For week of Oct. 25- Awesome Time and Motion

 This post is to celebrate some rather brilliant time and motion photos. I spent a lot of time trying to come up with creative ways to capture and abstract things using time and motion for our project, and now, I constantly notice the use of time and motion in photography. The above photo is of moths flying around an outside light. You don't notice their flight patterns or their wing shape very much until being able to track their motion with a slow shutter speed. 

 This is a famous landmark road in Angola. The fog and near-60-second-exposure help capture what looks like fairy flights or snakes of light or fire. It makes this photo look like a movie still or fantasy landscape.

A woman in Bangladesh rides in between train cars to keep from having to pay for a ticket. With the sun and time of day, it would have been easy for the photographer to stop the train tracks underneath. However, I like the sense of motion and danger one gets from a moving ground underneath the photo's subject. It gives the viewer a sense of riding with the woman.

For week of Oct. 18- Beautiful storms

One of my favorite things to do to give myself the heeby jeebies is to look at pictures and watch videos of storm cells and tornadoes. I love storm photos. I think it is the comfort of knowing I will not be swept away but being allowed to watch nature's awesome, awful, destructive show in the sky. This photo above was entered into the National Geographic photo contest, in Montana. It looks unreal. I didn't know the sky could form itself into something this twisted and beautiful.

 

  I like the vertical motion of this photo. Often, skies look horizontal in pictures, with viewers forgetting that the sky continues above and behind and all around us. I like that we see so much of the sky, and that the clouds seem in motion, perfectly and abstractly sculpted.

I do not understand this photo, and there is little info in its caption: "Cosmic. Mother nature doing what she does best," by Patrick John O'Doherty. I have no idea what element or force of nature is going on, but it looks like heaven and is still quite clearly earth. Glorious. I love to be absorbed into it.

For week of Oct. 11- An Edwardian Family Album

I was searching for artistic renditions of family albums on Google and home upon these examples from an amateur photographer named Jack Urton, an amateur but skilled photographer during the turn of the 19th century. 480 negatives were discovered in a cupboard in an old house in Liverpool, England a few years ago, and these photos have been shown in museums as documentation of an average middle class family's life during the late 1800s.

They are not anything groundbreaking, but they are incredible in portraying aspects of life rarely documented during that era--most photographs we see from the time are formal portraits. They almost seem to sweet, too perfect to be true. Like Mary Poppins come to life. They are intimate, yet educational.

I find this one to be especially beautiful, with sky and land both dramatically captured by film in a way that digital isn't able to do without combining multiple exposures.

Week of Oct. 4- Monochromatics!

Forgive me, these three photos were supposed to be put up for last week, so please count them as last week's blog post! I started messing around on Flickr looking for interesting use of monochromatic color in photos, and here are a few of my favorites. The red is called "Running from Myself" or something like that. The total redness of the picture gives it a distinct feeling of panic or eeriness that I don't think would be there were it to be beige, or blue, etc. Very interesting use of color to influence how the photo feels.

 Oh, I love this one. It's blue/teal. I almost used my old blue ocscillating fan for my monochromatic picture. The bubble is an ingenious idea. Thing is, I was going to use bubbles in a bathtub for white--I didn't think about bubbles looking blue around their edges! It's whimsical and made more attractive to look at with its single shade of sea foam.

I liked the simplicity of this white-on-white still life. I think these are golden delicious apples, so somehow they must have manipulated the color. The use of the apples on the old whitewashed board give it a country twinge, but there's also a decidedly modern feel because of the use of only white and the simple lines. Very nice!

Oct. 3, 2010- Edward J. Steichen

Edward J. Steichen was at one point in history the most famous and well-paid photographer in the world. He was a jack-of-all-trades (photographically speaking). This above photo is of a dancer's daughter at the Acropolis in Greece. Steichen would manipulate the negatives to make certain effects. I don't know what he did to this one, but she looks like a Greek goddess, her clothing made from and flowing into the sky. It's fantastical.

  This one seems unreal, dreamlike--the vibrantly white cloud contrasting impossibly with the darkness of the horizon and reflecting eerily on the rippled water.

Steichen took photos during war time and then became what was considered the world's first fashion photographer. Therefore, he was great at portraits. This one was in a collection called Juxtapositions. I like that I can't tell if it's a "civilized" gentleman with some other negatives processed over him or if it's a native man from somewhere (he took pictures documenting people in undeveloped countries, too).

Sept. 23, 2010- Dali and Halsman

So last weekend for my best friend's birthday, we drove to Atlanta to see the Dali exhibit at the High Museum. I loved looking through each medium of art Dali engaged in, but--surprise!--my favorite part of the exhibit was a gallery of photography featuring photos from the famous Halsman and Dali collaboration. Halsman was famous for his portraiture of celebrities. All are more intimate and real than most other glamour photos from that era. However, I think Halsman's career really took off when he and Dali began to work together. This photo above, In Voluptas Mors, began as a sketch that Dali drew and wanted Halsman to create. They spent days building the structure to hold the girls and tens of hours placing the lighting and models. The structure of women looks effortless and elegant, a little unsettling because of their individual beauty, and yet the gruesome image they make up. Dali in the foreground is perfect, slightly out of focus, mustache a-flying, looking as complex and, well, surreal as ever.

This is Halsman's famous Dali Atomicus. Whenever I first saw most of Halsman's photos, I thought someone had taken vintage photos and photoshopped them to create all the effects his photography features. But no---far more impressive, Halsman created his whimsical scenarios and portraits through hours and hours of carpentry, throwing water (and cats), and making people jump over and over until things clicked. I was astounded by the dedication, time, genius, and eye for detail that went into every one of his photos (and here I was complaining about my 35-shot contact sheet!). I was also amazed by the rightness of their collaboration. Halsman seemed too personal and whimsical for strait celebrity portraiture, and I believe Dali brought out the best in him. And without Halsman, Dali would never have been immortalized or seen in the same way as one of the most bizarre and genius personalities of the modern era.

That said, I also love Halsman's portraits of all the famous figures of his day. They bring honesty through their off-coloredness. Face it--not every person is meant to be captured in the way that many portraiture photographers of the day worked- everyone was highly stylized, beautifully lit, utterly perfect. Those portraits are so beautiful that they are boring. And give little to no sense of the person's true identity. That's what the public really wants to see from portraits--the truth. They want the photos to reveal something no one is supposed to know about that person, or to see that person documented in a new way. This portrait above is of Tippi Hendron. It's a perfect example of Halsman's dedication to bringing whimsy and truth to each portrait.  

Sept. 19, 2010- All Roads Photography

National Geographic has a neat series of awards called the All Roads Photography Awards, and is "part of the All Roads Film Project, a National Geographic program dedicated to providing a platform for indigenous and underrepresented minority-culture storytellers from around the world to showcase their works to promote knowledge, dialogue, and understanding with a broader, global audience." Sumit Dayal, the photographer of both these photos, is from Kashmir, historically caught between Pakistan and India and the main source of conflict between the two countries. His story got to me because it combines my true loves- social activism, international affairs, and photography. His photo style is right up my alley, too. These photos seem like they could've come from a film camera roll shot in the early 20th century. I love pictures of people and situations and places I've never known even existed. Who knew that there are still entire floating markets in Kashmir? He has awesome tonal range and  a wide depth of field--you can view each man's expression. I love the photo below for some of the same reasons.