GCSE Animals Project - Artist Links - Unusual Tiger Sculpture

Tipu or Tipoo's Tiger

A sculpture that is also a musical instrument made by an unknown craftsperson for Tipu an 18th Century ruler of the Mysore region of India

Listen to it being played

Some context and history

Irving Penn - Still Life Photographer May 2020

https://irvingpenn.org/still-life

https://archive.artic.edu/irvingpennarchives/still-lifes/

https://www.vogue.com/article/irving-penn-food-photography-vogue-archive

”Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I’m trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.” – Irving Penn

The worst thing you can do as a photographer is to bore your viewer. You want to create images that excite, interest, and stimulate your viewer.

Object Photography - Forced Perspective May 2020

Forced Perspective

We all know that the lens in the camera can take out depth and distance. It can make this appear closer together. Forced Perspective is a name for the technique where things that are closer or farther away are photographed to appear smaller or larger than they actually are.

Have a play, you will need to do some experiments. You may need to play with the aperture on your camera with a higher fstop (f11, f18 f21) to stop the camera lens pushing the object in the foreground out of focus. Changing the fstop or aperture will mean changing the ISO or shutter speed to balance the light level. Luckily its bright outside so you can this easily without ending up with blurry or dark shots

Kerry who did this one, uses photo-manipulation and layering and explains how she does that on a blog, but you could easily do this shot with an SLR and a long depth of field / high fstop. Careful because the girl up the ladder is actually tipping tea on the floor which is a/ waste of tea and b/messy

Object Photography May 2020

"What They Didnt Teach You In Photoschool" by Demetrius Fordham is an interesting book about good oractice, rather than studio techniques for aspiring professional photographers.

Fordham breaks photography specialisms down into

Fashion

Portrait

Product

Outdoor /  Landscape

Event

and Photojournalism

Product Photography covers everything from food and drink, to still life photography of accessories and clothing items. Work typically coming from cataogues, magazines, agencies and fashion brands

Burning House

If your house was burning what would you take with you? Its a conflict between whats practica, valuble and sentimental. What would you take that reflects your interests, background and priorites. Think of it as a question condensed into one question.

This is what the Burning House Website /  Blog says. We would say condensed into one photograph.It is an interesting idea for an object or product photograph. You could do a series, maybe your priorities and what is important changes day to day or week to week.

 As an idea it has been superseded by Instagram, it is a very Instagram idea and since the growth of Instagram over the last decade BH site has gone a bit quiet with only a handful of posts in the last five years, suggesting it isnt being updated anymore or people are not sending in posts. We did actually have a Sixth Form student who successfully made a submission

Depth of Field

Use Depth of Field to push the background and figures in a portrait to make objects in the foreground the focus of the photograph

This is a technique I have used a lot to focus on other peoples phone photos. Here are photos taken at an event in Luton 

The phones and the cameras rather date these Photos ( they were taken during the UK Olympics in 2012)

Here is a link to this blog about using spectacles and glasses as obects to look through

https://sjl-photography.blogspot.com/2015/02/a2-art-and-photography-edexcel-2015.html

Article within this blog on Depth Of Field

https://sjl-photography.blogspot.com/2017/09/you-can-use-aperture-of-camera-to.html

Marshall Gray - Seven 7 Deadly Sins Still Life

Marshall Gray is a professional photographer and his website is an excellent starting point if you want to look at quirky or exciting compositions and examples of thinking outside the box.

website

As well as a website he also has a blog where he plays with ideas. Here are some examples of his themed Still Life photography

Seven Deadly Sins

Pride

Envy

Greed

Wrath

Lust

Gluttony

Sloth

Seven Deadly Sins Photos

An interesting approach to still life where a theme has influenced the way the still life groups are composed

Contact Sheets - William Klein and annotating your work

In the days of film photography. You took photos on a film with either 24 or 36 shots. There was no way of checking, deleting and taking again.

Once you had finished the film you took the film out of the camera and under no light developed the film.

Once you had developed the film you had a series of small negative thumbnail images

Negatives for black and white or colour film were inverted with negative colours and tones. They were difficult to understand.

So Photographers cut the negative roll into strips, laid the strips on a piece of photographic paper and made a photogram of the negatives. This was called a Contact Sheet and was easier to look at and understand. Using a special chinagraph pencil they could draw on the contact sheet, making notes about which images were worth printing, about how they could crop or change the composition of their original photos.

The photograph you take, whether using digital or film, is not always the photo you end up with. You can refine or improve the composition by cropping a photo.

Your contact sheet shows that you have taken a lot of photos to arrive at your best nine or favourite six that you have printed it out on a larger scale. But it also shows your thinking, how you have started to refine your images.

This refinement is an important part of your supporting book work, an important part of you showing your creative process. If you are using a digital camera and printing a contact sheet onto A4 or A3 paper you do not need to use a chinagraph pencil. You can scribble over the images to show ideas for crops, you can cross out the ones you do not like. You can write notes to yourself to record your thinking or ideas.

All of these things are important parts of you showing your thinking and the creative process. Showing your thinking and showing the creative process gets you marks

Photographers use their contact sheets sometimes as creative pieces of work

Martin Wilson plans the layout of his contact sheet and orders how he takes his photos to create a image out of his contact sheets

Martin Wilson.

Website

William Klein is a Fashion and Street Photographer who revolutionised Fashion Photography by taking the models out of the studio. He also is well regarded for his street photography.

William Klein 2012

His recent exhibitions have turned his contact sheets into giant art works. Showing his images and his original pencil or pen marks on the contact sheets