the quality seldom wavered. All About Eve is essentially a celebration of Arnold’s life and work, the photographs chosen by her close friends the curator Zelda Cheatle and the academic Brigitte Lardinois, who worked closely with Arnold at the Magnum Photos agency in the 1990s. It’s a big, wide-ranging show selected from the vast archive of one anonymous private collector that includes many of Arnold’s best-known photographs – a series each onMarilyn Monroe and Malcolm X – and several that are not so instantly recognisable. There are one or two surprises. The first is a beautiful self-portrait from 1948 which greets you at the entrance to the show. Here she looks young, chic and totally at ease before her own camera. As with many Eve Arnold photographs it comes with a story attached. Apparently she was accidentally locked into a friend’s studio in Pennsylvania and, bored, began photographing herself to pass the time. The result is characteristically self-assured. The earliest pictures in the main gallery are her studies from 1951 of a group of black migrant labourers who journeyed north every year at harvest time to work on white-owned farms in Long Island. There are perhaps unconscious traces of the 30s work of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange here, but Arnold’s sombre and slightly surreal-looking group portrait of the farm owners, the Davis family, enjoying a picnic among the graves of their ancestors, is all her own. Throughout, you marvel once again at Arnold’s ability to gain access to her subjects at work and at play. Her many portraits of celebrities, which she called “personalities”, are the product of a more open and innocent era, when stars were not so paranoid about controlling their image. There’s a beautifully intimate shot of the film director John Huston and his then teenage daughter Anjelica, sketching. Arnold caught a young Michael Caine cavorting playfully with Candice Bergen in a break from shooting The Magus in Majorca, and Marilyn Monroe lunching in the woods with her husband, Arthur Miller, on the set of The Misfits. There’s a great shot of a young Andy Warhol deeply engrossed in a painting in the Factory in New York, and another of a luminous Mia Farrow in rehearsal. I’ve always been drawn more to Eve Arnold’s in-depth reportage, the great commissions she did when she was very much a pioneering woman in a man’s world. Again, her ability to be in the right place at the right time, and to catch it up close and personal, is almost uncanny. Her photograph of leaders of the American Nazi party attending a Black Muslim rally in 1961 – they were united in the belief that America should be racially segregated – has a chilling power 50 years later. A snatched black-and-white portrait, starkly titled Divorce in Moscow, USSR, 1966, is powerful in an altogether different way. In a drably functional room, a distraught man looks away from the camera to the right, while his wife stares stoically off in the opposite direction. The body language speaks volumes: his head rests on his hand; her hands are clasped tight, her wedding ring just visible. The physical space between the couple is minimal, but the emotional space is vast. In the background, oblivious, a man reads a newspaper, while another is engrossed in a book. Arnold catches the full weight of this fraught moment, and the universal truth that great personal suffering, as Auden put it, often “takes place when someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along”. It’s an extraordinarily poignant photograph: the decisive moment rendered just as powerfully, if not more so, as in a great piece of observational writing or film-making. Eve Arnold was a single-minded and determined documentary photographer, and a portraitist who won the trust of her famous subjects. Her travels took her to Afghanistan, Cuba, China and Mongolia, where she made a wonderfully evocative colour series of young women training to be horse riders in the national militia. Somehow it all came together in a visual style that amounts to a signature: nothing more or less than the world according to Eve Arnold.” http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/mar/04/all-about-eve-arnold-review
Robert Capa was Born October 22nd 1913 in Budapest, Hungary. He was a well known War Photographer covering 5 wars. The Spanish Civil War, Second Sino Japanese War, World War 2, 1948 Arab Israeli War and the first Indochina War. Robert Capa died in Vietnam on May the 28th. Below is a web article about Robert Capa. “Photographer Robert capa during the Spanish civil war, May 1937. Photo by Gerda Taro. He was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, where his parents were tailors. At the age of 18, Capa moved to Vienna, later relocated to Prague, and finally settled in Berlin: all cities that were centers of artistic and cultural ferment in this period. He started studies in journalism at the German Political College, but the Nazi Party instituted restrictions on Jews and prohibited them from colleges. Capa relocated to Paris, where he adopted the name ’Robert Capa’ in 1934. At that time, he had already been a hobby-photographer. In 1934 “André Friedman”, as he still called himself then, met Gerda Pohorylle, a German Jewish refugee. The couple lived in Paris where André taught Gerda photography. Together they created the name and image of “Robert Capa” as a famous American photographer. Gerda took the name Gerda Taro and became successful in her own right. She travelled with Capa to Spain in 1936 intending to document the Spanish Civil War. In July 1937, Capa traveled briefly to Paris while Gerda remained in Madrid. She was killed near Brunete during a battle. Capa, who was reportedly engaged to her, was deeply shocked and never married. In February 1943 Capa met Elaine Justin, then married to the actor John Justin. They fell in love and the relationship lasted until the end of the war. Capa spent most of his time in the frontline. Capa called the redheaded Elaine “Pinky,” and wrote about her in his war memoir, slightly out of Focus. In 1945, Elaine Justin broke up with Capa; she later married Chuck Romine. Some months later Capa became the lover of the actress Ingrid Bergman, who was touring in Europe to entertain American soldiers. In December 1945, Capa followed her to Hollywood, where he worked for American International Pictures for a short time. The relationship ended in the summer of 1946 when Capa traveled to Turkey. From 1936 to 1939, Capa worked in Spain, photographing the Spanish Civil War, along with Gerda Taro, his companion and professional photography partner, and David Seymour. In 1938, he traveled to the Chinese city of Hankow, now called Wuhan, to document the resistance to the Japanese invasion. Robert capa had a very unique photographic life and career he was with the troops and the soldiers around the world so he can be able to get the people back at home see whats going on and how the war was and how hard it really was he put himself right in the middle of the war to show what was going on in world war II his style of pictures was great because it was up close and personal and it really touched you when you saw what was going on on the field.” http://kirolosabdelsayed.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/history-of-photography-robert-capa/
