$4.59 500Pcs Blue Strawberry Rare Fruit Vegetable Seeds Bonsai Edible Garden Climbing Plant6/4/2017
I haven't done any posts for some time, this is due to laziness and or lack of motivation and or I sprained my finger and or the cat ate my computer. This post features a classic piece of Photoshopping which I thought was amusing (see pic on left). I wonder how they did it? They were trying to sell these blue strawberries too... cheeky! Good luck if you're doing a photography exam, otherwise known as the two day long photography lesson. Just a quick note to say there's a series of TV programmes about photography on BBC 4 called Britain in focus - a photographic history. It begins tonight at 9 and is in three episodes on Monday nights. Presented by Eamonn McCabe a famous photographer. I came across a type of printer that I hadn't heard of before which seems to be trendy at present with arty types. It's like a photocopier (see pic on left) but uses single colours instead of black and you can do prints with multiple single colours - if that makes sense. You've probably seen things printed using this type of printer they're generally flyers and arty booklet/magazines/books etc.. and it's used a lot by illustrators (see pictures above). The colours are very vivid and the prints have a distinctive 'look' about them, sort of retro and a bit crude. One of the colours used is a vivid pink and there is also a metallic gold (see picture of crumpled paper in slide show below) which looks good printed on black paper. Photographs printed in this way look quite interesting and it may be a way of 'outputting' your final photographs if you want a more primitive look for your photos, rather than using the 'super accurate' laser printer. I've put a slide show below showing some examples of Risograph prints with photographic elements in them, apologies for a couple of 'saucy' images. The Bad News
These type of printers are not that common and I couldn't find anywhere where you can just go and use a printer off the street, so to speak (without paying quite a lot). There are rather off-beat 'commercial' printers where you can get prints done but you'd have to order a batch of prints e.g. - 50 x A3 prints in a single colour would be around £20, although you might not want 50 prints unless you plan to wallpaper your room with them. This place in Birmingham does them - http://www.theholodeck.co.uk/Riso.html The good news is it's quite easy to fake this Risograph look in photoshop, I would use a half tone filter to change your image to a single colour and layers if you want multiple single colours, if that makes sense. The revolution starts here Lets face it glossy laser printed photos are so 'corporate', if you want to stick it to the man (or woman) in the suit you have to go for the old school look. Never mind if you're using the latest laptop/camera/mobile/software to make your images with they have to look like they were photographed using a cardboard box with a hole in it. Some of you will be doing the photography exam at the moment. And I’ve got some quality advice that may help you. I think I’ve written about this before but it bears repeating. You may have been given the starting points and thought ‘what the heck am I going to do? None of these themes appeals to me, they’re rubbish… aarrghhh!’ (Sound of something hard being thrown at the wall). Fear not! For I have a possible solution and it involves something called lateral thinking, sounds impressive but it’s really quite simple and is a useful skill to have when you’re being creative. It's simple ...so simple ...very simple ...eeeeasy! So, instead of thinking about the themes you’ve been given, think about what you’d like to photograph and then connect what you’d like to photograph to the themes. Sounds radical I know but believe me when I say it isn’t as hard as you’d think. For example - you really want to photograph your pet dog because you like it and think it would make a good subject. So here's what you could do for the following starting points/themes - 1 Celebrations – Photograph of your pet dog wearing a party hat and blowing a party blower thing 2 Stretched – Stretch photo your pet dog in Photoshop into a sausage dog shape 3 Cooking – Photoshoped collage/manipulation of your pet dog standing at the stove the cooking a meal Etc. the list goes on......I hope you get the idea. The justification for this approach is it's always better to work on something you're interested in rather than something you're not too bothered with. Advantages of lateral thinking The advantage to this type of thinking is that things occur to you that normally wouldn’t - for example, if I was given the starting point of Cooking my first thought would be to take a photograph of someone cooking, not very exciting or original! But the idea of having a pet dog cooking is slightly more unusual/surreal and from this idea it occurred to me why not have other animals cooking perhaps animals that we eat? e.g. - a photo of a pig cooking itself? Gruesome but good vegetarian propaganda. You could even have a group of pigs cutting each other up cooking the parts and eating the results (done using Photoshop collage techniques), horrific I know but an unusual idea and kind of black comedy. Perhaps the example above isn't a good one but it did lead me into an unusual train of thought. For no good reason I've put an illustration called The creative process which I thought was amusing, you'll need to zoom in to see all the detail and after that a slide show below of some cartoons about the creative process. Only the Brave
There is an alternative exam strategy but this is only for the brave, those who like to live dangerously, those with nerves of steel and a cavalier attitude who are willing to stare death in the face and wink. Which is you get the exam paper, pin it to a notice board and throw darts at it and when a dart lands on a starting point that’s the one you do even if you don’t want to, risky I know.
