Color Management

PhotoNet article on Color Management.It is well written and relatively concise. It is a good introduction to the topic. It starts with the monitor and goes all the way through the printing process. The author of that article also wrote an interesting article on monitor calibration and wide gamut displays. Here is an article he wrote on Checking the accuracy of your monitor.

Luminous Landscape, a really great photography website, has recently posted an article by Andrew Rodney titled Why Are My Prints Too Dark. It is very current and address some maters that have arisen since the 2005 publication of his excellent book on the subject; Color Management for Photographers. I encourage you to read it and the numerous articles that he links to.

X-rite is the largest and most popular manufacturer of color management products. They make a product called the Color Munki Photo which is a very reasonably priced color management package targeted at photographers. They produced a nice series on videos on using the device. The first video on color is especially well produced and concise.

UT Juried Student Art Exhbit - must submit work by February 17th & 18th

CALL FOR ENTRIES: THE 2012 UTART STUDENT JURIED EXHIBITION

SUBMIT ARTWORK ON FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17 OR SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 10pm-4pm

3 SUBMISSIONS PER STUDENT / ENTRY FORMS AVAILABLE AT THE CVA FRONT OFFICE

ELIGIBILITY
Open to any undergraduate, graduate or post-baccalaureate student currently enrolled in courses at the University of Toledo.

MEDIA/PRESENTATION
Open to all media. Artwork must be installation ready (i.e. 2d work must be framed) upon submission. *

PROCEDURES
A maximum of 3 artworks per student may be submitted. Submitted work should have 1 Identification Tag affixed to each work in addition to a completed Entry Form.* Entry Forms and Identification Tags will be made available in the CVA Department of Art front office.

*Artwork that does not comply with these guidelines/procedures will not be accepted.

For information contact Ben Pond, CVA Gallery director: benjamin.pond@utoledo.edu

By Tuesday's class...

You should have shot two sets of images for the Ambiguous Doppelganger project. One set can be a rough test of things with your model wearing the same clothes and doing something corny. The other set should be the real deal with a well though composition, concept, and execution.
You will be masking these together in class on Tuesday.
You should also have began to read the materials about exposure that I assigned.
BTW, the Little Planets project is too complicated to pull off by the 31st. 

Editing Raw Files

Ansel Adams wrote, "The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways."

The same can be said for editing your RAW files. Editing takes considerable time. It is a thoughtful, contemplative process. It is not a race to be done.

There is much in regards to digital imaging and photography that isn't intuitive. Editing your images is one such example. The biggest thing that students have trouble with is failing to make full use the full tonal range of the image.

One of the biggest struggles that students have is learning to adjust the distribution of tones in an image. Technically speaking, when you are shooting, your job is to capture all the data in the scene without clipping important highlight information. Your job in editing is to re-arrange those tones to make full use of the tonal range and create an attractive image.

If you see data climbing the right and left walls of an image, that is data containing no detail. I find if helpful if you think of lost detail as not having texture. If you grossly overexpose an area to the point that the data is climbing the right wall, let's say it is a white t-shirt, then the photo of the t-shirt won't have any sense of texture to it. You won't be able to tell if there was a pattern or what type of fabric it was. In a nut shell, you should set the black and white point of an image so that the data just kisses both sides of the histogram without climbing it. Of course, there are exceptions to this such as when you deliberately allow the white of a specular highlight to go to pure white.

If you see that there is a gap between the right wall and the image data, then you are not using the full range of tones available to you. Increase the exposure additionally until the data just kisses or nearly kisses the wall. If you see that there is a gap between the left wall and the image data, then you are not using the full range of tones available to you. Increase the Blacks slider until the data just kisses or nearly kisses the wall.You should do these edits first, then edit the other tones. At a minimum will likely have to adjust the midtones a bit using the Lightness slider or Curves.

Simply put, if you only use part of the tonal range, then you will have a flat (lacking contrast) image.
Like any advice, it is good to hear it from multiple people. Here are some tutorials on the use of Adobe Camera Raw that I highly recommend. These are written for Adobe Photoshop, but nearly everything is the same between PS and LR as far as the editing of RAW files is concerned.
I would like you to watch these videos. If you are struggling to understand the editing of RAW files, these will really help. The first one in particular.
Start with this one:
Adobe TV video featuring Julieanne Kost introduction to ACR. Great step by step tutorial in which she explains the choices she makes. If you like it, and I think you will, it is part of a longer video series featuring her. Click here to see all the episodes of The Complete Picture with Julianne Kost.
Russel Brown a long time Adobe evangelist and a pretty funny guy, has been posting some really great tutorials and scripts to his website for a number of years. I mention it now because he has some nice tutorials on working with Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop CS4. He takes a novel approach in some of the tutorials in which he edits others' files.
The Russel Brown Show

Reading on exposure determination: Expose for the Highlights

Please read the the first part of this handout that I wrote several years ago on exposure determination. The information is still valid.
Please also read this technical document on exposure from Adobe. It is very techy, but it does an excellent job of explaining why you should expose for the highlights. Also from Adobe, is this article on understanding raw capture.

That should be enough to keep you busy until Monday.

Remember to bring your camera and instruction manual to class until told otherwise. 

