The Brief

Make a Google Images search for ‘landscape’, ‘portrait’ or any ordinary subject such as an ‘apple’ or ‘sunset’.  Add a screen grab of a representative page to your learning log and not down the similarities you find between the images.

Now take a number of your own photographs of the same subject, paying special attention to the ‘Creativity’ criteria at the end of Part One.  You might like the subject to appear ‘incidental’, for instance by using focus or framing.  Or you might begin with the observation of Ernst Haas , or the camera vision of Bill Brandt.  Or if you are feeling bold, you might forget about your camera completely and think of the tricky question of originality in a different way – http://penelopeumbrico.net/index.php/project/suns

Add a final image to your learning log, together with a selection of preparatory shots.  In your notes describe how your photograph or representation differs from your Google Image search of images of the same subject.

Introduction

In starting this exercise, I thought about what I had just been working on in Ex 4.3.  My subject was a small shell that I found on a beach.  Like Haas’ apple[1], I looked at the shell for a very long time, noticing the shape, colour and texture of the inner and outer surfaces.   I had seen many shells before, but I looked at the details of this one like it was the first one I’d really looked at.  I guess the difference between my reaction and Haas’ was that I wasn’t trying to describe the shell.  Instead, I was creating a narrative based upon what I saw and how those elements reminded me of completely different subjects.  Both mine and Haas’s reactions were emotional, but our creative viewpoint differed slightly.  When reading the notes leading up to this exercise, there was reference to the conflicting viewpoints of celebrated photographers appearing confusing at this stage in our studies.  For me, it’s not confusing but their combined effort in seeking originality.  As the very first page of this course showed us, the world has been completely photographed already, so our personal voice is how we bring originality to something that has most likely already gone before.

For this exercise, I chose to search for ‘church’ in Google Images, not because I have some connection with religion, but because I’ve always seen them as a part of the British landscape.   Living in a rural area, there are plenty of potential subjects and I already knew they were all different from each other in some way; size, layout, how elaborate or simple.   However, how would the photographers online see a church in their images?

The Search “Church”

Reviewing the page from Google Images, the first thing I noted was the mix of external vs. internal shots.  Of the 32 images in the search window, there are 18 external and 14 internal shots which is pretty evenly balanced.  When we look closer at the perspectives of the photographs, we see that the external shots largely follow a pattern of traditional composition.  The viewpoints include the gable end of the building, predominantly where the spire or tower is.  The photographers compose so that the church is the dominant subject and often use the rule of thirds or centering to emphasise the traditional shape of the building.  For example:-

This image shows the church from the spire end and positioned slightly off the left third line, leaving a large blank area to the right.  The photographer looks to emphasise the abandoned feeling by placing the church against natural emptiness with just the trees and hedges surrounding it.  The use of high contrast and structure to the finished image further emphasises this.

Another representation of a church exterior shows the structure in symmetry.  Here, the emphasis is on the architecture itself with the clear, unfussy plasterwork contrasted against a bright blue sky.

Most of the other images in the search follow this style and the same can be seen even more clearly in the interior shots.  Here, the perspective of most photographers is to capture scale and symmetry.  Most of the shots are wide angle views down the aisle with the huge structures that make up the walls and roof on show in complete balance within the composition.  For example:-

The second detail of the Google search was that the images are from churches all over the world.  The two exteriors shown above are both US, but there are also churches from the UK (as above), Australia and an interior shot from India.  It would appear, then that the global perspective of churches is about their lofty designs, scale and level of grandeur and that it’s almost unconnected to the denomination or culture.

