Upcoming August 2012 Meeting

Posted on July 30, 2012 by admin

At our last meeting, all those present voted to have members voluntarily make presentations at our monthly meetings. Our hope is that this ongoing exchange of information, inspiration and support will benefit us all.

Riki Reichman generously volunteered to be the first to share. Her primary photo interests are in nature and portrait photography. She will be presenting at our August 13, 2012 meeting, held at 7pm in the Community Room of the the Bridgehampton National Bank in Bridgehampton.

By way of introduction, Riki had provided a short biography:

A Clinical Psychologist and published author by profession, I have been sculpting and painting for many years. I have been interested in film photography for over three decades and began working in digital photography about twelve years ago.
For the past seven years, I have been showing my photographic work in the East End of LI and in Florida competitions, and have been the recipient of numerous awards in Florida. I have shown statewide in Florida in the Florida Camera Club Council, which is comprised of more than 50 clubs throughout Florida and in international competition in the Photographic Society of America (PSA). In the east end I have shown in various members shows over the years and in two East End Arts Council juried shows.

My interests are primarily in nature photography and portraits, in both color and black and white. You can view her website here: Riki Reichman Photography: Nature As Art

March 2012 Meeting Notes

Posted on March 10, 2012 by admin

In spite of the change to daylight saving time, everyone eventually showed up. The March meeting was very well attended, and a lively discussion ensued.

The first order of business was the presentation of the Photographers East web site which is now on line (http://www.photographerseast.org/) thanks entirely to Loretta Bechert. Please note that all current members are listed on the members page. If you want your name to act as a live link, it will be highlighted in blue. Please email Loretta with your request. She will set up a gallery page of images for you or link to your already created website. I know all members will want to extend a heartfelt thank you to Loretta.

The assignment for the March meeting was to present two versions of the same image, one in color, the other in black and white. Firstly we reviewed the role of color in western painting, and saw that it took almost five hundred years for western painting to transform color from its totemic role in medieval manuscripts to the photorealism of Ingres, as shown in his self portrait, made around the time that photography was invented, and most likely based a photograph, as was Ingres’ habit in later life.

Medieval Manuscript

Photography on the other hand, as a means of fixing optical projection, started out in the 1830’s as a black and white medium which instantly provided perspective, shading, fine details: everything, in short, that painters took hundreds of years to develop, but without color, the foundation of western painting for hundreds of years.

This situation lasted well over a century, until the wide acceptance of color after World War II, first with Kodachrome 35mm slides, and subsequently with one hour color prints and finally, at the turn of the 21th century, with the digital revolution which brought color printing into the home and studio on a mass scale by means of the Epson inkjet printer.

Thus senior photographers among us will have developed their skills and appreciation of the art of photography in a black and white world, an example of which is this Avedon self portrait. While younger ones,who started shooting in the last 20 years or so, might consider photography to be primarily a color medium.

We started by examining the matter of converting color photos to black and white. It was shown that simply converting a color image to gray scale, or desaturating it, did not produce a satisfactory image, as the relationships of the grays did not seem correct.

This is because the eye has a different sensitivity to different colors, being particularly sensitive to the color green.

What is needed, is a properly “panchromatic” color to black and white conversion with the correct relationship between the grays. This problem had been solved by Kodak in 1922 with their Panchromatic Cine film. And black and white photographers will certainly recall Kodaks Plus X Pan, a long time standard for fine grain medium speed black and white film. Now a days, Photoshop and Lightroom have black and white conversion routines that make a correct conversion the matter of a couple of clicks of the mouse.

Here is an example of the results.

Color test sheet:

Simple removal of Color by conversion to gray scale

colortest1

Panchromatic conversion:

Note that in the Panchromatic version, the intensity of the grays is more like the color version. As we shall see later, being able to control the brightness of each color in the conversion process can easily be used for artistic effect, the most common of which is darkening the blues to make skies darker, something that was accomplished in the dear old days of film with a red or polarizing filter, or both.I started off by showing several pairs of photos that had been selected to show their suitability for presentation in color, or black and white. It was interesting to note the unanimity in the group in their preference for one form or the other. As this fall foliage scene was all about color, it should come as no surprise that no one preferred the black and white version: it was a total bore, no surprise there.

