The Freeman View

Simon Barber

admin — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 08:33:41 +0000

Simon Barber, one of our photography tutors at the OCA, has a special commitment to collaborative photography, and for me personally provides a fascinating contrast to the more self-absorbed method of photography that I grew up with. Indeed, Simon’s photographic career began after a very sharp change of direction from a science education — a degree in medicinal chemistry. Teaching and workshops play a central role in his work, as he describes below, and his commissioned photography includes assignments for a variety of health and social care organizations in North and Central London, such as NHS Direct, hospitals and Primary Care trusts.

Slideshows and Photo Essays Part I

admin — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:36:54 +0000

Over on the Observations page I’ve attempted something different from usual, which is to look in great detail at a well-known photo essay from Life magazine, which is the publication that developed this way of visual storytelling to its full. The purpose is practical, intended as background reading for anyone doing those parts of the photography course that involve shooting a sequence or series of pictures around a single theme. In particular, this long look at W. Eugene Smith’s Country Doctor examines the importance of layout to a photo essay, which I hope will be interesting especially to anyone doing Photography 2: Progressing with Digital Photography.

Robert Golden

admin — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:56:09 +0000

Robert Golden began his career shooting photojournalistic assignments in the USA and England, and indeed his original intention was to be purely a photojournalist. Then for reasons explained below, he turned to what on the face of it seems a polar opposite — still-life food photography. He became on of Europe’s best known food photographers, shooting at the top end of the advertising world, and inevitably in that business expanded into television commercials. He went on to direct over 850 commercials, winning numerous awards. We met a long time ago in Washington DC on a project that was neither photojournalism nor studio work, brought together by an art director friend, David Larkin, who hired both of us to photograph the National Air and Space Museum, a huge project that took many weeks. More recently, Robert has returned to documentary reportage, but making films more than shooting still images. Now that the lines are becoming blurred between the two, I thought it would be interesting to talk to someone at the top of their profession who has embraced two pairs of contrasts: photojournalism and studio shooting, also still and film. Robert’s first feature film was chosen as Best of the Festival, Edinburgh, and selected for Sundance amongst others. And he has filmed over thirty documentaries winning several awards. Presently an exhibition of photographs and films called HOME is touring the United Kingdom and he has established an on-line cinema called Objective Cinema for documentary films.

Country Doctor

admin — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 08:53:00 +0000

Case History of a Classic Profile Photo Essay

Magazine picture stories using photographs evolved during the 1930s, first in Europe, and then in the United States. Once editors understood that sequenced photographs on a double-page spread could tell a story in a different way from words alone, it became a particular way of communicating in its own right. It was Life magazine that gave it the name photo essay, and developed it to the full.

One of the classic early photo essays was Country Doctor, shot by W. Eugene Smith Smith on assignment for Life magazine in 1948. It took four weeks, longer than the editors anticipated, as was usual with this photographer. This is widely regarded as the first modern photo essay, and indeed, Smith is considered by most to have perfected the form, although of course this was in the context of Life magazine’s commitment to running picture stories. Considerable preparation went into the story, beginning with finding two things that the magazine thought important: a scenic setting and an attractive-looking person. Smith himself had no qualms about organising a story to ensure that the pictures would be strong. Smith wrote, “The majority of photographic stories require a certain amount of setting up, re-arranging and stage direction to bring pictorial and editorial coherency to pictures….it is done for the purpose of a better translation of the spirit of the actuality, it is completely ethical.”

Jesse Alexander

admin — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 12:22:29 +0000

Jesse Alexander has been working professionally with photography since 2004, after graduating from the Surrey Institute of Art & Design in Farnham (now know as the University for the Creative Arts). As well as a photographic practice, Jesse has written for several magazines, including Source and HotShoe Magazine and teaches photography within Further and Higher Education. His photographic practice is mainly concerned with landscape, but also often explores the photographic medium itself as a subject.

Vertical Landscapes

admin — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 09:16:33 +0000

There’s a new exhibition at the Shanghai Museum near the corner of People’s Square, close to where I’m staying this month, and it features a wonderful collection of Chinese scroll paintings. These are executed in brush and ink, some coloured, some monochrome. Prominent among them are what are called Shan shui (literally ‘Mountain-Water’) paintings, and these follow some very specific conventions, developed over the sixteen centuries during which this form has been painted. Although there are horizontal and squarish versions of Shan shui, vertical scrolls are the most common, and these are what interested me most as I thought about how photographers compose vertical landscapes – and how less often than horizontal.

On Imperfection

admin — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 19:18:36 +0000

One of the underlying themes in all the OCA photography courses is developing a photographic eye and a photographic way of thinking. The emphasis is firmly on this, and as a result, the technical aspects of photography and digital processing are treated as support for making imagery, not as ends in themselves. Maybe this isn’t really necessary for me to plug, but photography as taught and as talked about has a tendency to drift towards the technical, the mechanical and the hardware. There’s no mystery to this: many people simply find that hands-on procedures are easier to understand than less definite things such as composition, colour judgment and how to deal with people when you want to photograph them.

Processing under fire

admin — Wed, 11 May 2011 11:02:13 +0000

Over on the Techniques page I look at new developments in HDR processing, and note that the new and improved ways of doing this offer a greater choice of different result than ever before. The extreme ‘HDR look’ is still there if you want it, but it’s also possible to avoid it while being able to vary the look of the image greatly. This makes HDR processing a part of the wider contemporary issue of how far to go in processing any digital image.

HDR Revisited

admin — Wed, 11 May 2011 11:02:00 +0000

HDR Revisited

I decided this last weekend to take a fresh look at HDR and what’s been happening to it. Three or four years ago I was enthusiastic about what was then a brand-new technology that seemed to promise a lot. That was my view, because it looked like a marvellous way of overcoming the special problem of scenes in which the dynamic range (darkest to brightest) was too great for a single shot. This mattered to me in particular for daylit interiors in which there was a view through a window to outside, and also because the gentle fall-off in the highlights and shadows on film has been replaced by the sharp, unforgiving cut-off from a digital sensor.

Dewald Botha

admin — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 08:00:30 +0000

We’re making something of a break here in these interviews, because this month’s featured photographer is an OCA student at the beginning of the course, having just completed the first level – The Art of Photography and People and Place. We were all impressed with his photography. I was with the assessors recently up in Barnsley, looking at the submissions, and Dewald’s work caught my eye. Caught everyone’s eye actually, and we thought it would be interesting and instructive to show, on this website, the work of someone who is both talented and having considerable success on the course. Dewald Botha, 34 years old, grew up in what he describes as ‘a really small farming community town called Wolmaransstad, in central South Africa.’ When he left school it was the time of serious changes in the country; he worked in agriculture for a while and then, in 2001, left for the United kingdom ‘ like so many other young people’. After a year’s course in photography at Chichester, but disappointed at not being accepted for university in South Africa, he opted for teaching English, first in the Czech Republic, and then to Suzhou, China, where he now is.