It's not the gear - winner of British Society of Underwater Photographers does it with a Canon compact

“It’s a Canon S90,” said Ms Campbell. “It wouldn’t even be the latest model and would retail for about a couple of hundred quid.” A professional SLR camera costs at least €1,000.  

As a “keen amateur” who practises wildlife photography and scuba diving in her time off from managing a clothes shop in Dublin, cost was a big factor in deciding to go with a compact.

Sometimes, she admitted, using the cheaper camera can be frustrating but “in some cases it’s technique and composition that has more to do with [a photograph] than what camera took the image”.   

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/technology/irish-woman-wins-photography-award-using-off-the-shelf-camera-1.1703155 

The winner's instrument:
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canons90

Check out Jackie's gallery:
http://www.jackiecampbellimages.com/gallery_489324.html

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Film Review: Eugène & Berenice; Michael House, director; 2008

Eugene Atget and Berenice Abbott

Looking for a film on Atget, I was fortunate to learn about Berenice Abbott, a young American who made her way to Paris in the 1920s and fell in with Man Ray as an assistant.  Man Ray was a neighbor and admirer of Atget, and through her employer Abbott made contact with the city's photographic chronicler, making the only known portraits of Atget just days before his death.

Abbott returned to US just before the Wall Street crash of 1929 and inspired by Atget began work on her own archive of the depression-era NY of the 1930's.  She also managed to purchase what was left of Atget's image collection (that wasn't owned by the French government), arranged for a volume of photos to be published in the US and France, and wrote and published her own book on Atget in the 1960s.  She sold her collection to it's current owner, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I was unaware that Atget had done a study of prostitutes and wonder if I might find the confidence to do the same.  It would make a wonderful study for Dubai.  I have at least a couple of massage parlors in my neighborhood.  Do I have the courage to ask? 

Sit Up Straight Production

Michael House, director

Eugène & Berenice

2008
52 minutes

Atget's Paris, Abbott's NY

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Entered: The Royal Photographic Society International Print Exhibition

I have just registered, paid, and submitted four images for this annual competition, my first such entry in any photographic competition anywhere, anytime. I have never felt confident enough to do this before.  I don't know that there is any one thing that has made the difference, but perhaps a series of events, including my better than average results from my first course, and the occasional compliment from friends and associates.  I think, too, that sampling a wide variety of images over the past couple of years has made me realize how vast the spectrum of interest and taste is. Really, most anything could be competitive depending on how the image is contextualized.

I felt, too, that this particualr contest might be a good place to start as it requires a minimal fee and so will as a result have a lot fewer entrants than one that is entirely free.  

Plus, it's a rather old and prestigious contest, and it's always a good feeling to take part in a tradition that includes so many past photographers (possibly even a few great ones).

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11 April

Finalists announced today and I was not one of them.  

Back to work. 

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DPP Assignment 2: Seeing Like Your Camera: Planning

The title for Assignment 2 is Seeing Like Your Camera and requires a collection of high-contrast images shot in jpg and presented without post production.  The intention of the assignment seems to be to have the camera operator create as close to perfect exposures as possible in-camera under high contrast lighting conditions.  

The assignment is in two parts.  Part one requires shooting three images in four situations (twelve images in all).  Part two requires rethinking one set and reshooting it to reduce contrast. Total images in the assignment are thus fifteen.  

While not required, my plan has been to shoot thematically.  For the past few months I have frequently returned to images of poles - such as light posts and street signs - that punctuate the urban landscape like naked trees.  This has been done as part of my SZR project, documenting the few blocks around my residence on Sheikh Zayed Road, the city’s most well-known thoroughfare, the one lined with skyscrapers, including the world’s tallest, the Burj Khalifah.  My project has been the antithesis of the glamour and glitz as typically presented in travel and tourism images.  I see myself working more in the tradition of Atget, capturing everyday life in my little corner of the city in as realistic and unaffected manner as possible.  My intention is not to sell the city or make it attractive, but simply to record what I live and what I see.  

As for poles, I don’t quite know where the idea originated, but a review of my SZR images reveals an early interest in the concept of verticality as expressed in street signs, advertising, and metal rods. These three images from June 2013 show an interest in capturing collections of poles.