On the other hand, everyone preferred this photograph in the black and white version, no doubt because the bird stood out much more dramatically against an almost black sky.

As the evening progressed, it became clear that while there was quite a bit of unanimity among the members as to whether an image was stronger in color or black and white, and it was not always the color one, by any matter of means.

Marilyn DiCarlo presented a pair of flowers. Here, the color was preferred. Again this

picture was all about color in the first place.

Bridge presented some night portraits which argued for an intermediate position:

in addition to color an black and white, he present images in which the color had been desaturated in the shadow areas, to better simulate natural vision which does not

distinguish colors well in very low light.

Color:

Black and white:

Bridg-B&W

Selective desaturation:

Bridg-color&BW

Dainis presented a number of images which recalled post cards of the past. This photograph seemed to benefit from a black and white conversion, because without the blue sky, the form of the Wainscott Church was emphasized over the expanse of blue sky, and that was the point of the picture.

Dainis-Saulitis photo

Loretta got the prize for actually doing the assignment correctly, and in a way that facilitated showing it to the other members, and presenting it in the meeting notes.This properly sized and presented pair was one that every one agreed was stronger in black and white, because the bright red color of the kite seemed to distract from the relationship between the surfer and the kite, and the blue sky obscured the lines that connected the two, thus reducing the strong pictorial effect of the diagonal formed by the surfer, the lines, and the kite. Normally, though, seascapes seem to benefit from color.

Beryl Brownman thoughtfully arrived early with some photographs she had taken on a trip west. I selected a few to convert. This one of the Grand Canyon seemed to be a candidate for conversion to black and white, as the natural lighting was somewhat dull, flattening out the strong forms in the photograph, although that was an interesting look in itself. After conversion to black and white, a bit of contrast was added, as is common in a black and white conversion. The blue channel in the Photoshop black and white converter was pulled down, to absorb the blue in the shadows, thus emphasizing the shapes of the plateaus in the canyon.

Original:

Black and white conversion:

Photoshop black and white converter:

Yvette brought a pair of photos that were converted using a “film look” conversion plug in.

This group was unusual in that there was no clear preference for color or black and white, perhaps because of the fact the the color photo itself, was almost a monotone, and the photograph relied for its impact on form and movement, rather than color.

Joan Santos was unable to make the meeting, but she sent in a pair of images,

properly sized. Thanks Joan. What is interesting about this pair is that the color

version looks to me like a photo of the people in the distance framed by the car

window, while the black and while looks like a picture about the car. Note that

the contrast, as is often the case, was increased in the black and white.

We are all grateful to everyone who completed the assignment, especially those who took the trouble to resize their work for easy projection and inclusion in the meeting notes. Just a reminder,(for Dainis:-), work should be 8×10, 72 dpi, medium resolution jpegs. Anyone who needs help in resizing might come a bit early to the meeting, It isn’t difficult to do.

Our next event will be the Annual Ashawagh Hall Show the Weekend of March 24th.

Details will be covered in a separate email from Fred Vanderwerven. There will be a critique and discussion starting at 4pm Sunday. There will be no meeting in April, and the next meeting will be the May 14th meeting at the Bridgehampton National Bank.

-Jonathan Morse

February 2012 Meeting Notes

Posted on February 19, 2012 by admin

The February meeting explored the age old problem of representing ever moving time with but a single still image. The meeting was very well attended, and six members presented work for the review.

Dainis presented a number of different techniques, and I found this multiple exposure to be the most effective.

Everyone is familiar with flags waving in the wind. As the wind increases, the gentle waving turns into a manic flapping. Back in the day, multiple exposures were an all too common error with manually operated cameras. Now a days, it is almost impossible to even make a multiple exposure with an electronic camera, and the effect must be created in after capture in Photoshop. This picture seems to create the impression of a flag beating in a strong wind more effectively than either a stop action or a motion blur, does it not?

