Archive for the ‘Exhibitions and Contests’ Category
The British Raj and India
Few people in the Commonwealth Countries do not have at least a passing interest in the British Raj. For nostalgics – and arguably even for realists – the Raj brings visions of grandeur and a sense of pelf at its zenith.
A set of images from that bygone age are available at the Royal Ontario Museum clear through to January 2014. Between Princely India & the British Raj: The Photography of Raja Deen Dayal is an exhibition of 100-plus photographs taken when India was that figurative ‘jewel’ in Queen Victoria’s crown (and possibly the literal ‘jewel’ in her commonwealth) – which means we’re talking about photographs taken in the late Nineteenth Century by a man who was far removed from the centres of what was then an infant science.
Even discounting the disadvantages Dayal would have faced, some of his work truly deserves the superlative, “stunning,” used by both, the museum’s senior curator as well as the sponsor’s artistic director. These photographs reveal that the man behind the camera had an eye not only for composition and lighting, but also for documentary ‘street shooting’ that was ahead of its time, and also possessed considerable technical knowledge.
The museum’s website shows only five images, one of them a portrait of Dayal. The very next photo, The North Gate, is a delight of lighting (note the rich texture) and composition that strikes a perfect balance. The Elephant Procession is a documentary photograph taken from an optimal (or near-optimal) angle of elevation with (obvious) leading lines. This is not only photojournalism before there was any such thing; Dayal fortuitously captured an ‘atmospheric’ image: the haze of dust thrown up by the elephants’ feet brings this image to life.
The third photograph, Monkeys on a Temple Wall, is a touch over-focussed (leave alone auto-focussing, Dayal did not have the luxury of even TTL focussing!) but is a fine example of a keen eye: give due credit to the man for capturing monkeys who look like they’re in silent contemplation on a temple plinth! As for the fourth photograph of Bashir Bagh Palace, exposing an interior so perfectly in 1888 is a feat in and of itself. This photograph also has an excellent sense of space and depth, and good balance in a ‘busy’ image as no one object or element dominates the interior.
A few more photographs are available on other pages and sites.
Anyone who is both a Raj and Photography buff may be interested to know that Dayal’s images are available in a new coffee-table book, Raja Deen Dayal: Artist-Photographer in 19th-century India.
The ‘Black and White’ of Coastal Ukraine and Inner-City Chicago
The ‘Black Sea’ of Ukraine
If you like no-holds-barred documenting of grey city zones and urban decay, Rafal Milach’s Black Sea of Concrete may appeal to you. This play on words focusses on the ugly ‘sea’ of ‘concrete’ along Ukraine’s Black Sea coastline. The photographer himself sees his work as “post-Soviet nostalgia,” as he puts it in a story on BJP.
Check out his bleak vision of a dock – something from a dystopic Sci-Fi film? This image embodies the title, ‘Black Sea of Concrete’, doesn’t it? Now this image of wreck, rocks and grey sea does look like it’s straight out of that endtimes Hollywood epic, Waterworld.
As for that ‘post-Soviet nostalgia,’ could anything embody that aspect better than a stylized ‘concrete’ hammer and sickle in an umkempt ‘sea’ of weeds and paving slabs?
If, by now, you’re yearning for some colour, here’s just about the only outdoor splash of it in this mini-gallery; though even this image conveys decay and bleakness.
If telling it like it is in ’50 Shades of Grey’ all the way through to ‘black’ appeals to you, you may wish to get Milach’s photo book.
John ‘White’ of Chicago
Nearly two months back we had blogged about the Chicago Sun-Times’s infamous retrenchment of its entire photographic corps. That corps counted among its assets a Pulitzer Prize winner, John H. White. Photography Blog has run a story mentioning that White’s era-defining photographs of Chicago’s South Side will open in a London gallery a week from today.
These photographs are truly evocative, capturing the ethos and spirit of a particular community in a particular time.
Here is a startling photo of a drab residential block in front of which stands a young couple – who have evidently been thrown out of their home. A less startling and more gentle, though equally race-tinged, photograph of black women (‘missionaries’ according to the caption) in white boarding a bus harks one back to the 1960s as it carries a whiff of segregation.
The year 1970 was near or around the height of the ‘Black Power’ Movement. A photograph of a ‘human blockade’ of another eviction radiates that ‘Black Power’ consciousness – upraised closed-fist salutes notwithstanding.
