Archive for the ‘d) Musings from Matt’ Category

Richard Avedon – Portrait Photographer

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

portrait photographer, richard avedon, wallis and edwardRichard Avedon’s ability to render both his own and his sitters’ personalities in each image he creates is uncanny. The strength juxtaposed by vulnerability portrayed here is a classic example. Taken in 1957, Avedon gave this portrait of Wallis, Duchess of Windsor and Edward, Duke of Windsor to the National Portrait Gallery in 1995. It’s one of five Avedon portraits in the gallery’s permanent collection.  http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw09580/Wallis-Duchess-of-Windsor-Edward-Duke-of-Windsor?search=sp&sText=richard+avedon&rNo=1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Editing and the best shot in the world..

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

Digital commercial photography has increased the importance of editing – which photographs are fantastic and which are not.

You might take the best image ever, a stunning corporate portrait, a natural ad image, which captures emotion, a Gursky-blitzing image that could sells for millions and launch you to cult status in the art world.

However, if you overlook it in the editing, it’s no good to anyone.

Knowing which image to keep and which to ditch can be tough.

I remember at college working on a project called ‘Take a fresh look at London’. I begged and borrowed  (no I didn’t steal!) to build a roomset in the studios at college. It had two walls a window a front door, a fully tiled floor and various props – all for the price of a pint of beer. I stripped in a picture of Big Ben, this was before photoshop and took forever. At the my crit my lecturers gave me 100% – I was appalled, no photograph can merrit 100% – I couldn’t have created the perfect shot so early in my career.

My point is that if you photograph mushrooms for the rest of your life, you might, just might                   end up with some of the best mushroom pictures there are.

In praise of my first assistant – and what I think makes a good ‘n’

Monday, September 20th, 2010

An assistant is a necesity for many a commercial photographer’s shoots, sometimes more than one, but it has always fascinated me what my fellow photographers look for in an assistant.

I’m not talking about the likes of Mario Testino, but for us mere mortals…

I have a friend who looks for a very technically able assistant, indeed, long ago I once assisted a beauty photographer who could not load the film in her own camera (so old!). She was most put out that I wasn’t familiar with her particular camera. I resorted to the manaul and it was sorted.

Personally, I would never expect an assistant to turn up on a shoot and be instantly able to work all of my equipment. In my experience, the specifics of using the equipment in terms of setting it up and basic operations can be taught relatively quickly and easily.

However, the ability to make small talk and strike up a conversation at a moment’s notice with someone
you have never met before and probably won’t again is not something that is easily taught.

Since specialising in people and lifestyle photography, I have to say that Nicky, who has assisted me for a few years now, is a fantastic assistant for me. Don’t get me wrong, she is technically very able, but she can chat also with everyone.

Nicky is immediately at ease with the diverse range of characters we come accross on shoots, which ranges from people living on the streets to high maintenance American lifestyle models and everyone in between!

Which means she puts our subjects at their ease too, leaving me to do get the job done – capturing emotion for visual communication.

Together, we keep it seemingly natural and unstaged when the reality is often anything but. Which brings me on to praise Polly for her logistics and production – but I’ll leave that for another day!

Sebastiao Salgado

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Sabastiao Salgado is a photojournalist in the best sense of the word, Salgado’s lens captures the beauty in his subjects’ gritty reality. The following interview is with Carole Naggar in new York, March 29, 2000:

Why did you start the Migrations project?

The Migrations project is the continuation of my previous project Workers. It is the second chapter of the same story. While I was shooting Workers over six or seven years, I saw that we were inside a total transformation of the ways of production. With the end of the first industrial revolution and the arrival of the new technology–intelligent machines–on the line of production, with the new organization of factors of production, I saw that human beings and their traditional, sedentary way of life were also beginning to transform.

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Don McCullin

Saturday, September 20th, 2008

Today, Photojournalist Don McCullin’s work still secures the response that it so greatly received back in the 1960′s and 70′s. McCullin worked for The Observer, The Sunday Times and other commissioning magazines, who sent him on assignments, photographically reporting the stories that led from the ensuing wars around the world. McCullin used his camera as a witness to its surroundings: a tool that hoped could influence action. McCullin said “I knew things were wrong. That’s why I photographed them… I wanted to take pictures for the immediate consumption, to correct whatever wrongs they’re depicting.”

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Andreas Gursky

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

I admire Andreas Gursky for his large-scale, colour photographs, distinctive for their incisive and critical look at the effect of capitalism and globalisation on contemporary life.

Gursky studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the early 1980s and first adopted a style and method closely following Becher’s systematic approach to photography, creating small, black-and-white prints. In the early 1980s, however, he broke from this tradition, using colour film and spontaneous observation to make a series of images of people at leisure, such as hikers, swimmers and skiers, depicted as tiny protagonists in a vast landscape.

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