Welcome back to a new term! There now follows a rather long and rambling post, it's packed with facts, stuff, holes and mild nudity. It also contains virtually nothing about photograhy... controversial I know!
You might think that when you chose to do photography you went for an easy option and that you'd cleverly avoided academic stuff like learning about the history of art. I aim to change this since this post features some art history and I'll be using some of the photos I took on my summer holiday as illustrations - which is very convenient for me, at least.
Babara Hepworth in St. Ives
I mentioned in a previous post about St. Ives (where I went on holiday) that several well know artists lived and worked there. One of them was a sculptress named Babara Hepworth (see photo left), she's known as one of the pioneers of modernism in this country. Modernism could be described as a rejection of the art of the past, starting roughly at the beginning of the 20th century and it involved new ways of describing forms and gave birth to styles such as abstraction, cubism, surrealism etc.. Hepworths early work was realist or figurative but became increasingly abstract. Incidentely we are currentely living in a post-modern age art-wise although I'm not entirely sure what that means. Hepworth Museum I visited the babara Hepworth museum which is in the house she lived and worked in, in the centre of St. Ives. It is a fairly small building which I think was an old fishermans cottage and has an attractive garden with lots of her sculptures in (see slide show below). What I found most interesting is a couple of the rooms she used to work in have been preserved so you can see all the tools etc. and her working environment (see slide show). Hepworth used to make a lot of her own tools and I think seeing where someone worked tells you a lot about their art. Personally I prefer her early figurative work and her later abstract wood carved sculptures which are very beautiful and tactile. It's also impressive that she chose to work in stone and wood carving which is a pyhsically demanding type of art, if that doesn't sound too male chauvinist. One of the pictures in the slide show is of a small room (a bit like a summer house) in the garden which has a bed in it which I thought was quite poignant. Her later abstract work often features holes which connects nicely to...
Holey Art! Batman!
As a rather weird link to Barbara Hepworth, there's an interesting ancient stone monument in Cornwell (near St. Ives) called Men An Tol (meaning - holed stone), it's unusual as it features a stone with a hole in it which is quite rare for ancient monuments, aparentely. When you first see a picture of it you think 'impressive', I imagined it would be on a similar scale to something like Stonehenge but when you see a photo like the one below it's not quite as impressive.
Polo mints
I wonder whether Babara Hepworth had been influenced by this holey stone? As a lot of her sculptures feature holes. Indeed, there was a kind of fashion or style of sculpture in the 1950's (when she was working) where a lot of sculptures had holes in them, Henry Moores (another modernist sculptor) sculptures of this period often had holes, I think it was something to do with depicting 'interior space'.
Warning - mild nudity
I try to steer well clear of nudity in these posts as it's a school web site but I thought the photo below was amusing. The photo is of artist Lucy Stein doing a performance piece (I think). Notice how she's got a pair of wellington boots on so she's not absolutely commited to the nudity, although there are muddy puddles around the stone which may explain it. She also has DING DONG written on her leg but I'll draw a discreet veil over that as it's probably something rude. There's a legend surrounding the stone that if you pass through the stone naked 9 times (both ways) you'll become pregnant or very cold or both, it also helps if you're a woman I imagine. After this photo is a rather bizarre video art work by the same artist which also has holes in it (near the end of the video) and also features Babara Hepworths sculpture garden which rounds things off nicely... rounds! Circle! Holes! Geddit!