Marilyn presented a variety of ways to indicate action, but I found this series of a butterfly drawing nectar from a flower to be the most instructive.

This close up stop action shot is wonderfully revealing of detail on a beautiful flower and butterfly, showing a marvelous pattern that might not be seen at all by the naked eye.

On the other hand, is not this blurred shot more illustrative of a live butterfly as it darts and flits from flower to flower in nature? Has anyone discarded this kind of photo with barely a glance, perhaps prematurely?

Bridg presented several interesting ways of showing time. One was a stop action video that compressed a year of construction into a few minutes of video in a way that was more illustrative of the job than either a still shot or a conventional video.

He also showed what can happen when everything is just right in a high speed shot. The most dramatic moment in the launching of a ship is when it leaves the ways and splashes into the usually still harbor waters with a tremendous splash. This strong diagonal composition, and perfect timing capture the moment perfectly, showing a moment in time with more impact than a fleeting frame in a moving image.
Yvette used an entirely different technique to define a moment: soft focus.

By eliminating all normal “photographic” detail from this photograph, the more significant body language comes to the fore, making this image more painterly, and this special moment more memorable.

Perfect stillness is harder to portray than may be imagined. We use the expression “still life” to describe a scene that has been consciously composed to allow a careful portrayal, either by painter or photographer.

But when shooting natural scenes, the there is a difference between simply showing a scene with no movement in it, and the indication of that perfect, quiet, stillness that so rarely occurs.Perfectly flat water, water as flat as a mirror, actually occurs in nature rather infrequently. In this shot that perfectly calm water may
promote the sense memory of a particularly silent moment on a still and chilly autumnal morning.

THE ASSIGNMENT:

Back in the day, photography was entirely a black and white affair. From it’s earliest days in the 1830’s until the wide use of Kodachrome after World War II, there was very little color in photography, and none at all available to the general public.

From the 1950’s to the seventies, the 35mm color slide was the standard way of taking color pictures, until the ubiquitous one hour photo lab brought wallet size color prints to the masses.

But it was not until the rise of digital photography and the Epson inkjet printer that amateurs and professionals alike were able to make their own color prints at a reasonable cost in their own studios.

The result was that color, glorious color, became the linqua franca of virtually every photographer, as “free” digital “film” and inexpensive inkjet printers allowed everyman to own a “digital color darkroom”.

Or did it, really?

The classic black and white photographs certainly did not lose their appeal and many photographers continued to work entirely or partially in black and white, producing strong and memorable images.

(Some of the best black and white photography can be seen in Hollywood movies from the golden era, and stills from the period by such masters as Karsh, Hurrell and Bull,)

For our next assignment we are going to study the effect and impact of color and black and white on contemporary photography.

Members are requested to bring in images taken in both color and black and white, to illustrate and explore which technique is more appropriate, and when.

As always, kindly bring your work in a thumb drive, trying to make the images as 8×10 .jpgs at 72dpi. If anyone is unsure how to do this exactly, please ask, and we will give a quick demonstration. There’s really nothing to it.

– Jonathan Morse

Feb. Meeting Topic & Assignment

Posted on February 9, 2012 by admin

“Time… is what keeps everything from happening at once“. – Ray Cummings, 1922

In every photograph time is evident in two ways, one is shutter speed, but much more importantly, every photograph must show the effect of never ending time itself on the scene. That is what we are going to examine now: how time influences and is represented in various ways in still photography.

We have previously seen that still photography is the direct descendent of traditional painting which normally portrayed what we have come to call “still life’s”, that is to say a scene in which nothing is presumed to be moving. This suited traditional painting, as the painting took a long time to create , especially compared to taking a photograph of the scene. This was particularly true of portraits in which the “sitter” is portrayed in a relaxed and immobile pose, even if rendered in photographic detail such as the portrait of M. Bertin by Ingres which we have previously examined.

