Introduction – what we know so far

With the completion of The Frozen Moment, it’s clear that photography gives us the ability to reveal what the human eye is not able to isolate or retain.  The work of Muybridge, Worthington and Edgerton further reveals the beauty in nature that is happening all around us but is largely invisible.  During our recent video conference, Rob Bloomfield challenged us to look for the key elements in the first of the assessment criteria for this course in Edgerton’s Milk Drop Coronet, 1957 (below).

The criterion in question was as follows:

1. Demonstration of Technical and Visual Skills, which breaks down into
   • Materials – this could cover any element brought into making the photograph, such as light, equipment, props etc.
   • Techniques – what was used to make the image?
   • Observational skills – seeing the elements that make up the photograph as it evolves
   • Awareness – similar to observational skills, but more being aware of the context, the moments leading up to the decision to make the photograph
   • Design and compositional skills – how the photograph was executed.

When we were discussing this, my initial thought was that one would be unlikely to look at every image with these criteria in mind as thusfar, I’ve been considering the impact an image has on me personally and how that might work creatively.  However, I’ve come to realise that this gives our consideration of a photograph a simple structure to challenge the way we might think about the image.  Practicing using these simple titles may help understand the quality of a photograph.

With regard to Milk Drop Coronet, the obvious materials include milk, strobes and dye, but the technique was the ground-breaking use of strobes combined with the fastest shutter cameras available.  When we consider awareness and observation, it is here that the creative connection is made.  Edgerton was an engineer who began photographing the everyday.  His knowledge that the surface tension of the milk; the effect of the connection of the molecules at the boundary between the milk and air above it, would be disturbed by the falling droplet.  What he wanted to observe was how the energy from the drop dispersed as it impacted the surface.  What he revealed was the beauty of this natural physics in action.   His compositional skill with this image is in the cleanness of the the background and placing of the next falling drop above the coronet.   It is a stunning image, both technically and aesthetically.

For the Durational Space

In this Project, we see photography used to reveal time instead of stopping it.  Although my early photographs as a child exhibited motion blur for all the wrong reasons, the concept of using long exposure to capture the passing of time through a moving subject is something I am more than familiar with.

Capa’s photographs from Omaha beach are, as we know a combination of a number of elements that occurred deliberately and accidentally [1].  Capa set out to show the hell that is war by observing the emotion in a situation rather than trying to be a part of it.

“You cannot photograph war, because it is largely an emotion. He [Capa] did photograph that emotion by shooting beside it. He could show the horror of a whole people in the face of a child” – John Steinbeck

Capa’s creative vision in being an observer to war’s emotion is complimented in the Omaha beach photographs by other factors.  The film was botched during development which vastly reduced the number of usable negatives from the roll as well as increasing the drama of each through larger grain and blurring.  The solider in the image that has come to be called ‘The Face in the Surf” was later identified and tracked down.  Almost immediately after the photograph was taken, the soldier was injured and Capa found himself helping him onto the beach so that he could be treated.  In a way, Face in the Surf was a slice of time captured when the soldier was advancing on the enemy with the steely, committed expression on his face.  That slice of time, however was longer than the works examined in Project 1, starting with Capa’s observational awareness and ending with the soldier being shot.

For me, the use of movement in an image describes something that can only be appreciated during more than a passing glance.  What is clear in Capa’s famous image is that the blurred subjects in the foreground and background make one linger on the image long enough to observe the hell of war that Capa was witnessing.

With Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work Theatres, photographer uses time to completely remove traces of activity from the images.  Opening the shutter when the film starts and leaving until the final credits, the screen is completely blank; all traces of the movie failing to register on the photographic film.  In Sugimoto sought to use the static subjects in the image to frame the void of empty space, which reveals the beauty of the old theatre buildings themselves.   The effect of the movie providing slow, soft light and the absence of any people in the image leads the eye around the detail of Sugimoto’s framed emptiness.

In the documentary film Contacts, Sugimoto states that his approach to photography is built on deciding on the vision before deciding how to shoot it.  For example, his architectural series intends to show the conceptual shape of the buildings rather than the photograph being a source of precise detail.  To remove that distraction, Sugimoto deliberately made every image out of focus.  While it’s alien to thing that an out of focus image can be appealing, each photograph convey’s the vision perfectly.  The longer we look at one of these images, the more acclimatised we become to the absence of sharpness and are left with a pleasing view.  The shot below shows the twin towers of the World Trade Center dominating the skyline around them.  When we think of the scale of those buildings, this is exactly what the visualisation of the architecture is as opposed to the detail of the buildings themselves.

