Review on Hamish Fulton's website.

The website I am going to review is one of the photographer I have been recently working in the style of  Hamish Fulton or "The Walking Artist" as he calls himself.

To just be brief about what he does, he takes a walk somewhere, be it a forest, mountain or anywhere else and then sums up the walk in a few pictures or a single block of text, very interesting stuff if you ask me. I like his work quite a lot, I find it to be quite interesting, yet I find also to be simple which I like, overly complex things can become dull or just confuse the viewer, but his stuff is just plain and basic, which I like.

http://www.hamish-fulton.com/

The website itself is rather plain in terms of a background, just a plain white background. The main focus of the site is in the center of it where his work is being displayed along with his name, title and a list of numbers that show bits of his work, also if you have sound enabled you can hear sounds from nature, insects buzzing, birds chirping, water running, wind howling down a cave, you can also hear his footsteps and some car horns, I think this adds quite a nice little touch, the viewer instantly knows what he does and where he bases all his work in a sense, it also goes with the pictures and adds to them a little bit. Below the numbers there is a small link that leads to information about the artist, his biography, his work and publications, what I like about it's in a very streamline style of putting it, a basic block colour as a background and another black block to highlight the white text, this then has several drop boxes you can click on to view the information.

Review of the Bryan Adams book: Wounded.

"The first casualty of war is the truth."

This book titled "Wounded" by Bryan Adams is nothing short of one of the most fascinating books I have ever read, it has given me massive insight to not just photographic techniques to imply, but also personal issues of a injured solders trying to fit back into normal life, facing the challenges of normal life but with scars and wounded bodies. 

The book follows the story of Bryan Adams as he recalls the events of war and the stories of young British soldiers who where wounded and had to retire from military service, he captured them in the exact same background and lighting, the pictures inside where of wounded soldiers after they returned home from battle. The injury's within are quite grim, ranging from scars, lost limbs, mechanical body parts and burnt skin, however what I found is that hardly any of the soldiers look in pain or sad, most of them are shown either smiling, looking like they are laughing or have a strong look on their face but what I noticed is that their eyes looked somewhat drawn out, as in they where more noticeable in some photos, I believe he was going for this to show to emotions at the sometime, both strength and sorrow. In my mind the whole book truly questions the humanity in people, pointless wars, pointless death and everything in the middle of it. The stories of the soldiers in this book really puts things into perspective.

 ‘When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains, An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.’

This quote I find to be quite chilling, in a sense of how harsh war really can be.












I pulled this picture out from all the others because it is my personal favorite, it shows what I said before about showing humanity. The upper part of the male is muscular, strong looking giving the view a thought that he is a strong man, the lighting giving highlights of the muscle tone in his back and arm, even the tattoo adds to it over all, but the lower section of his body looks weak, with mechanical legs that are crosses in such a way that makes them look broken or damaged, like they have been thrown down. But I also note that the lighting is not focused to much on them but the white backdrop brings them out, almost like they are not hidden but not meant to be focused on either



 If you are into studio shots or working with human models in general, this book is fantastic for showing you how you can show strong figures of people, keeping both dignity and strength, while showing humanity. I took much inspiration in my recent fashion, taking similar shots and using the style he did, taking portrait, focus on lighting and the models composure. All in all, this book is fantastic, I take much from it, working with models, lighting and composition is critical.What I like most about this book is that it does not focus on the photographic work, but more on the personal story behind each solider. Each story tells about their injury's and how they happened, if you match what they say to the picture taken, it gives another level of depth.


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bryan-Adams-Wounded-The-Legacy/dp/3869306777 - This is a link to where you can buy the book, I highly recommend it.

Research on composite portrait

What is composite portraiture? A composite portrait is a compilation of portrait photographs mixed and matches to meld together, for example. If I take a picture of a farther and a son, I can use photoshop to mix their faces together to make them hold and more often than not will show similarities, matching them up from the eyes, the nose, the lips, the chin.

The several links above are research I have done on the subject and there will be more added with time, overall I have found this to be an interesting subject to study and even more so to practice, my experiments have shown me that it can be very difficult to preform this if you are overly OCD about how things look and that it can take quite some time to find a correct match, but I did manage to create a experimental picture that I really liked, it was a combination with me, Gandalf and George RR Martin. Three who don't exactly look alike but it did go together rather well after some tweaking about with it. 

I was happy enough with it, so I posted it here. I found it to be both an enjoyable process but also frustrating due to my inability to correctly to match it up and then when I did I had erased to much from the other picture, however once I got the hang of it, it became a simple process. I like this one because it shows three different face that I did not think would fit, yet to my pleasant surprise they did.










Overall I did like doing this project but it's something I would like more time to work on, I think if i spend another week on experimenting and working on it I would produce a much strong piece than I did, if I got chance to do this again, I would love to try and replicate some of Nancy Burson's work, get that unique look.


Research notes:

http://nancyburson.com/ - Photographer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_portrait

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2435688/The-average-woman-revealed-Study-blends-thousands-faces-worlds-women-look-like.html - Interesting topic, must do further research

http://faceresearch.org/students/averageness - http://faceresearch.org/demos/average - http://faceresearch.org/

PH1300 - Introduction to Photography Practice: Part 1 Film and Dark Room.

Seeing as this is part one of my project blog I would firstly like to welcome you and thank you for reading my posts, sit down, relax, grab a cup of tea and put your feet up. Enjoy my babbling and pictures till your heart is content, now that being said let's get this started.

This is the introduction to my project for Uni, it details my introduction to photographic practice and goes into the techniques and styles that i will be learning and developing over my time here. The first project I took part in was a introduction to the dark room and photographic film, 33mm to be exact. Firstly we had to head out into the local area and take on location photographs, I myself was using a Nikon F3 with 33mm film, the area i took the shots of was Bootle located in Liverpool.

This first one was taken around noon, I personally like it because of the lines leaning up to the hill and then the buildings looming behind it, I noticed after developing it that it was slightly titled, this could be fixed in photoshop but I want to keep it as it is due the fact this is my first attempt ever at using film and I personally liked it as it was.

This one was taken around the noon as well, a little further down the road there was a garden with a skip in it, I looked at it and thought for a moment about how to compose it to look right, once I had my idea I took the shot, three of them to be exactly, the other two failed as I did not set the camera correctly, the ISO was not set right and was way off. However once I devolved this one after several attempts, It came out exactly how I wanted it to, I was extremely pleased with the outcome, the colouring and shadows became striking and the details became more defined.






Now, to sum all this up I will talk about my experiences with the dark room.

The dark room was quite the experience to have, I will admit I struggled at first but I got the hand of things after I had it explained a second time I got the hang on it perfectly. The process to develop film was quite interesting and took quite a bit of testing and practice before getting what you want, I honestly enjoyed working with it. Overall I found it to be a very eye opening experience, I learned a lot about the old ways of Photography and film, I made a lot of mistakes during this project and would love to redo it, but for a first attempt it's pretty good.