Review: In No Great Hurry:13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2013)

My first photography film in many months and something of a disappointment.  The subject is not interested in being filmed or discussing his work - which is admirable, actually - and spends a lot of time grumbling and wondering why anyone wants to make a film about him.  Much of the footage comes from a period when the 80-year old photographer was in the process of organizing his cluttered existence and so when he is not out walking the neighborhood with his camera, we get interior shots of the subject and an assistant digging through boxes.  Perhaps because I am unfamiliar with Leiter's work, which this film doesn't do much to showcase or contextualize, I found it slow, plodding, and largely uninspiring.  Perhaps the most amazing thing about the subject is that he has lived in the same apartment for over five decades and for a similar period documented the same neighborhood.  In two or three hundred years his work will be incredibly valuable.

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P&P: Exercise 6: Review a Portrait Sequence

This subject of this portrait session is a rather animated human who in day-to-day life is likely at the most unlikely moment to pull a face or strike a pose.  For this session I had him sitting at a desk in a classroom, with me on the other side, my DSLR on a tripod.  Light came from windows to my left, as well as a bank of overhead fluorescents.  On occasion I prompted a pose - "a student just walked in" - but for the most part the subject used the opportunity to showcase his talent - unprompted.  Unfortunately, ISO and shutter speed settings were not adequate to the task and many images were marred by excessive motion blur.  A good example of this from a recoverable image is the one of the hands-up-surprised-face.  Fortunately, the eyes are sharp enough to make this one of the more interesting images in the set, though there were perhaps equally dramatic and interesting poses that didn't make the cut. 

P&P: Exercise 5: Eye Contact & Expression

I was on the way to the nearby temple when I passed a man with a beautiful white beard.  I couldn’t stop then, but knew I could likely find him again in the same place days later.  This is a spot where independent truck owners gather to be hired out.  When they don’t have any work, they just sit on the kerb waiting, chatting, smoking, and watching Dubai drive by.

P&P: Exercise 4: Active Portrait

The brief here was to produce a set of images in which the subject was not posing for the camera, but engaged in an activity.  The purpose here was not to document the activity, but to capture the subject unaffected.

Apon is a young Bangladeshi assigned to clean the classrooms in my wing of the building.  I usually see him every evening immediately following conclusion of class as mine room is the last of the night.  I recorded him for a couple of evenings and found the biggest problem is that he likes performing for the camera.  Technically, the yellow walls seem to make the images a shade of sickly, so I reduced saturation to try and create something more palatable.

I don't feel these are the best images I can do, but I'm anxious to make some headway here in the course and don't want to get bogged down in perfecting the set.  Ideally, I'd like a faster lens, because even shooting at high ISO I still got a bit of blur and motion in the image.  Not always bad, but I'd prefer something cleaner (no pun intended).

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P&P: Exercise 3: Light

It's been too long since I last posted an exercise.  There were many excuses for doing so but won't go into them here.  Suffice to say I feel I've been stuck and in order to get unstuck I need to post whatever I've got and build up a little momentum.  Since all the stuff for the first assignment isn't included in the course mark, I feel more free to post less than what I'm happy with on the chance that I'll get back into a regular groove.

This exercise calls for four to six head-and-shoulder images of the same model under different lighting conditions in order to demonstrate the effect of light on the face. As I don't have a model to drag around town, I shot myself using the Nikon D5100 with remote release.

The photos here are much like those I did for an assignment for a previous course: http://freedomtolook.blogspot.ae/2013/05/assignment-four-applying-lighting.html

(Outtake:  800is0, 5.6, 0.8)

Shooting on holiday: Istanbul

Last week I was in Istanbul with my camera.  I pressed the shutter close to 1000 times in 6.5 days of wandering the city,  the most I’ve used a camera in months.  Initially I found myself out of practice.  I had to refamiliarize myself with the mechanics of the camera, with which buttons controlled which functions.  I then had to remind myself to slow down and think through my situation, what I was attempting to capture, and how I might best achieve this.  It was in many ways a frightening experience – My god, look at what I’ve lost!  On reflection, though, it was also inspiring – Look at how much I’ve learned and how much comes back with just a little thought and application!

Review: Istanbul Photography Museum

I had the good fortune this month to visit the Istanbul Photography Museum, located in what looks like a middle-class neighborhood only a few blocks from the major tourist sites in Sultan Ahmet.  The museum maintains an informative website with details concerning its sponsors, leadership, and supporters, and appears to be a joint effort between art enthusiasts and government offices responsible for the promotion of the same.  Opened in November 2011, it defines its mission as “providing exhibitions, collections, publications, photography archives, electronic and standard libraries, activities, and educational projects to further develop the Turkish art of photography.”  

We arrived just as one of the staff was unlocking the front door and were welcomed in without fuss or hesitation, directed up a flight up stairs and into a lobby with a display of books for sale.  A long corridor led off this space, with doors opening into five separate galleries.  During our 40 minute stay we had the facility entirely to ourselves (something of a departure from many of the city’s often crowded museums).