Michael Wesley took long exposure to greater extremes by capturing the passage of many months of time in a single frame.   For his series of images of the rebuilding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Wesley set cameras around the perimeter of the museum site and opened the shutter for nearly 3 years [].  During this huge duration, the camera captures the slow progression of the reconstruction works gradually layering up on the film as well as the tracks of the sun and moon across the sky as each day passes.  There resulting image is complex, hard to navigate but clearly shows the evolving of the work and the photograph as an observation.

For me though, his more interesting work is far less grand.  His shot of a vase of flowers dying slowly over time from the series Still Lives, shows the power of this technique [].  Here, the viewer can clearly see the flowers in their prime gradually moving downwards as they decay and drop petals on the table.  This image evokes a sadness related to the loss of the flowers but also how time can be compressed into a single, seemingly fleeting frame that is itself only looked at briefly.

My Own Work on Durational Space

As I stated previously, I am no stranger to the use of long exposure or the addition of accidental technique to achieve motion or drama in an image.  However, unlike Sugimoto, I’ve not previously envisioned the subject and then decided how to shoot it to achieve the aesthetic that I want.  Perhaps the most common of subjects for me have been photographing triathlon events and waterfalls, both needing movement to be revealed in order to make them interesting.  I have included two examples here.

The first is a shot I took at a race in 2016.  My friend is about to pass a cyclist much to his surprise and probably frustration.  I’d been practicing panning the camera with a slow shutter speed to include the movement in cycling as without that, the result can be very static.  The sense of speed of both sets of wheels in this shot is emphasised by the indecipherable writing on the rims of the red bike.  Her expression of pure focus on the job in hand is offset by the guy looking back at her which suggests that he is unsettled.  The background and foreground detail is largely lost, even though the spectators can be seen clearly enough.

The second photograph is one that I shot with a pinhole camera, which I’d not used before.  I was at shooting West Burton Falls in North Yorkshire with my DSLR and the technique was all about capturing the movement of the water over the falls themselves.  When it came to this camera, the extremely small aperture of f132 and no control other than choice of film ISO and shutter ‘speed’, a long exposure with this camera would be all I could really achieve.  What I failed to appreciate was that film has a non-linearity of sensitivity decay called Reciprocity Failure.  This is the way that the film gradually loses its light sensitivity over the duration that it is exposed, which is not a problem at typical speeds such as 1/30th.  In fact, when the exposure slows to over 1s the reciprocity failure value for that film stock means an even longer exposure to get the same amount on the film, e.g. 1s might instead be 2 or even 4 seconds to get the same equivalent exposure.  I had not taken this into account with my 15 second exposure in this photograph.  The resulting happy accident was an underexposed shot of the whole distance to the falls from my position, which in reality was only about 50m away.  Pinhole cameras tend to have substantial light roll-off from all but the centre region of the image so what shouldn’t have worked at all, ended up being a softly lit, glass-like waterfall with almost no sharp details to distract from it.

In concluding the study for this Project, I recently visited London for a short break.  On the overland train back to our hotel, I noticed the way that perspective of the lit skyline changed as the train moved past.  In a similar way to Maarten Vanvolsem [4], I turned to my smartphone that has an app that creates a pseudo slow shutter speed.  It achieves long speeds by taking multiple shorter speed shots of say 1/2 second and overlays them.  For the two images below I pressed the phone to the train window to reduce internal reflections from the glass and shot the skyline with exposures of 3 to 5 seconds.

 

The first shot of the Brixton skyline on the way into the station shows the effect of layering, which for some reason the phone did not stitch the three images together properly.  The second shows the skyline crossing the river, with the motion of the train, its motion and the window glass distorting the cranes on the horizon.

In conclusion, the durational space takes us away from the stationary.  The viewer looks at the image for more than simple sharpness and lack of blur or noise and instead embraces the feeling of time passing.  This passage of time is much like the ‘moment’ that we achieve with fast shutter speeds, but instead of revealing what we don’t see, it reveals what we might not have noticed.  In the case of Capa, it emphasises the emotion and terror or the war. In Sugimoto’s work, we are directly to consider the unnoticed and the idea behind the subject and its place in the composition.  I mean, when was the last time we noticed the interior of a cinema during a showing of a film?  Wesley’s work draws our attention to progression over time, from the simple act of a plant dying to the major renovation of a museum building.  Finally, the brain’s ability to see the movement in a still image means too that the way the photograph was shot could also be abstract as with Vanvolsem’s Contraction of Movement image [4].