In concluesion
It's worth looking at other art forms even if your main focus is photograhy, you may be inspired by what you see and may get ideas which you can use in your photography. NOTE - Apologies for the dodgy spelling, the Weebly spell checker didn't seem to be wirking. Recently I've been doing some printmaking at school (in my free time). One of the things I've been doing is putting fruit through the printing press. I placed the fruit on a sheet of plastic, covered this with blotting paper and the juice/gunk transfers to the paper when rolled through the press. The results are quite interesting (see pic on left and the slide show below). The Concept - Under Pressure This is a conceptual art piece about the pressures fruit face in our society and I'm illustrating this by 'symbolically' squeezing them. Did you know that all over the world fruit are being massacred in huge numbers? Yes, every day thousands are being slaughtered in horrific ways: every second at least 3,517 blameless plums are crushed between peoples teeth, 3,456 kumquats are 'liquidized' to make smoothies, 2,347 lychees are drowned in yogurt, 1,235 pears are squeezed to make juice, I could go on but I won't as it's too depressing. This killing has to stop! The worst offenders are a bunch of people called the Fruitarians, a fanatical off-shoot of the vegetarian movement, they eat only fruit (and some nuts - for protein), these people are terrorists! Or as I like to call them fruiterrorists. This tragedy is turning into a blood bath, or rather a fruit juice bath. Ask yourself this question - 'do I want the juice of innocent fruit on my hands? Just think, when you bite into an apple you're eating a baby tree! I'm starting a campaign in support of fruit and have come up with some catchy slogans e.g. 'Free the Fruit' and 'Fruits have feelings'. They do! (Have feelings that is), next time you eat a grape listen very carefully and you'll hear a high pitched squeak, although it's beyond the range of human hearing so it's very hard to pick up! Even the governments health advisers are part of this anti-fruit conspiracy, remember the well known 'five a day'? Don't make me laugh! It makes me soooo... HUNGRY!!! erm... I mean... ANGRY!!!........... (right that's enough Mr Lockwood I can take no more of this fruit nonsense which is in very poor taste! I might add! Unlike fruit which is in very good taste! Ha, ha! - Blog Editor). The Ugly Truth - A Gruesome Tale Actually the main reason I did this fruit printing was just to see what happened when fruits were squished. It was partly inspired by something a bit gruesome a student did during the foundation art course I was on. The teacher had sent us out to collect feathers which we were going to ink up with a roller and take prints from. They make beautiful prints as the example on the left shows. One student found a dead bird and.... you can probably guess where this is going! Printing presses squash anything soft and squishy flatter than a pancake and after many unpleasant crunching noises this happened to the dead bird and the resulting print was not very pretty. Although the bird wasn't very fresh, so not very juicy, so not very messy. Now that I've left you with that unpleasant thought..... Which fruits did I use in these fruit prints? In case you're interested (which I doubt) the fruits I used in this serious scientifically devised experiment were blackberries and rosehips (mainly) because they have colourful juices. I also tried kiwi fruit which was disapointingly uncolourful and beetroot which is not a fruit but could well be a fruit in an alternative reality. Slide show of fruit prints below, Mr Meredith thought they looked like sick which I took as a complement. As to where all this squishing is leading, I have no idea. Does this have anything to do with photography?
