Started: 36 hour Graphic Design course

While looking around for some basic training in Ps, I happened upon a computer training center in Karama offering 36 hours of small group training in Ps, Illustrator, and In Design.  At approximately US$500 it seems like a decent bargain, depending of course on the quality of instruction.  I started this morning with a young man from Kerala who does freelance design work as well as teaching at this institute.  We started out using Ps as a design tool and right away he was kicking my ass with stuff I had never tried nor seen taught in beginning Ps classes.  The first day wasn't so productive as I was prepared for his teaching style, which is:  show you a bunch of stuff, then say, ok, you do it, and walk away.  I will need to take more notes and ask more questions, but I think we can manage to get along.

#

An Introduction to Adobe Photoshop

Symmetry

I attended a weekend workshop at Gulf Photo Plus conducted by Alex Jeffries (from whom I did a similar Lr course about a year ago).  Topics covered included the workspace, menus, palettes, tool bars, review and practice with different selection tools, use of layers in the editing process, color filters, and masking.  As usual, I learned a lot!  Alex is a great teacher, patient and responsive to student needs.  If you're in Dubai ...

More examples below.

Why practice?

You practice the piano not in order to perform but for the sake of practicing the piano. With music, you don’t practice and then one day become a concert pianist. You are that. Practice is as much an expression of that as of practice itself. — Philip Glass

Assignment 4: Planning

Assignment 4 calls for the creation of a book cover, imaginary or real, in which adjustment or manipulation is employed. The written description calls for something as simple as shading one area of the image where a title might be inserted.

The brief is similar to exercises in TAOP:

1.  Juxtaposition:  http://freedomtolook.blogspot.ae/2013/06/exercise-juxtuaposition.html

2.  Rain:  http://freedomtolook.blogspot.ae/2013/06/exercise-42-rain.html

In preparation I have been considering returning to a Buddhist theme.  The Pali suttas are full of wonderful similes, a list of some of them can be found here:  http://www.accesstoinsight.org/index-similes.html

I'd love to do the arrow, but the parable involves an impaled body, which might also include a bit of blood.  Maybe a bit beyond my abilities at present.

The raft is also a classic, but will require a bit of searching.  Perhaps on my Friday morning bicycle ride I'll visit the beach and marina and see if there's anything useable. 

One that seems easily doable is a set of six hooks (the six senses), arranged into a nice geometric pattern, or perhaps dug into a surface of some kind.  An alternative could be a coat hanger with six hooks, each holding something representative of each of the senses.  

#

DPP: Exercise 23: Alteration

In this last exercise in Part Four, we are asked to alter an image through the removal of an object.  The finished image should not reveal retouching to the average viewer seeing the image for the first time.

Book Review: Five Atgets

When I started off I intended to write a single review of the five Atget books I owned or borrowed.  I wrote and posted about each separately and now don't have much left in me to write a separate review covering all five.  Fortunately, I do have a few photos, and so can summarize in image rather than word.

Notable: Smeggy's Dubai 1986

View from Hyatt Regency Dubai, 23 Feb 1986

I'm not entirely sure who Smeggy is.  There is no About page or bio data at his bulletin board. It seems he was a member of a pop band that did a couple of tours of the UAE in the mid-late 1980's.  Smeggy was also apparently a decent photographer and has posted galleries of several hundred photos from these tours.  The images are well scanned and cleaned-up and for anyone who has visited Dubai in the last five years something of an eye-opener.  I spent at least an hour mesmerized by these images.  Usually I flip through something like this quickly, but something about these image kept me click-click-clicking one after the other.

Dubai 1986 Gallery

Dubai 1988 Gallery

#

Book Review: Books on Books 1: Eugene Atget: Photographe de Paris (1930), Errata Editions, NY, 2008

This volume represents a poorly executed great idea:  reproductions of classic rare photography books.  In this case we have the first monograph of Eugene Atget, published internationally in 1930 in copies of 1000 each in France, Germany and America.  One of these is currently available from a rare book dealer on Amazon for USD500.  The Errata reproduction is USD30.

None of the photos in this collection, so far as I know, are rare, and are most probably all found in the Gingko edition.  What makes this book particularly interesting is that it is essentially a collection of photographs of photographs, a document of a document.  A few of the essay pages appear to have been left out, but everything else is included here, but unfortunately in reduced scale.

DPP: Exercise 22: Addition

Moving up the scale of alteration, we come to an exercise requiring the addition of something not in the original capture.  But we begin by producing an image similar to those in previous exercises employing post processing techniques to overcome the limitations of camera technology.

Book review: Atget Paris. Gingko Press, Corte Madera, CA, 1992.

There’s not a lot in this book but photos, but there are more of them than in any currently in-print collection, over 800 by the publisher’s count.  The book is like a large brick and is not something you’d like carry around for casual viewing.