Not all was gloom and doom; White managed to capture lightness and optimism too: witness this young girl’s dreams of someday becoming a gymnast being formulated and expressed in a very unhospitable setting for gymnastics.
This exhibition is scheduled to run for four weeks.
From Equatorial Africa to the Arctic Pole . . . and Outer Space!
Today we look at three very unusual photo galleries. On Monday German, Canadian and American websites posted news items about exhibitions and galleries related to subjects from Equatorial Africa, the Polar North, and in Outer Space!
Equatorial Africa
Helen Whittle on Deutsche Welle suggests that the West’s view of Africa has been defined by Photography. Whether or not she gives photography more credit and more power than it deserves, her thesis is developed from the germ of an idea around which a major photography exhibition has been put together at The Walther Collection in small town Germany.
The exhibition is divided into three sections of which the early twentieth century photographs of Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin (found in the ‘Black House’ section) comprise the centrepiece.
These are not ‘art photographs’ but very faithfully rendered portraits of African subjects that do not depict them as such, in any manner or with any intent; rather they capture, preserve, the subjects as they are, perhaps even teasing out the respective subject’s essence. The intention does not seem too distant from that of Karsh’s (much more) famous portraits of famous personages.
Equally fine “vintage portraits” documenting a bygone Africa from the nineteenth century are seen in the ‘Green House’ section by various (for the time) very talented photographers.
Polar North
CBC features a story about photographs of “rare arctic wildlife scenes” with the interesting twist that no photographer is involved! You see, the photos were taken “using remote camera technology.”
These motion-sensing cameras did the job in temperatures that fell to -40 in Yukon Territory’s Ivvavik National Park, capturing images of shy and seldom-seen animals.
The eleven-image gallery shows porcupine caribou, grizzly bears, and even a wolverine and a musk ox, apart from impressive views of an unspoilt tundra. You can also see some of the same, and older, images on Parks Canada’s website.
Outer Space (well, not technically)
Sorry photogs, but the only way you’ll ever be able to take photos like the ones on offer here is if you book a million-dollar seat on a space shuttle. PetaPixel reports on “a rare portrait session” for Planet Earth from “almost a billion miles away.”
By some chance these photographs, taken in interplanetary space, are artistically appealing. The Earth, appearing as a pinpoint of light near the centre of the image, can be missed. It is the curvature of Saturn in one or another corner with those obvious and well-known banded rings in a sea of gradated blackness that ‘makes’ these photos.
Story-Review-Gallery Combo
Story
Thank heavens we’re not ‘fanboys’ and thank heavens we don’t do reviews anyway! DPReview has a short story about bogus online reviews that ‘dis’ one or another product. These fake reviews are attributed to fanboys gone bad. This news story is actually based on a bona fide academic study, Deceptive Reviews: The Influential Tail (40 pages) by Eric Anderson and Duncan Simester.
It’s an open secret that some small-time brands and sellers purchase review writers’ ‘services.’ Anderson and Simester have uncovered a dual reverse phenomenon: some self-appointed reviewers post negative reviews . . . gratis!
Briefly, the authors began with a set of reviews that were known to be genuine and another set that was known to be fake. They used syntactic and linguistic analysis over these different sets to determine whether any patterns could be found, and voila! These findings allow one to infer which review has a good chance of being a fake.
Electoral candidates well know the value of negative advertising during elections. Clearly, some ‘fanboys’ are learning well from them.
Review
Having written what we have above, we’d better not sound negative about the Samsung Galaxy S4. Fortunately, all we’re doing is concisely presenting what Daniel Bell has to say on ePHOTOzine about this android gadget.
This 13 MP smartphone camera has Full HD video and goodies like Panorama and HDR modes. Notably, it has an AMOLED display – a Samsung-LG innovation from last year.
Image quality in all its facets is not something to get too excited about; then again, there’s nothing particularly poor about it. Bell politely uses the word ‘good’ throughout this part of his review.
It edges the iPhone 5 on one score: high-res panoramas but in portraits it’s “not ideal” – they “aren’t great.” Bell awards the Galaxy S4 two 3-1/2 stars and two 4 stars in ePHOTOzine’s four essential review criteria.
Gallery
Masters of Vision is a British biennale that is due to open next month to “showcase the work of legendary master landscape photographer Joe Cornish and eight other inspirational UK landscape photographers,” reports Photography Blog.
