The next Topic is to experiment with different ways of shooting all together. The goal is to create a feeling of ‘Extended Seeing’ through the use of Extended Space and Extended Time. The easiest examples are panorama and slow shutter speed. With Panorama the process is a moving camera and the product is odd shaped photographs not made by cropping. With Slow Shutter Speed the process is a stationary camera with a moving subject. The impact with both of these is seeing something that the human eye cannot see itself.
Think about shooting panoramas that will include things that your eyes cannot see all at once. This is about an expanded sense of space. Think about using shutter speed to present an expanded sense of time, as a compliment to the Memory/ Vintage topic. This will also produce photos that are beyond normal human vision. Extended Space and Extended Time are a consequence of ‘Extended Seeing’. So there is the source of the Topic title.
Directed Shooting
The content is, once again, completely up to you, and should be about things that you find compelling. This means you should think about what you’re shooting first and not depend on the world to just give you things when you go out for a walk. This is ‘directed shooting’ as opposed to ‘intuitive shooting’.
The goal is to create a consistent collection of photographs that work together and make sense with each other. Similarity in content and process will coalesce a group of photographs into a unified body of work. The impact of the work will be amplified through the idea of ‘content bleed’, where the content in one photograph will affect or change the way one reads the content in any other photograph in the collection.
The first step in creating this consistency is to look at all the photographs shot this semester and try to organize them into groups. Think of these groups as chapters in a book, where the book is the semester. If you can then put a name to each chapter you are halfway home. A very good tool to do this is Adobe Bridge. You can navigate to a folder full of photos and move them around and then place them into individual folders for each of your chapters. Not every photo will fit into a chapter and some photos will fit into more than one chapter. [note: hold the option/alt key when you drag a photo to duplicate it.] Sometimes a single photograph can become the inspiration for whole new chapter on its own. These are things you will have to work on figure out.
The last step in this process is to take the names of these chapters and fix them as concepts in your mind and then go out and try to shoot more pictures that will fit into each one. And now, rather than being a ‘gatherer’, you become a ‘hunter’. A photo hunter! This is what photo artists are. They do not wait for things to happen, they make things happen.
Visual Strategies
The basic idea is to shoot in such a way that people respond by saying, “How was this shot? How can a person see something in this way?” We want pictures that are uniquely your point of view. They have to be about how you see the world, not just how the world appears when you are looking at it. This is a subtle but huge difference.
We have been approaching this concept of Personal Vision throughout the semester by talking about framing, composition, and angle of view, and so forth. These elements work together to create a feeling of extended space. You need to remember all of these facets of shooting and try to apply as many of them as you can to make this next batch of photographs.
We have been talking the concept of extended time in terms of memory or imagination but now we will approach this on a more physical level. [note: only the present really exists - the past is only in our memory while the future only exists in our imagination.]
As usual, I am posing these challenges to you from my experiential point of view. I would really prefer that you deviate from my vision and create something unique and different through your vision. You to devise ways of shooting that are unique to you, aka ‘personal visual strategies’. How do you research this idea? That is part of your job for this topic.
Panorama Shooting [extended space]
Many people shot panoramas by standing and looking at some landscape and twisting their camera to capture a wide scope. This is typical and you should avoid this tactic. Do not make photos that just look like they were shot with a really wide lens and then cropped down. Avoid shooting the typical panos that are usually pictures taken while on a trip, e.g. landscapes of the Grand Canyon (not that you can do that in Philly anyway, but I have seen a million photos looking up into Center City from the South Street Bridge).