The final detail I noticed from the search was about Google itself.  As a regular user, I’d seen the feature at the top of the window where the search engine groups popular searches together, but hadn’t recognised its significance.  In the context of this exercise, what the groups tell us is how people relate to the term ‘church’, particularly where iconography and photography are concerned.  With this search we see groups around religions (Catholic and Baptist), symbols such as crosses and alters and the connection with people (youth, family, weddings etc).  With this exercise, our voice is informed by what we’ve seen before as well as the subject’s historical relevance or connection to us.  This ties in with Burgin:

There can never be any question of ‘just looking’: vision is structured in such a way that the look will always-already entrain a history of the subject. (Burgin, 1982, p 88)

Of the photographers mentioned in the notes, Burgin who is more of a conceptual artist and writer than photographer, interested me the most.  I tend to agree with his appraisal that photography is manipulation; the image is constructed to either tell a story or connect with a viewer emotionally.  The idea that one cannot look at a subject without some form of idea about it in mind, or a story to tell resonates with me.  In his essay Art, Common Sense and Photography, Burgin states that “Photography wouldn’t exist without manipulation”, referring to its use in influencing socio-political points of view.

Developing my own Personal Voice

When I think of churches, I’m reminded of memories of my earliest encounters with them.  As a child, I was encouraged to attend Sunday school and the subsequent church service.  For some time, this was a given, but as I got older I began to value the weekend time away from school and it soon became a chore more than an enjoyment.  As a growing boy, I started to resent the idea of church and my engagement with it.  What I saw was an institution where people did what they were told, from kneeling to reciting the Lord’s Prayer out loud, something I refuse to do to this day.   Naturally, I progressed my understanding of the importance of church in the community, particularly in the rural areas where I have lived.  To Burgin’s point, my history with the church changed.  When I first looked at the Google Images search, I related to the grand buildings, vast interiors and orderly gatherings of people receiving the lesson.  This is how I started to see the church, more of a symbol than a building and an institution that I have had more contact with as an adult.  Now in my mid-forties, I’ve attended many weddings (including my own), christenings and an alarmingly increasing number of funerals in church.  Each of these has shaped how I see the physical manifestation of such a building.

For this exercise though, I wanted to create a viewpoint from my childhood.

The Images

The exercise called for a single image, but I elected to select a few that represented my vision.

Review

Photo 1 

I saw this image whilst paying for my ticket in the car park opposite Tewkesbury Abbey.  The building can be seen from pretty much any position in the town, such is its imposing  size.  Here, the damaged car park sign declaring “No Exit” reminded me of the long slog through the services I attended as a child.  I made the Abbey the subject without being the point of focus.

Photo 2

Another view approaching the abbey was inspired by the idea of these buildings being large and important.  From the perspective of a child, the huge building partially hidden by the trees is an intimidating prospect and while my own memories are more of a quaint village church, the place still seemed vast to me.  The stormy weather adds to the sense of foreboding

Photo 3

This sign reminded me more of my earliest memories of churches for other purposes, in this case pointing to where you might end up if you don’t have a safe journey.  The first funeral that I attended that wasn’t an elderly family member was following the death of a friend of mine when we were 17.  Sadly, it was the beginning of something more regular in life as I got older.  I can’t help seeing the humour in this composition, though.

Photo 4

As with Photo 3, I’ve recently started to notice the impacts and often humour of signs and how they are juxtaposed with another subject.  I’m nearing completion of a series of photographs called Mixed Messages and while this isn’t really in keeping with its theme, I noticed the humour of a church being some kind of spiritual construction site.  It was certainly an expectation that I would attend church, even though I had no choice in the matter.  It was a while before I understood the religion that I was born into and the traditions of Christian worship.  Wanted to also emphasise scale in this image against the small construction sign.

Photo 5

This image captures the essence of what I was trying to create in this exercise.  The entrance to the Sunday school has what I have always thought as a statue of bored children.  While I doubt it’s what the artist intended when they sculpted it, the fact that it is overlooked by the huge bell tower of the abbey made this image fairly easy to visualise.  The bonus here was the mother and son who sat on the bench as I was setting up my photograph.  Shifting emphasis onto them, I was grateful for their naturally bored expressions, particularly the boy.  It reminded me of those Sunday school sessions that led to the long church service.

How do these differ from Google?