Judging from the images on the website’s main page this exhibition is much about Ethereal Nature.
In truth this gallery is deserving of a full-length post, comprising as it does of some of the finest work of some of the country’s finest photographic artists.
Take, for instance, Joe Cornish’s incredibly captured ‘God Beams’ bathing a hilly Northern landscape, making for an image that is quite transfixing. Or David Baker’s minimalistic study of sky, waves and spume, radiating both beauty and menace.
Come to think of it, with the amazing variety and sheer number of gorgeous photographs in this gallery, why not dedicate a post exclusively to it . . . .
If this Story-Review-Gallery combo doesn’t do it for you, head over to today’s equivalent on our sister blog!
Galleries: Combat and Worship
The past 24 hours have offered up two extremely contrasting galleries: one devoted to combat; the other to worship!
Combat
Kainaz Amaria on NPR’s ‘the picture show’ discusses a War Photography exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. She says, “it has the usual array of iconic war photographs” but the real strength of this exhibition is “in the presentation of our collective war story.”
Actually, another strength may be the exhibit’s sheer breadth and range: it features “more than 185 photographs from 25 nationalities with conflicts spanning 165 years.” Exceptional quality and selectivity are two more strengths: over one million photographs were viewed from which the exhibition images were culled.
The article includes 20-odd photos in a mini-gallery. See a sergeant treating a recruit to a staredown and compare it with a grunt’s glazed stare.
A photograph of Nicaraguan rebels is one of the most unusually colourful war photos you’ll ever see. Just like bursts of bright colour, ballet and art are not associated with war either, yet this photograph of infantrymen leaping over a trench is artistic and balletic exploring form, movement, and warriors in the abstract. If overt warfront action is more your style, this mini-gallery has you covered.
Flick through the gallery for even more overt photos, a couple of which may be gut-wrenching.
Worship
Today’s installment in Baltimore Sun Darkroom is a gallery of photographs revealing the inner workings of the seldom-seen Baltimore Carmelite Monastery where fewer than 20 sisters live of whom you can see three chanting vespers and five in prayer.
The gallery begins with the hint of a sunswept lawn seen through a dim corridor that is dominated by stained glass with a religious motif. However, this is a modern residence for women devoted to religion and not a hillside cloister: witness other photographs that are documentary and prosaic, such as this image of a sister gardening and one that could have been taken in any suburban kitchen.
That said, this modern-day monastery has a Seventeenth Century antiquarian book or two and its own religious relics.
Combat and Worship
We close with a convergence of our two topics by way of the Spanish Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona in which a holy day – a remembrance to a saint – is marked by combat in the bullring.
The festival took place last week. Kevin Fischer identifies two photos that are not the same old, same old. Here’s a photo of a bull being kept at bay by stick-toting men and another of a cow leaping over scared revellers.
‘White Out’ and Black Infra
Olympus PEN E-P5
Feature-packed, technology-packed, and tradition-packed. That about sums up Olympus’s new PEN E-P5
On the 50th Anniversary of the PEN F, Olympus is launching ” a digital update of [that] classic film camera.”
Although the story on Shutterbug is actually just a press release from Olympus, it’s worth a look because of the blend of features, tech and tradition in this 16 MP interchangeable-lens compact. For instance, the camera has built-in WiFi, a top speed of 1/8000, traditional dials and knobs, assignable functions, optional viewfinder, interval shooting, time-lapse movie, and a ‘photo story’ mode.
For a preliminary review head over to DPReview which says that it is “a serious camera, but one that has real charisma too. Overall the E-P5 takes a significant step forward from the E-P3, and is perhaps best seen as an E-M5 in a slimmed-down body. Yet it adds useful extra features of its own . . . .”
Unfortunately, for all that it is, it seems that Olympus have overpriced the PEN E-P5.
White Out
Photographer Eirik Johnson’s “meditation on the passage of time” gives a whole different meaning to the term ‘white out’.
Johnson has taken ‘Summer’ and ‘Winter’ photographs in Barrows, Alaska of exactly the same cabin from exactly the same spot, reports D.L. Cade on PetaPixel.
Though strictly documentary, these photographs have a startling quality about them due to the intense shift in seasonal landscape. What are sunny splotches of colour in scenes you may come across most anywhere in the world turn into stark white and shades thereof in the paired photograph.