Review: Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction: Ch 2: Surveyors and Surveyed, 4th ed, 2009, CONTINUED

From the Bolton Worktown project, a part of Mass Observation.   http://boltonworktown.co.uk/

The Construction of Documentary

In this section Price examines documentary as first defined in the 1930s, quoting Stott from 1973 on the primacy of unassailable content, content “inaccessible to critical engagement.”  (p 93) Since the camera was believed to be able to capture and reproduce reality, photographs were irrefutable proof. Price also notes in the succeeding section of this chapter that documentary photographs did not function in and of itself, but most always in support of text, to confirm what was written. Photographs were published largely anonymously.

Price covers three projects in this section, beginning with Mass Observation, an anthropological survey of British life in the 1930s, for which a number of photographers gathered images on the typical behavior of English citizens.  Their brief was to remain aloof, impartial, unobserved, to gather data without interfering with their subjects.  As one photographer is quoted about his approach to this work, “I was somebody from another planet.”  The point was to make what seemed ordinary strange in order to be able to examine underlying assumptions and identify patterns.  Unfortunately, what became of this work and of its conclusions Price does not say.  He does, however, note that much documentary work of the 30’s recorded conditions with the assumption they could be ameliorated, but never challenged the political-economic structures that bred such conditions.

DPP: Exercise 10: White Balance

The purpose of this exercise is to examine the effects of the camera's white balance settings under several lighting conditions.  The first set was shot in ares pictured above, the afternoon sun off to the right, the camera pointed at the area in direct sunlight in the red circle.  The arrow points to a shaded spot just out of frame where a second series was taken.

Review: Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction: Ch 2: Surveyors and Surveyed, 4th ed, 2009

Political rage against Arthur Rothstein's staged image, 1936.  More:  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/the-case-of-the-inappropriate-alarm-clock-part-1/#more-11487

Documentary and Photojournalism: Issues and Definitions

Chapter author Derrick Price begins by noting that documentary has been described variously as a form, a genre, a tradition, a style, a movement and a practice.  To arrive at some understanding of something so intractable, he finds it necessary to examine the history of documentary practices, products, practitioners, and consumers.

The word documentary was first used in 1926 in relation to cinema and a particular kind of film in opposition to Hollywood fiction.  Solomon-Godeau (1991) has observed that almost all 19th century photography can be described as documentary.  While most academics concede that documentary has no defining style or technique, what sets it apart is its basis in investigation and “a goal beyond the production of a fine print.”  (Ohrn 1980)  In many cases, the photographer’s intention is not only to observe, but in doing so to bring attention that may change the conditions documented.

DPP: Exercise 9: Scene Dynamic Range

This exercise is a continuation of the last, but requiring five scenes in a variety of settings and ranges.  Here is the first.  I will add more as the week progresses.   The image was captured in P mode with matrix metering and wide-area auto-focus.  The camera was then set to spot metering and single focus, and meter readings taken at each of the spots indicated with an exposure setting.  The image shows a middling dynamic range, with 3.3 stops between the darkest and lightest elements.

DPP: Exercise 8: Your Camera's Dynamic Range

The previous two exercises looked into perhaps the biggest issues in digital capture:  highlight clipping and noise.  These correspond to the camera's extremes of the tonal palette, the light and the dark, and it is this range that is examined here.

The brief calls for shooting a scene with a range of contrast in bright daylight .  It also calls for a white card, but this was omitted since the scene had a couple of reasonable sized white patches (the bar on the No Entry sign and the painted curb).

The scene was shot in AP, multi-metering mode, with no noise reduction.  Extreme brightness required using exposure compensation to dial down 1EV.   Playback showed some clipping on the white curb, but as the previous exercise indicated the camera overcompensated in its display of highlight clipping, I thought this exposure would be adequate and not show any clipping once imported into LR.

DPP: Exercise 7: Tolerance for Noise

The brief for this exercise calls for a series of captures at the camera's full range of ISO settings with the intention of demonstrating noise.  Noise may be the result of insufficient photons striking the sensor and may occur when shooting under low light, with long shutter speeds, or high ISO settings.  The result is the speckling effect seen in the right image in the pair above, showing captures at 80 (l) and 6400 (r) ISO.