Posts Tagged ‘child photography’
Charming Children, Fascinating Fotos, and Awesome Waves
On this blog we do a weekly roundup of Photography News that is unusual, even peculiar or weird. Today, however, this weekly post is about charming, fascinating, and awesome Photography News.
Charming Children
Grant Podelco brings the story of a photographer who focusses on children with their toys.
Gabriele Galimberti’s series of photos does not aspire to be high art; rather, it is a charming document of childhood, highlighting that which is most precious to children of different socioeconomic strata and different nations.
One can’t help but wonder at the collection of cheap plastic sunglasses owned by a happy little girl in Zambia (5), or marvel at the Kenyan boy’s sole pride and joy, an old stuffed monkey (2), and compare it with the play riches of the Chinese toddler (7).
Don’t miss contrasting the Albanian doll-like girl surrounded by a slew of dolls in a pink bedroom (12) with the Latvian boy with his countless corgi, matchbox and other toy cars (13) – classic girl and boy toys!
Do you wish that Galimberti had come by your house when you were a child?
Fascinating Fotos
Tim Barribeau brings our fascinating segment in PopPhoto. He recently reported on ‘Living Photographs’. Though admittedly quirky and unusual, this technique of building a picture or composition was also indubitably an advanced form. It seems to have reached its high-water mark back in 1918.
Technically, the most fascinating point is that “the compositions had to be designed to correct for the perspective of the 80-foot tower the photographs were taken from, so fewer people had to be at the base of the image than at the top.” This is clearly visible in several photographs. The process of creating and setting up a single photo “took weeks.”
To actually see these photos, you’ll have to go elsewhere – Barribeau’s feature presents only one.
An extensive gallery of these images has been compiled by Vincze Miklós on io9.com. It has several truly fascinating ‘living photographs’, including an eye-catching Liberty Bell, complete with crack, made up from 25,000(!) people.
It reminds one of the old child’s toy, Picture Peg, but being played with persons in coloured clothes as the pegs.
Awesome Waves
If ever a title precisely, exactly, nailed a hard-to-describe set of images, “frozen sculptures” to define Pierre Carreau photographs of waves is it. Lauren Davis introduces Carreau’s photos on io9.
However, what you see on that page is merely an appetizer; Davis points her readers to Carreau’s website.
The textures, glints, shapes, that you see in the first slideshow are simply astonishing. Some of the waves look more like sculpted ice and Neptune-carved glaciers.
Proceed to the second slideshow to be astonished all over again, this time by the awe-inspiring magnificence and heft of the waves.
Because the shutter-speed is so extremely high (is there a 1/50000 speed?!), the waves are ‘frozen’ and all feeling or effect of motion is lost. Though there is field blur, in many photographs there’s nary a trace of motion blur. This somehow deceives the eye and brain into thinking that one is looking at some fantastical real-life still object – a “frozen sculpture.”
A Child Photography Pro who’s a Child Psychology Amateur
A week back Shutterbug posted a new how-to by Lou Jacobs Jr.’s under their ‘Pro Techniques’ banner and well they might, for the tips and techniques in The Photography Of Laura Cantrell: A Pro In The Child Photography Field are all pro.
Cantrell’s beginnings are unusual for a photographer: like so many small accounting, auditing and brokerage firm bosses, she simply carried on in her father’s footsteps! That doesn’t mean she was not ‘meant’ for this profession; her very sentiments reveal that she’s found her place in life: “It is rewarding to watch a mother’s face as she sees her child’s enlarged portrait for the first time.”
Cantrell keeps costumes, backgrounds and props in her studio to the extent that parents can choose one of different sets. The article is also helpful in providing details about the gear Cantrell, a ‘Canonite’, possesses and uses.
Though Cantrell does not say so expressly, what comes through loud and clear is that a child photography professional also has to be a Child Psychology amateur. For example, she says: “Teenagers . . . require . . . a lot more flattery for natural expressions” and “A 6-month-old baby will laugh at a puppet . . . .” These are a few of the many skills one needs to be a top-class child photographer.
I did find one omission in this how-to. Like adults, children can have pronounced personalities so what works for one child may not work for another. Also, some children are quite moody; their moods vary from day to day. For a child photographer, reading a kid’s personality and his/her mood of the hour, and then adapting to it, is key. Pros at the level of Cantrell certainly do so instinctively; for those who aspire to get to that same level, this reading and adaptation would require a more conscious effort.
Cantrell clearly has a fairly well-developed ‘Style’ – consider this opinion: “I prefer soft smiles because big grins distort features.” Indeed, her images are on the gentle, pensive, sensitive side rather than exuberant or boisterous. That said, even though you and your clients may prefer exuberant and boisterous, there’s something to gain from reading this article (and seeing the photos).
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