References

[1]. Wiess, H, 2018, Visual Culture article, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-photographer-robert-capa-risked-capture-d-day-images-lost, accessed February 2019

[2] Sugimoto, M, https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com, accessed February 2019

[3] Gramovich, M, 2015, Time Shows, Ultra-long exposures in the work of Michael Wesley, https://birdinflight.com/inspiration/experience/time-shows-ultra-long-exposure-in-works-of-michael-wesely.html, accessed February 2019

[4] OCA, 2018, Photography 1 – Expressing your Vision Course Notes

 

The Brief

Start by doing some of your own research into the photographers discussed.  Then, using fast shutter speeds, try to isolate a frozen moment of time in a moving subject.  Depending on the available light you may have to select a high ISO to avoid visible blur in the photograph.  Add a selection of shots, together with relevant shooting data and a description of process (how you captured the images), to your learning log.

Preparation

For this exercise, I wanted to shoot something that reminded me of the research in the Project ‘The Frozen Moment”.  The pioneers who used photography to investigate the physics of the natural world interested me because of my engineering past.  The almost accidental beauty of the images they produced offer both that instant slice of time, but also a close and personal view of phenomena that had previously been postulated rather than observed.  For my Freeze shot, I wanted to do something similar.

My idea

To capture the falling grains of sand in an hourglass and suspend them in time.  This idea came to me when thinking about the time element to the work in the project.  Hourglasses are a classical tool for measuring time, dating back to 350 BC in ancient Rome and are still used today for fairly mundane tasks such as boiling an egg for the correct duration.  The grains inside an hourglass fall in a column under the influence of gravity and move rapidly, so to freeze their motion with a fast shutter speed would be a good example of what Szarkowski was talking about [1].

The setup

My first plan was to shoot the hourglass closeup with a continuous LED light source and fast shutter speed.  I selected my 200mm f/4 macro lens which is capable of focusing down to 50cm and a Manfrotto LED.  This lamp provides an even beam of light at 3 different power levels and I’ve used it many times to illuminate small areas.  My abstract images in Exercise 1.3 used this light, with different gels applied.   The layout is shown below.

 

Pretty early on, I realised that there was insufficient light to allow for a high shutter speed (> 1/2000th of second was what I was aiming for).  Increasing the ISO obviously started to degrade the image quality and although the Nikon D4 is capable of ISO 204,800 through clever use of it’s electronics, I wanted the images to be usable.  So, I turned to the work of AM Worthington, who started using electrical sparks as lighting sources; an idea taken forward by Harold Edgerton.  Both men saw that if you strobed the light source, the shutter could be a lot slower, something which they had no real choice of doing in the early days of automatic shutter design.   The durations of some of their flashes were as short as 1/1,000,000th second.   As long as the flash edge is short, any motion in the subject is frozen, a technique used today by fashion photographers in the studio.

I have used flash sources previously so decided to start with my speedlight flashgun.   I connected the flash to the camera via a cable so that it could positioned relative to the subject instead of mounted in the hot shoe.  With flash sources, the common misconception is that the higher the power, the more intense the light.  In actual fact, the unit simply extends the duration of the flash to get the intense light coverage.  For this shot, I wanted to have the shortest possible flash time, so I set the power to its minimum; 1/128th of its range.

I had purchased an hourglass with black sand grains, which against a white background would give a good level of contrast.  For the background, I used a piece of semi-gloss photo paper.

The Photograph

Reflection

My early attempts with the flash were much better technically than those taken with the LED light source, mainly due to getting a good amount of light on the grains of sand to give contrast to the background.   At ISO1600, the noise performance of the D4 is not perceptively degrading the image quality.  This left the composition itself.  My original intention was to freeze he falling grains as they exit the upper part of the hourglass, effectively creating a column in the lower section.  After several attempts to capture the brief moment when that occurs, I had a frame that didn’t really work.  The composition above has balance in the upper and lower sections of the hourglass in each corner of the square-cropped frame.   I am happy with the simplicity of the composition and the choice of converting to Black & White to remove any colour present in the light fringing within the glass.  There was enough light to pick out the grains of sand and a short enough pulse to freeze the movement.  What puzzled me for a while was how some of the grains are very sharp and some are not, depending on their position in the ‘column’.   Even with a shallow depth of focus, they are more apparently random than I had expected.  I then realised, that I was viewing them through a curved glass whose imperfections are most likely to be the cause.  The effect of mixing sharpness with softness really works for me, though.  From a compositional perspective, it is the presence of the grains in the top section that have yet to fall that makes the hourglass stand out.  While the image I was trying to shoot was ‘clever’, it didn’t work as a photograph for me.  I’ve included the rejected image below.

The Rejected Image