Monthly Archives: November 2017

Project 3 – Surface and Depth

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Research Blog

JPEGs by Thomas Ruff

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JPEGs by Thomas Ruff

All images that appear on the internet and/or printed in books and magazines today are digitised.  Nearly all images are digital even if they originated in non-digital or pre-digital forms. Given this fact it is surprising how few of them ever wish to address the fact that they exist as masses of electronic information that take visual form as pixels. Ruff has done a great deal to introduce into photographic art what we might call an ‘art of the pixel’, allowing us to contemplate at an aesthetic and philosophical level the basic condition of the electronic image. Of course he does this not by showing us the images on screens but by making large scale photographic prints, blowing them up far beyond their photorealist resolution. This might be the  first time some of these images have ever taken a material form.

extract from David Campany's blog/essay

http://davidcampany.com/thomas-ruff-the

http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/2009/04/review_jpegs_by_thomas_ruff/

The tremendous beauty of some of the images notwithstanding, the concept itself seems to rely a bit too much on the technique itself. What else is there? Make no mistake, there is nothing wrong with producing beautiful images or images that are “just” beautiful. And everything would be fine if there hadn’t been so many attempts to convince me that in reality “jpegs” is more.

extract from Joerg Colberg's review

These two articles are reviewing Thomas Ruff’s book; JPEGs.  In this book he has collected photos from different archives to create his own archive of iconic photos.  He has taken the concept that even though many of the images were created on film, they are all now stored in digital format which he found on the ‘web’.

In Joerg’s article he says that the photographer is stating that the idea behind the photos is that even when stored in poor resolution they still have an aesthetical quality.  the Question is: is this photography or art?  He also makes the point that an individual image can be part of many different archives, each with a different focus. I would relate this _DJF1817to ‘collections’ in Adobe Lightroom, where a single photograph could be in a number of different collections based on the focus of that particular collection.

eg: my beach huts image could be a member of various collections, such as, Beaches, Golden Hour, or Structures.

The 9/11 images were iconic, but of terribly low resolution. With the […] jpeg structure and the results from work with image structures I managed to modify the terribly poorly resolved but still visually aesthetical images my way. ‘Terribly beautiful’ images they were.” In a nutshell, this is the idea behind jpegs.

I find it interesting that he has taken a very modern phenomenon of  pixelated photos and printed them.  It’s a bit of a reversal of mediums.

This book was made in 2009, most mobile phones, ipads and computers these days have very high resolution screens, so we are used to seeing all of our media in a very photorealistic way, so it actually requires us to look closely at pixelated image to make sense of it. (Was that his point?).  I believe most people would continue searching for a better quality image rather than look at a low resolution, pixalated photo these days.

In order to relate this to my own work, I took two recently taken photographs and attempted to create the same effect by re-sizing the photographs to 180 x 270 pixels, and saving at ‘zero quality’ compression using Photoshop’s ‘save for web’.

As David Campney noted that the photos are best appreciated in printed form, I also printed them out, to see how they looked.

jpegs_Lachlan

jpgs_beachhuts

Conclusion:

I initially struggled a bit with the concept, and didn’t get why anyone would want to lower the resolution of an image, but then most photographers edit and amend their images to present them in a format they choose.  Therefore, I think there is an argument that photography is just about shape and form, and that humans can understand meaning in images even if they are not realistic.

I wonder, however, how far you can degrade an image before it is no longer recognisable or meaningful? I took the same two images and used the dry brush filter in photoshop to deconstruct the photos even further.

Aesthetically interesting but no longer recognisable?  As with Thomas Ruff’s, JPEGs, if you hadn’t already seen the realistic version, would they still have meaning? This is something that might be interesting to explore further.

 

 

Thomas Kellner

Aside

I came across this photographer whilst reading another learning blog by Derek Youd. I thought it was really interesting and did some further research as I felt it carried on the theme of deconstructing image to create something different.

Whereas Thomas Ruff has taken existing images and reduced them to pixels, Thomas Kellner has interestingly taken images of one subject in order to create something new, but which seems to also encompass the original.

 

http://lenscratch.com/2017/03/thomas-kellner/

German photo artist Thomas Kellner has spent much of his photo career deconstructing architecture.  He calls his methodology  “visual analytical synthesis” where he thoughtfully plans a series of photographs in order to create a picture out of contact sheets. “His work is often referred to Cubism considering that his creative process includes a construction but the results resemble a deconstruction.”