Anyway, now I should make some sort of point about the information above and try to link it to photograhy - so, artists/photographers often do things that are a bit crazy or eccentric - e.g. squashing fruit in a printing press. The creative process can seem a little off-beat or strange, silly etc. to the average person. However, I would recommend you try odd ideas out and don't worry if people think you're being foolish. It may turn out to be a complete disaster but you'll have learnt something (possibly) and it may lead to interesting directions for your work and help with your creative development. You could 'play it safe' but the danger of this is you can end up with creative constipation, if you see what I mean. (What are you on about? - Blog Editor). NOTE - Having said all that don't try taking selfies whilst leaning over a balcony on a 30 story tower block, this really is very silly, it may result in a good photograph but you might end up dead which would be a great shame and your mobile phone/camera would also be ruined in the fall! You may remember me waxing lyrical about expanding foam in a previous post (see 'There's no place like foam' 8/9/2016). I'm obviously foam obsessed since I came across some photographs by an artist called Marcus Coates who covered his face and body with shaving foam and photographed the results. He's done a whole series of these images bizarrely entitled 'British Moths'. Each image in the series (see images above and below) is named after a type of British moth!?! Don't ask me why? Maybe you can figure it out. Personally I think some of the images look rather creepy, it's the sort of thing a serial killer might do in his (or her) free time when they're trying to de-stress. Note: I wouldn't recommend trying this out yourselves as it could be very very messy and your dad might get upset at you using all his shaving foam! Edible Art Thinking about shaving foam, it smells nice but I wouldn't recommend eating it (not very nice). However, something I would recommend eating is whipped cream (in small quantities), the sort you get in a can which looks a bit like shaving foam when you squirt it out. Imagine you were given a starting point of 'Fruit', for this project you could spray whipped cream all over your head, add pieces of fruit on top of the cream and call the whole thing 'Human fruit salad'. Which would be a winner in my opinion. You could even film a video of the process and then film yourself eating it all once you'd finished. You might end up rolling about on the floor with a stomach ache or hurling into a bucket but it would be worth it, artistically speaking. Question - How many artworks can you say are nice to eat? Answer - Not many, if any! Warning: Cream 'in a can' might be tasty but you wouldn't want to end up like the woman in the photograph below who's got a serious 'habit'. Spray Cake
Bizarrely some clever American has come up with an idea for 'spray cake' or cake mixture which you spray out of a can. If like me you enjoyed licking raw cake mixture out of the bowl when your mum was making cakes you might appreciate this idea although it could lead to similar problems as with the woman in the picture above. There's a picture below of what this spray cake mixture looks like! Yummy!?!?! Regular readers of this Blog (if there are such people) will know that I often post pictures I took over the summer holiday on this Blog. This isn’t because I’m a sadist and enjoy boring people senseless, but because I’m a compassionate guy and have empathy. The pictures I take sit (in the dark) on my hard drive -unloved- and I feel they deserve better, they deserve their 50 seconds of fame, their chance to shine... (are you still taking the tablets Mr Lockwood? – Blog Editor). I also (perhaps mistakenly) feel that they might have some educational value. St. Ives - village of mystery This year I went to St. Ives, the quaint old fishing village in Cornwall, the photograph above is of a lovely rainbow I witnessed appearing over St. Ives harbour. You might think that I went there for the wonderful beaches or the world class surfing, however you'd be incorrect, as me in a wet suit looks rather like a plump seal without the natural grace or swimming ability. No, the main reason I went is because of St. Ives history as a famous artists colony or bohemian haven and I wanted to see what the fuss was all about. Did I mention seals? Seals appear at the mouth of St. Ives harbour around sunset when the fishing boats return, I wonder why they come? Very fishy! - photographic proof above. Pink Light St. Ives is on the tip of Cornwall near Lands End and artists flocked to this unlikely and remote location, perhaps because of the bohemian lifestyle, the charming town, the unspoiled locals and the pink light. What? You say! 