What I’m doing now …is looking at websites on photography. Not an easy task, because there’s no filter I can think of that discriminates between interesting and worthwhile… and the rest. Gareth and I have been talking about the vocational aspects of the courses, now even more important since the BA (Hons) in Photography was [...]
Archive for What I'm doing now... »
I finally got round to watching a film that had been on my list – The Cave of Forgotten Dreams by German director Werner Herzog. I missed it on release, as I was away, so just now took out the DVD. Apart from the reviews, and apart from liking Herzog’s other films, especially the...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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,...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
You may have noticed that photographic prints are scaling up. No longer is a 10 x 8 inch print, once the standard unit of production in a wet darkroom, considered worthy of display. It’s fortunate that ink-jet printing has kept pace, because optical enlargers would have been severely challenged by the print sizes that...
Read more »
The first Assignment in the first of the OCA Photography course, The Art of Photography, is an exercise in finding and photographing contrasting qualities. There’s a particular purpose here, and it is intended to set the tone for the course. Deliberately, this first assignment has nothing to do with camera mechanics, or lenses, or...
Read more »
Two months ago we ran the first of this two-part feature on one of photography’s more constant creative problems — the cliché. Why photography’s? Of course, cliché crops up everywhere in the arts, even in regular writing and speech, but photography has a special handicap. That is its relationship with subjects. Strong or photogenic...
Read more »
In the recent interview, in which Gareth and I talked about the Photography Degree Pathway, I discuss briefly the ethics of digital processing and manipulation http://www.weareoca.com/photography/the-photography-degree-pathway/. We all know what gross manipulation is, and every so often there’s a ‘Photoshopped’ scandal to remind us. I’ll come onto some of these in a minute. But...
Read more »
Clichés may be a little less common in photography than in, say, writing, but I would argue that they are more of a problem. The reason is that they are more difficult to avoid. A clichéd phrase can easily be replaced – you only have to use a thesaurus – but in photography there...
Read more »