In conclusion, the obvious differences are that my photographs are about the abbey without actually being about the abbey itself.  I’ve tried to represent what the building and its purpose means to the child version of me and that is one of presence and purpose.  I chose the abbey because it is a typical building that has been photographed many times over the years.  A quick Google Image search of ‘Tewkesbury Abbey” yields the following.

The pattern is the same as before.  Classical views of the structure both internal and external but unlike before, the grouping of the images is much more about the detail of the abbey itself, without the traditional religious iconography.   I look at these photographs and think back to Burgin and the idea that it’s easy to fall back on memory and subsequently easy to relate to everyone’s memories of a particular subject.  Breaking away from that requires either looking for something new in the subject, or connecting to something from the past.   I was reminded also of a photograph that I took a few years ago during some major flooding around the abbey.  What I saw was a proud building standing above the water with its reflection clear and sharp below.  I’ve included it here.

References

[1] Haas, E, ‘Ernst Haas, Colour Correction’, Visura Magazine, http://www.visuramagazine.com/ernst-haas

The Brief

Use a combination of quality, contrast, direction and colour to light an object in oder to reveal its form.  For this exercise, we recommend a natural or organic object such as an egg or stone rather than a man-made object.  Man-made or cultural artefacts can be fascinating to light but they’re already authored to some degree, which requires interpretation by the photographer:  this exercise is just about controlling the light to reveal form.

Introduction

The further instructions for this exercise discuss how a simple, organic subject can be photographed with an equally simple ‘studio’ arrangement and selection of light source.  Over the years, I have enjoyed shooting in a studio environment and am still in the process of building my own at home.  The idea of being able to completely control the environment and concentrating what I see in the subject has always appealed to me, even though I have enjoyed spending long periods of time outside, shooting nature in uncontrollable natural light.  I believe the appeal stems from me not being a patient person; waiting for the perfect conditions to present themselves often causes me some challenges.  Studio work offers the ability to adapt quickly to something in the subject frees the photographer from the environmental elements.  Knowing that I have lots of studio equipment that could be used for this exercise, and the space to set some form of studio up, was reassuring.    However, the idea of keeping everything really simple made this exercise more interesting and in the end more rewarding.

The Subject

A recent weekend in Weymouth training for an upcoming swimming event, offered me plenty of interesting objects to chose from; a variety of textured pebbles, pieces of driftwood and shells.  After collecting a number of samples, I settled on the one shown below.

 

The shell has interesting textures but little in terms of colour variation, which I thought would make revealing it’s details more of a challenge both from a technical and artistic perspective.

The Setup

The first thing I wanted to decide upon was the type of shot I wanted to take for this series.  The options included high key, which traditionally uses a strong key light on the subject and a lit white background and low key, where the background is either black or a dark texture that doesn’t reflect light.  An example of both that I shot during an art nude workshop can be seen below.

The simpler of the two setups is low key, being achieved with with minimal lighting.  I elected to use a piece of cardboard in an ‘infinity curve’ as described in the notes.  By curving the cardboard from the vertical to horizontal plane, there is no perceived join in the between the planes, making the background appear continuous.  If depth of field is set correctly and the light is at a level where it rolls off just behind the subje
ct, the card appears to be completely black.  My simple rig is shown below.

For light, I turned to my continuous LED light by Manfrotto.  This small light array can be adjusted to three levels, is very lightweight for hand-holding and has a tripod socket.   The illumination is at a colour temperature of 5600K, which is somewhere between natural daylight and overcast sky.  I fitted the LED to a lighting stand to keep the illumination consistent for this shoot.   Other equipment included another small LED torch, my mobile phone,  tripod for the camera and a cable shutter release.

The brief was to take different photographs of the subject by varying either the light or perspective.  As my subject was quite small, I wanted to the shots to be close enough to reveal the details of the shell fully in the frame.  For this reason, I selected my 200mm f/4 macro lens, which creates a surreal look that I’ve used elsewhere on this course.