'pink light'?, Yes, it's true! Apparently according to a brochure I read it's something to do with being surrounded by sea and the slightly pink sand which combines to produce pink light. I did try my best to see this light including wearing pink tinted sunglasses, however at the risk of being a killjoy I did not see much of this pinkness, there was light and it may have been subtly pink but in all honesty I couldn't spot it ...most disappointing! Rock and a hard place The thing that made the biggest impression on me during my visit was the rocky coastline around St. Ives which could be described as - rugged, wild, romantic or if you're feeling more poetic - primeval, dangerous or rocktastic. In other words the coastline in between the lovely beaches has a lot of rocks and if you like rocks you are in for a treat as I took a lot of photos of rocks and have put them in a slide show below. There are also photos of the sea, beaches, sunsets, miscellaneous and a few of a cemetery (which links nicely with the recent Halloween), as - rather bizarrely - there was a Victorian cemetery right next to one of the beaches. If you don't like rocks you might like to miss the slide show and see the handful of 'best of' photos after the slide show. Black and White Whilst the photos below are fairly traditional in technique/subject I did quite a lot of tweaking of the colours and also changed many of them to black and white in order to make them look more dramatic and arty. I would encourage you to experiment with black and white photography as it can help produce different sorts of moods/atmospheres in your photographs. You could try 'toning' the B&W images with colour or try 'split toning' which is an effect where the lighter tones (highlights) in the picture are toned one colour and the darker tones (shadows) a different colour. I've put an example of Split Toning right at the end of this post. Colours can be a distraction in a photograph, in black and white photographs the forms and textures of objects can become clearer. I should warn you there will be more holiday photos coming up in a future post about a couple of artists who lived and worked in St. Ives. Best of... Split Toning
The photograph below is an example of split toning. Highlights were toned orange and the shadows toned green. This post is highly unusual in that it actually has some relevance to the work you're doing, or some of you at least. It's to do with light painting. Recently I saw some 'professional' light painting tools called 'plexiglass wands', they were a bit expensive so being good with my hands I made some myself (see picture on left) and they work quite well, if I say so myself which I do. They may look like a motley collection of torches with transparent coloured plastic shapes gaffa taped onto them but they are in fact professionally made artistic tools of the highest quality and they are kept in the photography storeroom to be used free of charge by students. There's a slide show below of some of the photographic results produced with these wands. You can get 3D ribbon-like effects with them. Note - Ignore the checked trousers you see in some of the images, these are what's known as 'lounge wear' and are what old people (and some young people) wear around the house when relaxing, they're not pyjama bottoms (or tacky golfing slacks) as you might imagine. Mobile phone light The image below left was produced by having the image below right displayed on my mobile phone and then waving it around a lot. I made the image below right in Photoshop. You could also try playing videos on your phone whilst waving it around to see what happens. Only read this next bit if you're very wealthy Incidentally if any of you are wealthy (which I know some of you are) you might like to get a 'Pixelstick' with your pocket money, they cost around £350 and produce very professional results (see slide show below). The Pixelstick is a stick with a long row of LED's on it which are computer controlled so they can change colour and animate, you can also insert an SD card into it and the Pixelstick projects one vertical line of the image and when you move it horizontally it 'scrolls' through the image. I haven't explained that very well but it basically means you can have light produced images in the picture, there are some of these in the slide show below. Some of the images below may look like they're done with clever Photoshop techniques but they're all done with the Pixelstick. And no, I'm not a sales rep for this company. I also noticed that wedding photographers have already seen the potential for this tool and are offering it as a kind of add-on to their normal wedding photos. It would be nice to have one of these in the photography dept. but sadly it's a bit out of our price range. You may have thought... You may have thought that was the end of this exciting post but you'd be wrong, there's more! If you're old (like me) you will have fond memories of a children's art activity/toy called Spirograph. If you don't all you need to know is Spirograph drawings are pretty geometric patterns. You can do similar patterns surprisingly easily with light paining. Basically you hang your light source (e.g. - small LED) from the ceiling with a bit of string, put the camera on the floor pointing upwards and push the light source so it swings in a circular motion and (as if by magic) the light slowly makes a pattern when it swings. The secret is to use a very long shutter speed, 30 seconds or more, as it takes a while to build up the pattern. The pattern is evidence of