Monday 30 March 2015

Assignment 5

After consultation with my tutor we have agreed upon the scope of assignment Five.

The assignment will centre around the work of Karl Blossfeldt. I will write a short essay as a background to his life and work and that will be followed by a small body of work along similar lines to his. The final outcome will be to enter some of the work in suitable juried exhibitions and gain exposure of the medium of macro botanical work in the local Press.

I have been carrying out some exploratory work, especially the setting up of a macro studio and collecting specimens. Specimens are hard to come by outdoors at this time of year so I may have to postpone this a few weeks. In the meantime the essay research can take place. Little exists about Blossfeldt outside of his books and they are in short supply new. I have managed to acquire a good second hand copy of Karl Blossfeldt 1865-1932, Edited by Hans Christian Adam - Taschen 1999.
Internet searching reveals a number of sites with biographical and technical content, but on inspection it seems that the primary source is Wikipedia, with minor changes.

There is still indecision on the technique I should use to make the images. Blossfeldt made his own camera and lenses and at the turn of the last century this was a considerable achievement, especially as he was making images with X30 magnification on a glass negative about the same size as modern medium format film. It is written that (no photographs exist) the bellows extension was in the region of 1 metre. I will not be making a camera or lens, or acquiring any further equipment for the assignment.

My options are:

1. Use a FF DSLR with either a 60mm macro or 105mm macro lens. Both of these can have extension tubes 12mm, 20mm or 36mm attached singularly or in any combination.

2. Use a 6x6 SLR with 80mm standard lens and 21mm extension tube.

The specimens can be very small, sometimes 10mm in diameter and 30mm long. The digital route will give technically better results, especially when focus stacking is employed. The purpose (as I will detail later) of Blossfeldt's photographs was so that art students could see (by projecting onto a wall) small botanical specimens in a drawing class. If Blossfeldt were given another chance of that today I am convinced he would use whatever technical advancement was available. By way of contrast and aesthetic considerations I may shoot a roll of 6x6 as a comparison.

The studio is now complete. It comprises of a 800mm x 800mm x 800mm light tent, 2 Elichrom Dlite 2 flash heads and a number of reflectors, honeycomb grids, soft boxes etc. The light rig is suspended so that the lights are above the worktop, and removes the need for light stands in a confined space. Various coloured cards are available as gobos and reflectors. A copy stand is also available if I need to shoot vertically onto flower heads on a close card background or the light box.

 
Macro set up.

 
Work space.
 
An early test to set up the lighting. There is considerable time spent with trial and error to get it anywhere near correct. The surfaces are so small and the positioning of lights, reflectors and gobos has to be millimetre perfect. Blossfeldt used window light and exposure times of 10 minutes and that soft round light is difficult to achieve.
 
Background colour and texture is under review. Blossfeldt used a variety, generally to suit the specimen's tones and the distance between specimen and background has an effect on the lighting set up and any texture.
 
More work is being carried out on this.
 
 
 
Apple Bud. (Early test shot)
 





Thursday 12 March 2015

Focus Stacking - Test

I have the need to revise my macro techniques for a future project. I have a 60mm and a 105mm macro lens, together with 3 extension tubes. Even at F45 the depth of field is very narrow, especially when at minimum focusing distance. A view camera or maybe a short tele tilt and shift on the DSLR would improve this but the cost would outweigh the benefits. One other item (given to me by a good friend) is a focusing rail. It is a rack and pinion device that allows movement of the camera to change the focus rather than the normal lens focusing. A few years ago I tried focus stacking, a technique whereby you take a number of images, starting from the front of the subject to the back, each in focus. Software, using layers stacks these, applies masks and produces a composite image of all the in focus bits. The result is a photograph with a very wide depth of field. In the image below I used a single Bowens strobe so there are too many reflections, but that will be rectified as my light tent has now arrived and a diffused light is now available.
The image is from 12 frames. Each movement on the focusing rail no more than 2mm. The images are then processed in CS5 using photomerge and align. An i7 with 32gb, 36MP frames and the processing took no more than 45 seconds so I am happy to make further stacks of up to 20 layers.
While just testing I have reverted to .jpg files rather than raw to speed this up a bit. This work continues.


Another experiment with the light tent and acrylic sheet lit from above and below. The paper weight is from assignment 2. Being glass it is difficult to not get reflections but here I think I have a reasonable effort.







Monday 9 March 2015

Assignment 4 Tutor Feedback

The tutor report was accompanied by an annotated copy of the essay. The overall comments were good with some comments that require my attention before assessment (which will be in November).
The main concern was the title. As can be seen from previous postings, this was also a concern for myself. I knew what I wanted to say, but as with a lot of images, a title is not the easiest part to make.
I now see, with the help of the comments how I can change this and the new title will probably be: "How does Postmodernism impact photographic theory and practice ?" A simpler and far less cryptic version than previous. Much of the content will remain the same however. I had shown examples of Modernism and Postmodernism through the work of three photographers. This needs to be expanded upon and I will include something on The New Topographics and Mirrors and Windows: two major exhibitions of the 1970s. There was the inevitable problem of using "sweeping statements" without backing them up with sources and the praise you get for citing your own opinion. There is a fine line between the two. Upon reflection however I can see the error of my ways. Making a statement such as "It was a stark difference to the deprivation of the previous century" when describing changes from the eighteenth to nineteenth century does need to be backed up with some examples. Another example is when I have said " Artists said ..... etc" need to cite somebody as an example. The tutor suggestions on what should / could be included will have to be edited and a corresponding number of words removed from other parts of the essay. I had gone over with the word count but I am never sure if the end notes are counted or not. Also the bibliography will be included in the count but is not a part of the essay as such.

On a general note my tutor is pleased that I am visiting exhibitions and reflecting on my work. There is room for improvement in reading. This is always true but my lack of writing about what I read is at the nub of this. For this essay I guess I have read 3 books but only a handful of words get cited in the end product. With something as notoriously complex as Postmodernism there has to be background reading (that never gets cited) just so that a general level of understanding is gained, especially with a subject that is being learnt almost from scratch.

What the process has done, is given me an appetite for more, especially towards Post structuralism and a deeper understanding (maybe too ambitious) of how I am working in my practice and how concepts are formed and cemented. I was talking to a fine arts graduate a few weeks ago about her sculpture/installation work in an exhibition. We talked about postmodernism for a while and critical theory studies and I was interested in her comments that without that level of understanding she could not make any of her work. That was her base from where the work started, comments that I found very interesting and inspirational.