I particularly liked this image of Big Ben:

Kellner_14_01

Exercise 1.4 – research

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Research :

researching what is the difference between framing and cropping:

why-framing-should-be-your-first-priority-and-cropping-second

Difference Between Framing and Cropping

Framing is the arrangement of elements within the confines of the imaging device. In other words, you have a rectangular surface area (film or digital sensor) that is going to image your photograph. The act of framing is you making a determination as to how you are going to fill that surface area with your subject. So, what is cropping?

Cropping is a tool meant to fine-tune an image in post-production. With film it’s done using an enlarger and with digital it’s done by cutting down the size of the resolved image.

From this I understand, that in order to maximise the full potential of your camera, you should fill as much of the frame as possible with what you actually want in the finished image.  That means that you should take a little more time, wherever you can to compose the image in the frame.

As I have a 36 megapixel camera and I know that I am sometimes lazy about moving closer or composing, because I know have plenty of  resolution and can crop what I don’t want.  However, I am now thinking how much sharper my photos could be if I make more effort to frame the photos properly.

For Victor Burgin (b. 1941), composition is ‘a device for retarding…recognition of the frame’ (Burgin, 1980, p.56). Looking back at some of your compositional exercises from earlier in Part One, would you agree that in the less successful shots there is the feeling of a ‘cropped view’ rather than a ‘transparent window to the world’?

Alfred Stieglitz’s (1864–1946) cloudscapes, the Equivalents, illustrate Burgin’s point. They don’t appear to be composed at all; instead they’re ‘equivalent’ in that any section of the sky would seem to do as well as any other. Because there’s no sense of composition our eye is drawn to the edges, to the frame. The sense of a cropped rather than a composed view is what makes the Equivalents so uniquely photographic – ‘a naked function of the cut’ (Foster et al., 2004, p.147).

I think this means that if an image is composed well, the viewer will be engaged with the contents of the image, whereas if it isn’t the viewers eyes are likely to go to the edges of the frames, wondering what they’re not seeing.

 

Exercise 1.3 (1) & (2) Line

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Exercise 1.3 (1) Line
Take a number of shots using lines to create a sense of depth. Shooting with a wide-
angle lens (zooming out) strengthens a diagonal line by giving it more length within
the frame. The effect is dramatically accentuated if you choose a viewpoint close to
the line.

Exercise 1.3.1-croppedExercise 1.3 (2) Line
Take a number of shots using lines to flatten the pictorial space. To avoid the effects
of perspective, the sensor/film plane should be parallel to the subject and you may
like to try a high viewpoint (i.e. looking down). Modern architecture offers strong
lines and dynamic diagonals, and zooming in can help to create simpler, more
abstract compositions.

Exercise 1.3.2-croppedReview your shots from both parts of Exercise 1.3. How do the different lines relate
to the frame? There’s an important difference from the point exercises: a line can
leave the frame. For perpendicular lines this doesn’t seem to disrupt the composition
too much, but for perspective lines the eye travels quickly along the diagonal and
straight out of the picture. It feels uncomfortable because the eye seems to have no
way back into the picture except the point that it started from. So for photographs
containing strong perspective lines or ‘leading lines’, it’s important that they lead
somewhere within the frame.

 

Exercise Review:

There is definitely a different feel to both sets of photographs. In exercise 1.3 (1), I tried placing the leading lines in different parts of the frame and I noticed that in most of them, I have left space around the line which emphasizes it, whereas, in exercise 1.3 (2) many the lines are terminated at the edges of the photograph.  The flat views are great for detail shots or strong regular shapes.

The hypothesis above states that ” So for photographs containing strong perspective lines or ‘leading lines’, it’s important that they lead somewhere within the frame”

To test this I took a photo where there appeared to be a definite ‘thing’ at the end of the ‘lead line’ namely two traffic cones.  In the second photograph I took them out of the picture, to see if it did indeed affect the viewers comfort.  Personally, I didn’t think it made much difference, but this may be because the line extends almost to the other side of the frame anyway.

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Although the photo below was taken with flat lines in mind, those being the different horizons between land, sea and sky, the addition of the people and boat, give it perspective which create an invisible line.  So for the image to have worked as a flat photo, I would have to taken it without either of those elements in it.

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Here the people and ship have been removed to show how the flat image would look.

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