The photo selection emphasizes Atget's urban cityscapes, organized geographically by arrondissement, Paris’ wards or districts.  There is less emphasis on architectural features (such as grillwork or door knockers) and interiors, though examples of the tradesmen, the city outskirts, and transport have been included.  After looking at so many books organized largely around themes, which also represent a chronological progression as they were often shot as a set, its startling to see examples of these images side by side representing place.  Even if you've seen many of Atget's photos before, seeing them organized thus can open up new understandings of his work.

DPP: Exercise 21: Enhancement

Here's a guy who's beard caught my attention. I had my camera in hand, asked for a photo, clicked twice on whatever settings were selected from a previous image, and he was away.  The original image direct from the camera is below, as well as large copies of the two above.  The one on the left represent global adjustments, while the one on the right the specific adjustments requested in this exercise:  brightening the face and eyes, as well as adding a bit more color (through saturation) of the eyes.

Book Review: Adam, Hans Christian ed. Paris: Eugene Atget. Taschen, Koln, 2008 edition.

In terms of number and size of images relative to cost, this is perhaps the best collection of Atget’s work currently available.  It contains 204 images, most featured on a single page, though there a few instances of two or even 4 images to a page  The first 14 pages are full-size images, within only a 2cm border.  Other pages have a wider bottom border to accommodate captions.

The book features an essay by Andreas Krase in English, French, German (more on that in a moment) as well as

• a map of Atget’s Paris
• the only three known portraits of Atget 
• photos of his business cards
• photos of covers of Atget’s handmade portfolios
• a biographical timeline
• an abbreviated bibliography
• a glossary of relevant French vocabulary

DPP: Exercise 20: Improvement or Interpretation?

This exercise is intended to explore alterations that fall somewhere between correction and enhancement.  The former are things like removing dust and lens flare, while the latter are efforts to improve (a word descriptive of the photographer's values) on optical and sensor technology.  Admittedly, the line between these two is not always clear.

DPP: Exercise 19: Correction

I am awaiting return of prints to do proper feedback assessment from Assignment 2.  My tutors says they are in the mail and that I shouldn't feel constrained to move on to exercises in part four.  

Moving on then.

Film Review: By the Ways: A Journey with William Eggleston, 2007

I was prepared to write a review of this film but found Neil Young has hit all the major points I wished to make.  I did, though, learn about Tav Falco, a musician and photographer who served as Eggleston's assistant in the early 1970's.  At first I thought he must be an actor playing a scripted part dreamed up by the filmmakers, but he is in fact for real, hairdo and all.  Eggleston's world is so redolent of a David Lynch creation.  

In any case, you can safely skip this film unless you're a diehard who needs to see everything about Eggleston. If you want to buy my DVD copy, post a comment here or send me an email.  

# 

Lightroom or Bridge

This week I started Photoshop CC Essential Training with Julieanne Kost through Lynda.com.

I have never done hours of training by video.  The advantage is that the teaching is precisely focused.  It's also one of the disadvantages.  There are no asides and no jokes.  It's all business and it goes at a pretty brisk clip.  I've had to stop the video or backtrack on several occasions because the teacher moves at her own experienced pace.  I'm doing this with two computers, one running the video, the other opened to the software in which I'm practicing.

The first 4 hours of the 14 hour course covers Bridge, which I had never heard of but which I have found is essentially another version of Lightroom tied to Photoshop.  Now I am wondering which might be better to use.  As an experienced LR user the choice seems obvious, but I wonder if there may be issues I'm not considering.  The video doesn't address this concern.

While most of what I've seen so far is pretty much what I already know, I did learn about a couple new things, including the targeted adjustment tool.

Next up - PS.

DPP: Assignment 3: Monochrome

Book review: Badger, Gary. Atget 55. London: Phadon Press, 2001.

This volume is one in a series of pocket-sized books on masters of photography based on the concept of 55 representative images..  History and context is provided here by Gerry Badger, a photographer, curator, and teacher of photographic history at Brighton University.  Badger is the author of the book accompanying the BBC series The Genius of Photography.  I cannot now find writing credits for the series and don’t know if he was involved with that as well, or only the book.

Badger’s 13-page introduction is framed as The Atget Problem:  what exactly does his photography represent?  The ex-thespian described himself as a creator of documents, but has since been hailed as a founding father of modern photography.  Because he had so little to say, he left behind much to discuss.  Badger sees the Atget Problem as a mirror of the problem of photography:  what exactly is documentary photography?

Badgers believes much of Atget’s work is slightly off-key, eccentric, particularly in relation to his competitors.  His use of a wide angle lens sometimes distorted verticals and he wasn’t concerned about extraneous elements in his images.  He didn’t photograph the upper classes, nor much of the lower. He worked in environments decidedly middle class to which he had easy access.

Digital photography: message and memory

Article from 01 April 2014 by Antony Funnell, a reporter with Australia's RN (Radio National), looking at the practice and effects of mass digital photography.  Among the more interesting themes he notes are:

1.  The degree to which we now expect to be able to control images of ourselves when shot by others.  I haven't yet run into this, but I don't shoot a lot of photos of people, nor am I often the subject of photographers.