Black Infra
From whites to intense, lustrous blacks, which is the usual result when shooting infra-red.
David English has an unusually technical article on the Leica Blog in which he explains how he used a B+W #092 filter to mimic IR film and the complications of using it with a Summilux-M 24mm. These include issues like autofocus being affected and the exposure meter being fooled.
If the techicalities of IR don’t interest you, do check out the gallery for some arresting takes on everyday scenes that seem to be out of the Twilight Zone and feature some velvety blacks.
The Mysterious Charms of Beijing’s Hutongs by Christopher Domakis
“‘Hutong’ is the Chinese word for typical old town districts in Beijing,” explains Christopher Domakis in his introduction to his gallery Hutong on Behance. “While Beijing is moving fast, developing new districts and constructing massive infrastructure projects, there are still some Hutongs which provide daily life which you would expect only in villages far away from modern metropoles as Beijing.”
Domakis has produced atmospheric images of these Hutongs, photographed after dusk when all is still and quiet.
Exposure and retention of shadow detail is a major factor behind the charm and mysterious quality of these photographs.
A few of them look no different from the inner alleyways of any old town; in fact, one photograph radiates the quality of a forbidding seam of Victorian London!
A small, well-lit ‘cabin shop’ amidst semi-deserted darkness inspired Domakis into a very unusual composition. Notice how the main subject is not only centred but also shot straight on, from the front. The simplicity and forthrightness of this choice combine to make the cabin pop out and also look even more unceremoniously out of place than it is.
Domakis came upon another cabin-shop that is integrated into a low-slung structure. Notice the radically different composition in this photograph: the cabin is off-centre in the image and it is also shot at an angle to present it in the context of its surroundings – shuttered doors, passers-by, two-wheelers, and more.
Clearly, Domakis’s compositions are no accident.
A few photos are taken at such an angle that, even though the perspective is fairly close and the subject-matter (close-set structures and narrow alleys) deters large fields of view, they have depth. The photo of the neighbourhood bakery and a man shows three planes of structures and the short span of road causes the eye to move front to rear; thus, the depth of the photo is not defeated by the glowing and lit-up main subject to one side.
Talk about ‘lit-up’, here’s a nice juxtaposition between fluorescent lighting and tungsten lighting with their different colour casts combining to lend tonal interest to a scene that is already interesting to begin with.
The most common props to be seen in this gallery are bicycles and chinese lanterns. Can you find each in five photographs?
The photo of Super 8 Hotel is the most teasing one. First, no less than five different patches of differently-coloured light appear in a horizontal band across this night photo. Second, the very hazy silhouettes of two persons behind a steamed-up window give a hint of human life to a fairly wide scene that is otherwise devoid of any life (except for a man standing under the bridge in the far distance). Fourth, it hints of the conviviality that may be found behind the hotel’s walls though the street itself is dreary and deserted. Finally, does liveliness and vibrancy lurk in the background past the left edge of the image?
If Carol Reed or Orson Welles were around and wanted to make a movie filmed in the Hutongs, they would surely ask Domakis to do the storyboarding.
Richard Bernabe’s Masterful Composition and Lighting
Composition and Lighting are perhaps the two essentials of Outdoor Photography. Richard Bernabe has not only authored an e-book on each of these subjects, many of his photographs reveal mastery over both, composition and light, such as his image of rocks, sea and cliff that has lateral symmetry on the horizon with even the sky and clouds being fairly laterally symmetric which is wonderfully balanced by an assymetric sub-horizon.
A very readable interview with Bernabe has just appeared on PhotoTuts+. He says, “When one is confronted with their life’s passion, they are either forever saved or ruined.” Even though Nature Photography is a tough nut to crack as compared to Wedding and Portraits Photography, Bernabe’s devotion to his passion and calling ‘saved’ him. It has also been the spur for some stunning Art Photography that verily breathes Composition and Lighting.
Check out Bernabe’s mist-shrouded vision of Machu Picchu. He has precisely centred the tip of the peak but the background on the right and the slope of the plateau offset the centreing of the peak so that one has both lateral symmetry of a kind (or ‘lateral balance’) and also lateral assymetry in one and the same image. This technique or vision seems to be a Bernabe speciality.