Newtons third law of motion (or something like that) and is something to do with Physics and Einsteins theory of a single body moving at the speed of light... possibly. If none of the above makes sense I've put a slide show below of some I did in the photography studio. The image at the beginning this paragraph is from the web and they've used two different coloured light sources and done a much more professional job than me. Myton students in the past have done work about surveillance (e.g. - security cameras) and I was thinking there must be some potential for a photography project using images from (or inspired by) Googles Street View which could be described as surveillance photography. Don't ask me how you could make a project out of it though, you're the people with the vivid imaginations! Perhaps the most interesting features of Street View are that people are caught - sort of - unawares by the cameras doing - sort of - ordinary things, admittedly it's usually rather boring things like walking along the street. There are also the weird glitches you get (see images above and below) which are often rather surreal and/or humorous. Another strange feature is the time jumping aspect of the Street View 'reality' where temporary objects and people disappear and appear (and visa versa) in consecutive photos, I guess this is due to the route the Street View car takes. Peoples blurred faces is another recognizable feature of the photos. Think of the billions of images that make up the Street View world there must be plenty of interesting photographic material out there as I was about to find out... (actually Mr Lockwood it's probably more like trillions or even quadrillions of images - Blog Editor [being helpful]) Lacklustre Scenarios I know there are many amusing and not so amusing Street View 'fails' on the web, some rude, some bizarre and some tragic/disturbing. I spent around 20 minutes in virtual Warwick, London's Oxford street and took a quick hop over to San Francisco, of all places, to search for potentially interesting images of people. Below are some of my Street View image 'grabs' which I've attempted to make amusing by adding text describing a fictional 'story' each picture illustrates, you may disagree on the 'amusing' part of the previous statement. I've given these series of pictures (see below) the group title of 'Lacklustre Scenarios' to reflect the mundane or everyday aspect of the images. As my spiritual adviser often reminds me - "Never underestimate the power of the ordinary as it is often very revealing" - I have no idea what he means but as he's a black belt in spiritual awareness he must know what he's talking about. Please Note: I apologize in advance if you recognize yourselves or anyone you know in the photos below. Names were changed and identities obscured to protect peoples privacy, no offence was intended or more truthfully only very minimal offence was intended (are we covered legally for this? Our lawyers aren't sure! - Blog Editor). Lacklustre Scenarios Google Nosey Parker One drawback of Street View is that it doesn't go 'off-road' (much) but I imagine people walking around with cameras strapped to their head is in the pipeline. I did hear a rumour that Google were planning to launch a new Street View related app called Google Nosey Parker where you can click on someones front door in Street View and then take a virtual look around their house - to admire their decor or snigger at their lack of taste in home furnishings. This rumour can't be true can it? So, if a man comes to your front door saying he wants to read the electric meter and he's wearing an over sized baseball hat covered with camera lenses you'll know to be very suspicious. Casing the joint
Personally I use street View when I'm going to a place I don't know to 'case the joint', so to speak, not in a criminal way you understand but in a touristy way. But somehow the 'real' reality isn't the same as the Google version of reality when you arrive at your glamorous and expensive holiday destination. I'm sure Street View images could be used for a more serious photography project or a kind of artistic social study e.g. - comparing rich and poor neighborhoods. You can go to cities around the world (that have streets and more revealingly 'wealth') as if by magic, the map above shows the Street View coverage , what does this say? If anything? I did notice Syria isn't covered (unsurprisingly) and North Korea may not be very welcoming to Googles camera cars either. The Wrong Side of Town I noticed some websites list some of the dodgiest locations on Street View and there are quiet a few, Leamington Old Town for example. As I like to live dangerously I made a brief tour of a notorious part of Mexico city, the funny thing is that while it looked a bit run down and there was quite a lot of rubbish in the streets it didn't look too bad. However the Google cars do tend to go out on sunny days and I imagine at night (and behind closed doors) the place is quite different. Below is a Street View image of a particularly dangerous place in America called Birdsville where the people have mutated and grown over-sized pigeon heads, quite terrifying! |