Assignment 5: Personal Project: Being a Tree in Dubai

Feedback is in and it's all good. My reflection is posted right (as a jpg). The original submission can be found after the break.

DPP is done.

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: Parker, Edward. Photographing trees. Richmond, Surrey, England: Kew Pub., 2012. Print.

This is a beautiful book as much about the love of trees as it is about how to photograph them.  The author is a well-regarded photographer whose images have been published in many well known publications such as National Geographic. He has also written a book on ancient trees, and contributed photos to a survey of some of the most important plants in human culture.  Here he looks back on three decades of nature photography, offering a collection of some of his best images as well as tips on how you, too, can produce beautiful tree photographs.

This is not, however, a book for photography professionals, but more an every-man’s guide to making good photos and appreciating the beauty of trees.  Parker says that used correctly, the compact point-and-shoot can produce similar quality images to equipment costing thousands of dollars.

Book Review: Pakenham, T. (2003). Meetings with remarkable trees. 1st ed. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Illustrated.

This is a lovely book, a collection of 60 photographs of the UK’s biggest and most ancient trees.  Each photo includes a brief essay with anecdotes about the tree’s history and current condition.  There is quite a lot of botanical lore, including how many of these species found their way to the British Isles.

I was looking at the text mostly from a photographer’s point of view to get ideas about my own project on trees in my Dubai neighborhood.  Some observations about the images here.  There appear to be three main compositions:

I can't figure it out

That's what the man said as he was getting in his car. What are you photographing?

The tree, I said.

Is it so interesting?

That's what I'm hoping to find out.

And he drove away.

#

Exercise 41: Juxtaposition

The brief for this exercise is to create a book cover using opposition to suggest conflict.  I really had no idea what to do so started browsing through fiction at Amazon.  I came across an interesting looking book that I haven't read, about a Japanese priest morally compromised by an affair with his mother-in-law. The blurb at Amazon didn't provide enough detail, so I went in search of a fuller summary, which you can read here.