How about the lighting in the photo of Mt Kirkjufell in Iceland? The brilliant gold-and-purple sky coupled with the flat-lit yet well textured landscape without any distinct shadows is quite confusing. The lighting mystery is solved when you read the title of the photo: ‘Midnight Magic’. Bernabe used the Midnight Sun to super advantage.
Even with a prosaic subject like maple trees Bernabe’s imagination creates a poetic and minimalist impressionistic canvas. He says that to some extent this is teachable: besides the “mechanics,” he says he can show students “why moving three feet to the left completely changed the image for the better.” More critically, he says, “I can plant the seeds of curiosity in another person, however, and see if they germinate or just rot away.”
It is those “seeds of curiosity” that may eventually enable a Bernabe student to someday take a photograph of a suitable subject with this palette, shutter speed, perspective, angle of elevation, and aspect ratio that combine to form a perfect picture.
Christy Lee Rogers’s Underwater Fine Art Photography
Yesterday’s post on our BPro sister site featured three news items and galleries about Underwater Photography. We’re continuing that theme today but with an extreme twist. The images we’re looking at are not regulation underwater photos, i.e. there are no pin-sharp depictions of marine life here. Instead, Christy Lee Rogers uses water-based refraction, diffusion and distortion to artistic advantage to create what is accurately termed ‘Underwater Fine Art Photography’ or ‘Fine Art Underwater Photography’.
The trick here is that Rogers herself is not in the water; she photographs from land while her subjects pose in a pool.
Jordan G. Teicher on Slate says that Rogers’s images “look like Baroque masterpieces” and that is only a slight exaggeration, for the photographs are indeed that good. The gallery on Slate is loaded with high-res images.
Some of Rogers’s photos look like, well, what they are: underwater photos. Others, however, resemble a painting that is a cross between an ‘Old Master’ and an Impressionistic canvas.
Teicher writes that Rogers’s “visual style . . . is often compared to that of the Baroque painter Caravaggio,” which makes sense. However, there’s clearly some of Michelangelo’s chiaroscuro in a few photographs, such as The Innocents. Apart from the light-and-shadow effects, a troubling mystery lurks in this image – something is not quite right.
If we’re going to talk of paintings and the masters, the photographs here will bring to mind more than one. For instance, doesn’t the lovely Drowning in her Sea suggest William Waterhouse in an uncharacteristically impressionistic mood?
A few images are more like Abstract Art than Baroque or Old Master paintings. Reckless Unbound is a visually luscious arrangement of hues both arresting and calming – brilliant carmine anchoring pastel greens and limpid blues.
How much of her work and which images are the result of anticipation and execution, and how much and which ones are the outcome of happy chance, only Rogers knows. To the viewer, the visual delights brought by these photographs are completely independent of their provenance.
Light Painting Hat-trick
Today we have a double feature from PetaPixel on Light Painting – in fact, one of the features is itself a double feature as it exhibits the distinctly different creations of Joanna Jaskólska and Zach Ancell. The second gallery exhibits the still different, dreamy, fantasy-like images of
Long exposure photo of a light show dance using finger lights. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
.
These are purely galleries, not how-tos. If you want some pointers on Light Painting, check out our post from a month back, Light Painting with Darlene Hildebrandt. You can combine the skills gained in that lesson with inspiration taken from these galleries.
Jaskólska asks her breakdancing subjects to do their thing with LED wands in their hands. The effect of bands of sinuous white lines is not exactly overwhelming. Had the breakdancers held taped multicoloured light sticks or sparklers, the images would have had a lot more ‘zing’ that would have complemented the breakdancers.
Ancell too shoots moving subjects but with a very different take. Not quite ‘Light Painting’ as commonly understood, he photographs atheletes in motion such that they give off superhero-like streaks lighting up their paths of motion! Now this is a concept that will have athletic goods suppliers knocking on Ancell’s door.
Light Painting as a term and a concept is probably best ‘illustrated’ by Jason D. Page’s creations. They are light paintings in that they are created with light, and they are light paintings in that they indeed resemble painted art.
The image of translucent dragonflies hovering in front of a swamp looks like a still from a Disney animated feature whereas the photo of an otherworldly woods is obviously painted with light (perhaps a little overdone for some tastes).
Head over to Page’s website for some more fantastical images, which have to be considered truly incredible images given that they are “captured to the camera in one single photographic frame [with] NO PHOTO EDITING used . . . .” One would be hard-pressed to create some of those images even with post-processing!
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