Painters did attempt to portray moving objects, such as horses, or running men, but these attempts relied on educated guesses, as the human eye lacks the ability to stop action faster that about a twentieth of a second.

From the earliest days of photography, the instantaneity of photography was appreciated as a way to “see the unseen moment”. Perhaps the most famous early example of this is Muybridge’s time lapse photographs of a running horse, which, among other things, proved once and for all that all four legs do, in fact, leave the ground at the same time, tucked under the horse , something that was previously believed to be impossible.

accurate time-lapse photos versus painting of a running horse showing incorrect placement of the horse’s legs.

Time-lapse photos showing accurate movement versus painting of a running horse showing incorrect placement of the horse’s legs.

This approach, although the photographs are combined in a much more sophisticated way, is still in use, as we can see in the surfing photographs of Blair Seagram, where movement through the waves is shown by placing the same surfer at several different positions in the same photograph to show his trajectory through the water. The image is created from several photographs by stitching them together in Photoshop.There are many other techniques that photographers use to indicate motion. One of the earliest techniques, which is still in use today, is the use of panning. That is to say to follow the trajectory of the moving object, say a racing car, with the camera. The result is that the background is rendered with “motion blur” and the object is much sharper, thus imparting the feeling of speed, producing a fairly accurate analogue of the way the human eye sees a fast moving object, concentrating on the object, and nothing else. Early examples of this technique often were made with large format cameras and relatively slow moving focal plan shutters, which as they moved a slit from the top of the frame to the bottom, created a forward diagonal to the image, which greatly increased the impression of speed, even though this image did not correspond to any thing seen by the human eye. This look was then adopted by illustrators to show speed, even if the background was no longer blurred.As the technical elements of action photography continued their relentless development, several factors made it possible to actually stop action and eliminate the need to pan the camera. These were increased film speeds, faster lenses, faster and smaller focal plane shutters, and high power strobes that enabled exposures as fast as a eight thousandths of a second. This perfectly stopped action became to imply action, even though there is no apparent movement.The photo might be said to show the artifacts of action such as a boiling wake left behind a sail boat frozen in time, tells us how fast the boat was moving when the shot was taken, or the ball player shown frozen in mid air, even thoug we can not really see him like that.In fact, we are susceptible to the artifacts of speed in real life: who among us has not believed that our train was starting to leave the station, when in reality we were simply fooled by the train on the next platform, that had started to move instead of us.

Another type of motion blur is axial motion blur which is created by pointing a moving camera in the direction of motion, instead a fixed camera moving across the picture plan, it to give the feeling of motion. This effect can also be created by zooming the lens rapidly while using a slow shutter speed.Perhaps no form of photography is more related to classical painting than portraiture. Painted portraits almost invariably show the subject, the sitter as they are known, in repose. Obviously this facilitated the process of the painting which could be quite protracted. It is said that Ingres’s portrait of Madame Moitessier, finished in 1858, was actually begun in 1844! Despite the fact that a modern portrait takes a mere fraction of a second, the sitter is almost always shown in repose. One wonders if this is simply following tradition, or if the face in repose is more revealing, or if some other factor is at play.

Madame Moitessier by Ingres

On the other hand, the advent of faster camera did lead to experiments in what might be called portraits in motion. In fact, Phillipe Halsman developed the technique of “jump shots” in which the sitter becomes a jumper. He observed: “When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears. This proved to be much more accurate in the case of real dancers like Danny Kaye or Maurice Chavlier, and much less so in the case of the president of US Steel. Are we surprised?Another way of interpreting the passage of time was to use an extremely long, or extremely short exposure to either show the effect of a long passage of time, or at the opposite end of the spectrum, an incredible short instant, as in this high speed shot of a drop of water, shows once again an instant in time invisible to the naked eye.For February’s exercise, we are going to consider the matter of illustrating motion, or stillness, and members are requested to bring in some photographs that illustrate an appropriate technique, or perhaps several techniques on the same subject in an effort to explore which might be the most effective.