Ansel Adams was born February 20th 1902 San Francisco, United States. Ansel mostly took Landscape images in black and white of the Amercian West. Ansel died on April 22nd in 1984. Below is a web article on Ansel Adams. “Ansel Adams was an American photographer who is widely known for his modern day representations that are made on calendars, posters, and in books. He is best remembered as a prominent figure in black and white photography. Adams was a great environmentalist too. The multi-dimensional genius in Adams made him develop the Zone System which determines proper exposure and adjusts the contrast of the final print. Adams was a guiding light in developing the field of photography with his teachings and practices of resolution, clarity and the importance of sharpness in images. Adams was a great lover of large-format cameras which were considered trouble because of their sizes, weights, setup time, and film cost but their high resolution helped ensure sharpness in his images. Adams is also greatly known for being the founder of Group f/64 which was a group of seven 20th century San Francisco photographers sharing photographic style characterized by sharp-focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western (U.S.) viewpoint. Adams’ photographs are widely distributed around the world even today. Ansel Adams was a famous American photographer and environmentalist. He was born near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California, on Feb. 20, 1902. When he was four years old, his nose was broken when he was knocked to the ground by an aftershock of the great earthquake. His nose was crooked for the rest of his life. One of his earliest memories was seeing smoke from the great fire that followed the earthquake. Growing Up He was an only child who performed poorly at school, so his parents had him tutored at home. Although he was hyperactive and possibly dyslexic, he was thought to possess an eidetic memory, which is a form of photographic memory that includes memories of smells, sounds, and other senses. Ansel enjoyed music and taught himself to play the piano when he was twelve. He also enjoyed nature and loved walking in the sand dunes near his home. His father gave him a telescope, and they shared a great interest in astronomy. A Photographer is Born in Yosemite National Park When he was fourteen, Ansel read In the Heart of the Sierras by James Mason Hutchings, and he convinced his parents to take a vacation in Yosemite National Park. His parents gave him a Kodak Brownie camera for the trip, and Ansel’s interest in photography was born as he tramped through the park’s mountains. When he talked about the trip, Ansel said, “the splendor of Yosemite burst upon us and it was glorious… One wonder after another descended upon us… There was light everywhere… A new era began for me.” Some of his most famous photographs were of Yosemite. His work helped raise awareness of and interest in America’s national parks. In 1927, Ansel took one of his best known photos, “Monolith, the Face of Half Dome” at Yosemite. Ansel learned basic darkroom technique working part-time for a photo finisher in San Francisco. In 1927, Albert Bender, a businessman and patron of the arts, helped publish Ansel’s first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. Ansel soon got paid for photos, and he began to think about a career as a photographer instead of a pianist. In 1933 he opened his own art and photography gallery in San Francisco. He often worked for eighteen or more hours a day, for days and weeks on end. He learned from and exhibited with other famous photographers of the time including Alfred Stieglitz, Imogen Cunningham, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston. They developed photography as a form of art. Ansel helped to establish the first department of photography at a museum at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.” http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/ansel-adams-269.php
David Royston Bailey is a photographer born on the 2nd January 1938 who took very famous portraits including Mick Jagger, The Beatles and the Kray Twins. He did many other famous photos during the 60s where he worked for Vogue. David Bailey is widely regarded as the nations best photographer. “David Bailey, (born Jan. 2, 1938, London, Eng.), British photographer known for his advertising, celebrity, and fashion photographs. David Bailey, whose career in photography would eventually bring him into contact with the high reaches of British society, came from a working-class East London background. Educated in London, he left school at a young age, worked at a series of menial jobs, and served with the Royal Air Force in Malaysia in 1957–58. Having been interested from his youth in painting and photography, in 1959 he apprenticed at the John French Studio, where he became involved in fashion photography. In 1960 he began to photograph for British Vogue, where he worked for about 15 years, first on staff and later as a freelancer. He also freelanced for other magazines and newspapers. Bailey’s fashion work and celebrity portraiture, characterized by stark backgrounds and dramatic lighting effects, transformed British fashion and celebrity photography from chic but reserved stylization to something more youthful and direct. His work reflects the 1960s British cultural trend of breaking down antiquated and rigid class barriers by injecting a working-class or “punk” look into both clothing and artistic products. Bailey himself became a celebrity who epitomized “swinging London”; he was known for his affairs with several celebrated women, among them the model Jean Shrimpton and the actress Catherine Deneuve, whom he married in 1965 (divorced 1972). He is thought to have inspired the role of the photographer, Thomas, in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-up (1966). Bailey also directed television commercials and produced a number of books and documentary films. In 1972 he began publishing the fashion and photography magazine Ritz. Although he continued to photograph celebrities for publications such as Harper’s Bazaar and The London Times throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, he began to turn his attention to television commercials. His documentary subjects include Cecil Beaton, Andy Warhol, and Luciano Visconti. Books of his photographs include Box of Pin-ups (1964), Goodbye Baby & Amen: A Sarabande for the Sixties (1969), Another Image: Papua New Guinea (1975), David Bailey’s Trouble and Strife (1980), David Bailey, London NWI: Urban Landscapes (1982), Imagine (1985), David Bailey’s Rock and Roll Heroes (1997), and David Bailey: Chasing Rainbows (2001). He was created a Commander of the British Empire in 2001.” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1255819/David-Bailey Pictures I took