Project 1 - Ambiguous Doppelgangers

Earlier today we looked at the work of Kelli Connell's fantastic body of work in which she combines multiple instances of a model to ambiguous, fictionalized scenes. In much of the series, the relationship between the two figures is unclear. Be sure to read her artist statement.

There are many people who create work with multiple instances of the same person.

Cornelia Hediger includes one of more instances of the same person in her Doppelganger series. Aesthetically and emotionality very different from Kelli Connell's work, Cornelia creates an image from six (or more) separate images. She appears to change the focal length of the lens that she uses and/or changes her distance to the subject. The vantage point of the camera, and thus the perspective, is also changed. The figure is often out of registration with itself. It creates a very fractured and rather whimsical look. She demonstrates a very sophisticated use of color. She makes use of monochromatic color schemes as well as complementary color schemes.

Wikipedia definition of doppleganger. Pretty interesting reading. Gave me lots of ideas..

Here is a very interesting Wikipedia definition of a phenomena known as bilocation.

Tomoko Sawada

I came across a Japanese artist by the name of Tomoko Sawada who has created a number of series exploring the many different facets of her personality. She has a series similar the Ambiguous Doppelganger series that you are currently working on (I just made up that project name, but I am going to stick with it). Interestingly, she also has a series in which she photographed herself daily over a prolonged period of time. She used a photobooth for that series.

A nice blog entry on her work.

Gallery with some of her work.

Canon Award write up on Tomoko Sawada

Newsweek article on Tomoko Sawada

Brooklyn Museum of art website with examples of her work

Tomoko Sawada's website - it is in Japanese and thus hard to navigate

Project 1 - Ambiguous Doppelgangers

Your first project is to create a body of work inspired by her work. First find a friend who will serve as your model. You will need to work with the person a lot, so chose carefully. Think of two different personae for the model. In each image, the model should appear as both personae. If your find that your model is a total ham and over 'acts' everything, then switch models.

Ideally, a viewer of the work wouldn't immediately (or ever) realize that the people depicted throughout the series is really the same person. You are going to create a series of four images for this project.

If you are interested in creating work such as this, there are a number of technical/logistical things to be aware of when shooting. Here is a list that of things to keep in mind:

Must shoot RAW.
Must set exposure once, use same exact setting for each of the two (or more) shots.
Must focus once, don't refocus between shots. This will require you to leave your camera on manual focus after initial focus. Think through where you need to focus at. Consider depth of field issues.
If you have a more compact camera that doesn't offer manual focus, see if you can set your focus by at predetermined distance.
White balance can be synced in Camera Raw, but must be the same for each image.
Must use a tripod. Take care not to bump the camera between exposures. Use a remote release if you have one.

Between shots, you need to change the appearance of your model. Consider the following:
clothes
hair
jewelry including ear rings, piercings, watches, bracelets, etc.
glasses
facial hair?
make up - some then none, do it differently, etc.
shoes, you can change someones apparent height by changing their shoes...
tight fitting and then baggy clothes?
general style of clothing.. street than dress clothes?

Also keep in mind that friends dress alike. So, if you are trying to create a sense that these people are friends, then they might dress similarly.

Remember, you want to create a series of four in which the relationship of the people is ambiguous. All the rules of design still apply. Avoid flat looking images in which the subject is in the same plane each time.

Domestic scenes may work well?

Then you need to edit the RAW images exactly the same. Then you need to combine them.
Here is a link to an tutorial on how to Combine multiple images into a group portrait.

Although the intent of the tutorial is different, it is exactly the same thing. Here is a link to a video on Aligning Layers by Content.

Avoid the obvious things like a person playing cards with themselves.

You may want to take three or more images to bring back down to one. Here is Ohio we get a fair amount of snow. I was thinking of an image where the person is walking through the snow with one another. Of course you would create footprints as you leave the scene to go change. If you took a photo before you had your model walk into the scene, then you would have a photo to mask back the snow from. You could do it with just two shots, but it seems like the third one would come in handy.

Ultimately, the composites need to work well as images. It is not enough to get all the technical aspects correct. You need to create compelling images.

Flickr Group Page

UT Digital Photography Group Page on Flickr

YOU ARE HERE TOLEDO project

Here is a link to the site with the Call for Participation.

Deadline for submitting 3 JPEGs of your art is January 31st. I am requiring you to submit to this.

Article and link to the Canadian Photography Daily Self Portrait Project

Here is a link to the Petapixel article and the video.

Stereographic images

Here is a nice collection of stereographic images.

Daily Self Portrait

Your first (and in a way your last project) is to take a self portrait everyday. Yes, every single day from today until the end of class. That will result in approximately 100 photos. I am going to have you turn in your photos every other week so that I know that you are keeping up on this assignment.

You might try a series in which you plan your movement over the entire series. Imagine the hands of clock ticking, running it place, slowly forming a smile, etc...

Article about DailyBooth.com which is a site in which you are encouraged to post a photo of yourself everyday.

It was inspired by Noah K's popular series of daily self portraits.

You might try uploading your self portraits to your Facebook account each day, maybe evening making it your profile picture. That might encourage you would likely put some effort into the project and keep up with it.




Video of a guy who took a self portrait everyday for 8 years.

Syllabus

Here is a link to your syllabus.
If I need to modify it, it will automatically be updated there.