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... »This section contains the techniques used by photographer Michael Freeman.
In the first part of this feature on how to execute a picture story as a slideshow, we took an overview of how the dynamics of a screen-based presentation are very different from traditional print. You might question why take print as a starting point at all. There are two reasons: first, that the...
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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...
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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...
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A Classical technique for beautifying landscape
Photography has its own language, distinct from painting, and much of the way it has evolved creatively has been through photographers finding ways of making images that explore the medium. Selective focus, for example, comes straight from camera optics. Many kinds of dynamic composition, as in reportage, come from...
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Over on the Observations page, we look at why the first photography assignment in the first course, The Art of Photography, is about finding contrast in subjects or subject qualities. And with a little bit of the history of the Bauhaus thrown in.
Here, I’d like to explore the idea of contrast further. The course...
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In part one of Widescreen Composition, two months ago, we looked at the growing use of 16:9 as a frame shape, both in-camera and in presentation, particularly on-screen. We looked at the four most basic uses of widescreen for composing:-
1. The frame-fit, not especially exciting, but using the wide frame for subjects that simply...
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You don’t hear much about colour management these days, thank goodness, largely because computer operating systems and software applications manage to take care of it semi-automatically. The major point for photographers is coordinating the input and output equipment and media so that the general balance of colours and tones stays the same throughout. When...
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One of the more obvious uses of a wide frame is the panoramic landscape, where the subject material is horizontal to begin with, and both sky and close foreground are less interesting.
Read more on Widescreen (part 1)…
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The word minimalist seems to be in the process of being dumbed down. Or at least it has been so over-used that for most people it has become no more than a catchword. When applied to design, it seems now to mean mainly white or mainly black with not very much in it. Applied...
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Last month I looked at alternatives to caffeinated HDR processing as ways of handling a wide dynamic range — and a bracketed sequence of exposures. Since then, I’ve had occasion to put these into practice as my assistant and I prepare the images for my new book on the Tea-Horse Road, shot largely in...
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