The Shoot

With the setup complete, I thought about all of the things that I found interesting about the shell.  The creature that had lived in it had shaped the interior with a strange texture in amongst the smoothness of the surface.  The outside of the shell was fairly featureless and polished smoothly by the sea and its time on the beach.  Opposite the main opening, there was a large hole or split that offered another view into the structure, while the shell thickness varied across its surface.  When I held it up to the sky, it was clear that the shell wasn’t completely opaque.

The shell was placed on the card and the composition set so that the shell was in the centre of the frame.  The extremely shallow depth of focus of the macro lens meant that I would be changing both the light position and the point of focus to create my images.

The Images

Shell 1 – The light was set to the right of the subject at a similar height.  For this image, I  was inspired by the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing, which was the previous day.  The smooth external face of the shell and its twisted shape against the deep black background reminded me of a celestial body like an asteroid.

 

For Shell 2, I put two strips of black tape across the front of the light to create a slot for the light to pass through.  Making the light more directional meant that I could control the way it rolls off the subject as there was now a hard edge to the source.  Studios and film sets often use ‘barn doors’ on lights; panels that can be moved in and out to effectively steer the way the light is projected.  My simple arrangement had a similar effect.  With this image I was trying to emphasis the space in the shell where the creature once lived.  The darkness of the back wall reminded me of an entrance to a cave.

Shell 3 was the same composition, but this time I was interested in the detail on the far wall of the shell.  The hole to the right offered a way of illuminating the wall without lighting the rest of the shell.  The light was moved to the right and further away from the subject so that it’s intensity was reduced.  Experimenting with the exact position and angle, revealed the details I was after.  To me, the back wall looks like a cave painting of a woman running.

Shell 4 was the result of looking at the jagged edge of the shell.  This was presumably where the other half of the shell would have been attached.  I was drawn to the jagged edge along the top, which reminded me of crooked teeth.  I refocussed to pick out the top edge and positioned the light to the left of the subject.  As the setup was on a chair, I was able to lift the light from below the subject to the point where it just caught the top of the feature.  I was surprised at how subtly the light rolls off onto the rest of the subject, which emphasised the thought I’d had when I looked at the jagged edge.  This picture looks like to me like a huge fish mouth coming out of the darkness.

For Shell 5, I wanted to exploit the thickness of the wall of the shell.  This time, I positioned my mobile phone underneath the shell to light through it.  The phone torch doesn’t have any control over it but the source is quite small.  I first punched a hole in the cardboard to eliminate stray light, but unfortunately wasn’t able to prevent spillage from underneath as the shell wasn’t perfectly flat.  I solved the problem by using a small square of cloth, with a hold punched through it, between the cardboard and the shell.  I could now push the folds of the cloth into the spaces where the light was spilling out.  I adjusted the angle of the shell to the camera slightly so that the warm glow of the source could be seen.   This photograph gives the impression of a cave, with its wall painting as in Shell 3 and a fire burning inside.  To remind the viewer that it was still the original shell, I lit the outer surface with the LED torch, which was a much weaker light to the phone.  The long exposure meant that the position or stillness of the handheld torch had little impact on the overall image.

Conclusion

This exercise was very rewarding as it pointed to the simplicity of photography that I often overlook.  The shell was a beautiful object to use as it had shape, texture and mystery about it.  The lighting setup was incredibly simple, but by experimenting with the position, intensity and some level of modification I am happy that the five images are very different from one another.

I’ve recently had feedback from my tutor that I needed to look for another level of connection with my work that just the technical.  My engineering background makes it very easy for me to consider the cleverness of an image and I’ve always looked at the technical challenge before the artistic.  This exercise has taught me the key skill of just looking closely at a subject and looking for an aesthetic that relates to something outside of photographic craft.   In order to get a different perspective, I asked some of my friends what they saw.

“An asteroid hurtling through space” (Shell 1)

“Ice Cream”  (Shell 1)

“Bird head skull” (Shell 2)

“A finger wrapped around a glowing orb”  (Shell 5)

“Warm and Cosy”  (Shell 5)

 

It proves how an image can provoke different feelings and perspectives in the viewer, even when the subject is completely different.