Finally we will close with this very interesting exposure of the Toronto skyline which took a entire year to expose, with a camera with a very small pinhole for a lens. The lens was left open all year, and the film, actually paper, was exposed to so much light, it was not developed, but scanned, which erased the image, but not before the scan was complete. This compelling image shows that for the inventive and creative photographer, there is always the possibility of creating original and fascinating way to illustrate the passage of time in a single static frame.

One year time lapse of Toronto skyline

January 2012 Meeting Notes

Posted on January 12, 2012 by admin

The January meeting was very well attended, and seven members brought in work in response to the assignment which was to make an abstract photograph.

Rob Reardon showed some very compelling abstracts which he took on a dull winters day in a boat yard. As anyone who has ever visited a yard in winter knows, there just isn’t a more depressing place, but Rob was able to find some wonderful compositions, and prove once again that one needn’t wander far from home to make great pictures. These shots certainly met the criteria of “good” abstracts: they are fascinating images and not even experienced boatyard cranks in the group could tell what the subject matter was.

Boat yard abstract photos by Rob Reardon

Dainis showed an ultra closeup of a scallop shell many thought was a man made structure, some sort of corrigated siding, although they should have guessed it was a scallop, considering Dainis fondness for shooting sea shells.Marilyn Stevenson showed some “light paintings” that were not really abstractions of a real object, as the objects portrayed only existed as traces in her camera. If the word “photography” means drawing with light, then these were the purest of photographs.

Marilyn Stevenson ‘light painting’

Loretta Bechert showed a number of shots that used motion to create an abstraction, and in so doing, anticipated the theme that we will consider next: the matter of time itself.

Loretta’s passing taxi and LIRR train

Meryl Spiegel showed some pictures from her phantom series in which time and the ethereal nature of existence also played a major role. Even though the picture itself was not an abstract, the central figure of the scene was, lending a sense of mystery and unease to the picture.Joan Santos submitted two abstracts which were on the cusp of the “good” -”no good” spectrum, as some members could immediately identify the subject, while others could not.The title, “shades” was a big hint.Determined to prove that one needn’t travel very far to find an image, I shot some abstracts of my footstool with my iPhone, without even moving from my desk chair, whilst moving the phone as fast as I could. With totally automatic devices, it is really a challange to get a completely abstract photo.

Two abstract photos of foot stool and one non-abstract rendering with feet shown.

Thanks to everyone who presented work for this assignement.

The assignment for February is an examination of the influence of the element of
time itself in photography.
– Jonathan Morse

November 2011 Meeting Notes

Posted on November 16, 2011 by admin

Hello All,

We had a very good meeting yesterday, and a lot was accomplished.

Nine people brought in work in response to the assignment which was to make an abstract photo, as an exercise in sharpening one’s visual sense, and exploring those elements of a photograph that exist outside the presentation of realistic content. This proved to be a bit more difficult than one had imagined.

A lively discussion ensued, and Frank Roccanova introduced a novel concept to distinguish between two types of abstract photos:

1. Good
2. No good.

Frank went on to explain that it seemed to him that “good” abstract photos where those in which one could not identify the objects in the photo, while No Good abstracts were those where the elements could be easily identified. This astute observation served to underline the power of photographs to portray reality and the difficulty of making “good” abstracts by Franks definition.

None the less, there were many “good” ones, here are just a few examples.

Most of the photos were close ups of well known objects, which were removed from the normal context which would have made the elements of the photo easier to identify.

However, Bruce Milne showed a photo that took the opposite approach. His shot was a telephoto of an icy river landscape that covered several hundred yards: the abstract quallity came from the fact that the elements were so small that they could not be recognized.

Jökull patterns by Bruce Milne

Everyone agreed that this was a very useful exercise, and so it was decided to continue this assignment for the January meeting.

It would be great if those who have not yet shot an abstract will do so, and those who have already done so successfully will also make a new contribution, perhaps further inspired by the evening’s discussion and presentations. The important thing in this exercise is to create the abstract quality while taking the picture, and not in Photoshop, as it is really an exercise in “seeing”.

– Jonathan Morse