DPP: Exercise 25: Gallery Review

This exercise calls for a review of online photography galleries.  I've taken this to mean the websites of professional photographers, which quite naturally feature image galleries.  The purpose of this review is preparation for establishing my own website, an optional activity that I am forgoing for reasons explained below. 

For the review, I have chosen to look at the websites of four professionals discovered while researching my latest assignment on trees.  All are engaged in some type of nature photography:  Clive Nichols is known for his garden and flower images;  James Balog most recently for his work on the disappearing ice of Antarctica;  Edward Parker for his travel and nature images; and Charlie Waite for his landscapes. 

Review: Reynaud, Francoise. The tree in photographs. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010. Print.

This slim volume is the product of a 2011 exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.  In Focus: The Tree was jointly curated by Anne Lyden, associate curator in the Department of Photographs at the Getty Museum, and Françoise Reynaud, curator of the photographic department of the Musée Carnavalet.  Book authorship is credited to the latter as she produced the essay with which it opens. Unfortunately this is rather less a reflection on trees as it is a collection of descriptions that would have been more helpfully placed in some proximity to the images.  As designed and edited, the reader is left to flip back and forth between the essay and the plates.

According to Reynauld, the selection process was based on “the power of the image, the beauty of the compositions, the interest of the represented scene, and the quality of the original print.”  [p7]  In an article at the Getty Center’s online magazine, she writes:

Review: Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction: Ch 6: On and beyond the white walls: Photography as Art , 4th ed, 2009

An example of Etienne-Jules Marey's 
chronophotography

This chapter looks at photography as Art, which Wells defines as “the web of practices relating to the Arts establishment (galleries, museums, public and private sponsorship, auction houses...) by contrast with more general understandings of photogrpahy as an ‘art’ or expressive skill.”  p259

From its inception there has been debate about the nature of photography.  Technology and art were considered distinct categories and photography successfully blurred the line.  Initially the emphasis was on the science, but as those trained in traditional art techniques began to produce photographs, the scope of photography widened.

Review: Master Photographers: Ansel Adams, BBC, 1983

Master Photographers is a 1983 series from the BBC profiling six photographers:  Alfred Eisenstaedt, Bill Brandt, Andreas Feininger, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Andre Kertesz, Ansel Adams.   The series format has the subject in his studio or office with a stack of preselected printed images.  Interviewer Peter Adam (not identified in the films or the credits) asks questions while the subject discusses the photos he has prepared.

I began this series more than a year ago (in February 2013) and thought, with only six 30-minute episodes, I would finish it rather quickly.  It seems there were other things to do along the way.

DPP Assignment 5: First edit and first print

After shooting at least a couple hundred images of trees, plants, and bushes in the Jumeirah, Satwa, and Zabeel neighborhoods, I selected approximately 30 images to post-process in Ps.  This was my first effort to do this entirely in Ps.  The workflow went something like this:

DPP: Exercise 24: Sharpening for Print

This exercise is intended as an experiment in sharpening, both for screen and print.  I expect I will be adding to this over the next two weeks as I experiment with new software, but for now I present the results of my first trial.