Clarke, The Photograph, Chapter 7: The Body in Photography, 1997

 Muybridge - Woman turning in surprise, running away

Where the portrait is ambiguous, Clarke finds the nude contentious.  This is, he says, because much of the way bodies are viewed is based on social construct.  This doesn't seem to say very much since very little of what we view or know is not understood through social construct.  His point seems to be that ideas of sexuality, identity and gender influence how nude bodies are photographically portrayed. 

You are not a photographer

These days everyone has a camera and post-processing software.  This has encouraged some to think they have all the tools required to launch a photography business.  Hilarious results are collected at You Are Not a Photographer.  While anyone who aspires to be a professional has to go through a period of producing poor images, they must be prepared, when claiming to be professional, to compare their skills and products with those already established as such.  Taking a shot at them here doesn't seem at all unfair.

Exercise 23: Primary and Secondary Colors

This exercise is going to take a few days.

I went out this afternoon with the intention of shooting the whole thing in one go - six subjects (three primary and three secondary colors) of three exposures each.  Ha.

Review: Clarke, The Photograph, Chapter 6: The Portrait in Photography, 1997

Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 19th century) -
James Linton, Newhaven Fisherman - 1840–50

Clarke begins his chapter on portraiture with the claim that is it “one of the most problematic areas of photographic practice, … fraught with ambiguity.”  He notes that portraiture was in its early days encoded in the 19^th century practice of oil painting.  This was a highly privileged medium available to only the wealthy and was used as a means of projecting power and status.  He sees the daguerreotype as the perfect portrait medium as it required, like painting, subjects to sit for long periods (relative to photography, that is) and produced a one-of-a-kind original.  

Exercise 21: Control the Strength of a Color

At long last I begin Part Three: Colour.  Or as I grew up writing it, Color.  The first exercise is intended to demonstrate how exposure affects color.  Washed-out color results from overexposure, deeper color from underexposure.

Holiday snaps workflow

I shot just over 1000 images in 10 days in Israel and Jordan.  Actually nine, as I spent the last day in bed sick and never touched my camera.

It probably took as long to sort and edit these photos as it did to shoot them.  I should have kept better track, but I'll have to do now with a rough estimate.

Happy New Year

Here's the evidence that I have been away:

This past week I started sifting through the 1000+ images from our trip and hopefully before the beginning of next week I'll have a few posted to No Realities.  Shooting on this holiday seemed different than previous vacations.  I was more self-aware.  It was perhaps also one of the more frustrating shooting holidays for not having the time to linger and play with the camera.  I was on auto most days and occasions shooting almost literally from the hip.  I wished I had a pocket camera instead of the bulky DSLR.

Besides the trip, my other excuses for not posting here recently are finishing a 4000-word essay for my Buddhist Studies class (still in progress, though the first draft is now done), a 1000-word book review for the same (submitted) and another 1000-word review for Buddhist Art News (first draft done).  Hope to get cracking on exercises for Part 3 by this weekend and to finish this course by before the start of summer vacation.

Let's see what happens.

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