Slow Shutter Speed [extended time]
Shutter speed controls our experience of time in a photograph. Shooting at a normal shutter speed presents the world as it appears, more or less. Shooting with a very fast shutter speed can freeze moment, cutting events out of the normal flow of time in a way that cannot actually be seen by the human eye, although these shots may not always seems so unreal because life tends to look like a continuous stream of still frames (not unlike the way ‘motion pictures’ work). Shooting at a slow shutter speed allows more time to pass while taking a shot so the camera captures longer amounts of time. This means that anything moving will come out blurred. While blurry may sound undesirable at first, consider how motion can be interpreted by stretching the viewing time. This presents a very different look. It is almost like capturing the ‘feel’ of an event rather than depicting it’s appearance.
Another possibility of slow shutter speed is to make people translucent (by having the subject leave the frame in the middle of the exposure time). This presents a dream-like or imaginary appearance. This has to be handled carefully to prevent making tacky photos.
Even another way to use slow shutter speeds is while shooting at night. When shooting in darkness, such a small amount of light is coming into the camera that the light has to be built up through time. Anything stationary will come out fine, but anything moving will be blurred. One thing to avoid is light trails from passing cars. That is the most obvious and easy thing to do and is so over-done. If you want to do ‘light painting’, the movements have to have some structure, let alone meaning.
The extended time factor at night also allows a photographer to control the lighting. It is possible to set up a camera for long exposure and literally fill in light with external flash units or flashlights to ‘paint’ the light into a scene. This can be combined with some ambient light if shooting in a place that is not so dark. If only portions of the scene are lit then some strange landscapes can be created with holes in the image where no light has fallen. We could call this technique Extended Lighting!
[note: when shooting long exposures it is preferred to have the camera stationary. A tripod is the best way to do this. Many small tripods are available for smartphones at a relatively low price. Check with Adorama.com or BHPhotoVideo.com for the best prices and very fast standard shipping.]
Research Flickr to Avoid Clichés
You should research any and all of these methods before trying them so you have some idea of the range of possibilities. Whatever Special Effects or Special Shooting Modes you use, try looking up those techniques in Flickr first. Or just do an Image Search for Panorama Photography and Slow Shutter Speed and see all the stuff that comes up. Most of this is already cliché. Avoid anything that is repeated over and over!
There are a million articles and how to do long exposure, light trails, and nighttime photographs, etc. Most of them will show you how to make the typical examples of these genres. This is to be avoided! These are all examples of what not to do. But you can take the technical examples and use them to make something that is indeed unique.
Extra Credit
Extra Credit will be awarded to anyone who comes up with another unique technique or shooting strategy to produce a new set of photos and a recipe that explains precisely how that happened.
Vintage Re-Do
There was not nearly enough experimentation with the Vintage and Retro apps. I would like to see you continue with this so that about half of your photographs are in that realm as well. But please do not go so far as to make ‘psychedelic’ photos. Believability is part of keeping the photographs real. A negative attribute of the new digital photography is the ability to make things that are strange. Strange is good, but when they cross the line they just look fake. And there are too many fake looking bad digital photographs nowadays. (Look at all the examples of HDR photos. When that process is handled properly you get photographs with a really long beautiful tonal range. When they are boosted too high you just get these fake looking visual dramas. If you see the effect before you see the content, then the effect is not working.)
The balance of this critique should be approximately one-third Vintage/ Retro, one-third Panoramas, and one-third Slow Shutter Speed, plus the inevitable minimum of 2 self-portraits.
Portfolio
Another thing to do as we are nearing the end of the semester is to start working towards compiling a Portfolio. A portfolio is a collection of your best photographs displaying consistency and diversity. You can use the book metaphor as a model for creating this portfolio. Having several chapters of photographs that work together will give you the consistency within each group, and the diversity can come by having groups that focus on different subject material using appropriate techniques. Remember - Form support Content!
At the end of the semester you will submit a finished portfolio of 24 photographs. These can be shots from any time during this semester but you must also include at least 8 new photographs. The entire portfolio of photos can be organized as 4 groups of 6 photos each, or 6 groups of 4 photos each, or something in between. (Each group does not have to have the same number of photos.) But they need to be cohesive in both form and content and impact.
happy shooting - - -
