portrait photography: mary capaldo

These are great tips that I found for achieving great portrait photos. 


Most portraits are taken with the camera at (or around) the eye level of the subject. While this is good common sense – completely changing the angle that you shoot from can give your portrait a real WOW factor.


Another element of randomness that you can introduce to your portraits is the way that you light them. There are almost unlimited possibilities when it comes to using light in portraits. 

Sometimes posed shots can look somewhat…. posed. Some people don’t look good in a posed environment and so switching to a candid type approach can work.

Framing is a technique where by you draw attention to one element of an image by framing it with another element of the image.

Shooting with a wide angle lens attached to your camera can help create some memorable shots when you’re doing portrait photography.

The person in your portrait is the main point of interest – however sometimes when you place them into different contexts with different backgrounds you can dramatically alter the mood in a shot.

Horizontal and Vertical framings are not the only options when it comes to shooting portraits. While getting your images straight can be important in when shooting in these formats holding your camera on a more diagonal angle can also inject a little fun into your images.

How to Develop Film

Preparing roll for developing

• When you finish your roll, look at your dial.
• Turn the dial counterclockwise until you hear a click. 
• Pull the dial up, doing that will open the back of the camera. 
• Take the roll out of the camera. 
• Extract the film with the extractor so you have a small tongue. 

 Preparing chemicals for developing

• When you insert the film in the tank you need to prepare the chemicals
• Prepare water at 20 degrees, MUST BE 20 DEGREES!!!!
• Prepare the chemicals with the water using Ilfosol 3 (developer), 1 part of Ilfosol 3, with 9 parts of water at 20 degrees, for 500 of water, 55 of developer.
• Prepare the fixer 1 part of fixer to 4 parts of water, for 440 of water, 110 of fixer
• If you develop Ilford HP5 at 400 ISO, 6 1/2 minutes of developer
• If you develop KODAK TMAX at 400 ISO, 6 minutes of developer
• When you insert developer into tank you need 10 to 20 seconds at beginning of agitation, then one turn every 30 seconds, till the end of your developing time.
• Remove the developer and insert the stop, water, for 30 seconds to 1 minute continuous agitation
• Then insert the fixer AT 20 DEGREES, for 3 minutes, after you put in the fixer continuous agitation for 30 minutes then stop for 15 seconds, agitate for 15 seconds, stop for 15 seconds etc. until the 3 minutes is up.
• After 3 minutes pour out the fixer
• Put it under running water for 20 minutes continuously.
• Extract film, hang to dry

Ezra Stoller's Architectural Photographs by alex anderson

Ezra Stoller was an American architectural photographer.  In these photographs, on can see how through lines of alternating light and shadow he managed to create a kind of pressure, each time drawing the eye to a central and very subtle horizontal and vertical convergence. In this way the effect is strong, but the means to do so is not obvious. Perhaps because he does not emphasize the physical characteristics of a scene, but the luminary ones, he dramatizes the architecture, and creates a beautiful and almost abstract photograph.

Alessandra Sanguinetti

    Alessandra Sanguinetti was born in New York in 1968, brought up in Argentina from 1970 to 2003, and is currently based in New York.  She spends most of her time in either New York or Buenos Aires.  
     Her first major exhibition in Europe presents photographs from the series "The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams" (1999-2002) and "The Life that Came" (2004-2008).  The photographs within these series depict the strong friendship between cousins Guille and Belinda, who live a "rich but fragile and supervised life in a rural community," (Magnum).  Alessandra Sanguinetti happened to meet these girls when they were ages nine and ten, while she was photographing farm animals at the home of their grandmother.  The photographs in this series represent their fears, fantasies, and expectations of transitioning from childhood to adulthood.  
     I see strong similarities within her photographs. The structure of her photographs seem to consist of a strong focal point (located near the center or off to the side), a strong vertical line, and a less strong horizontal line.       

-Jennifer Maldonado

http://events.magnumphotos.com/exhibition/alessandra-sanguinettihttp://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.Biography_VPage&AID=2K7O3RHJ2PTH

BURT GLINN

Burt Glinn (July 23, 1925-April 9, 2008) was an American professional photographer who worked with Magnum Photos. He covered revolutionary leader Fidel Castor's entrance into Havana, Cuba, and photographed people such as Andy Warhol and Helen Frankenthaler. Glinn's photos show such things as the social scene of the rich, the dirtyness of politics, and the humorous flotilla that called itself the Seattle Tubing Society. 

He was president of Magnum from 1972 to 1975 (then re-elected to the position in 1987) and covered the Sinai War as well as the U.S. Marine invasion of Lebanon.

When asked in an interview which of his images he most closely identifies with, Glinn replied that without a doubt it is the picture showing the back of Nikita Khrushchev's head in front of the Lincoln Memorial. 



Leonela Medrano

Brett Weston

Brett Weston (December 16, 1911—January 22, 1993) was an American photographer. Brett began photographing in 1925 and had his first international exhibition at Film und Foto in Germany at age 17.

Brett had an intuitive very sophisticated sense of abstraction, often flattening the plane and engaging in layered space, an artistic style. He is best known for his work on the dunes around Oceano, California, a location that he later shared with his father Edward Weston, who never learned to drive.

Brett Weston’s work would ultimately became one of the defining poles of contemporary photography with its technical precision, bold design and extremes of abstraction and private imagination. The excitement and tension in his prints were Brett’s unique response to pure form: the vocabulary of line, volume, pattern and light and dark. It was this sensual response to form that defines his more classical European landscapes.

In Weston’s concluding photographs taken during the 1980’s, the abstract was resurrected but this time the playful and less orderly images of writhing reflections in skyscraper windows and the electrifying patterns of light on underwater figures captured his imagination.

By the amazing age of 20, Brett Weston’s work was being exhibited internationally and the world had a glimpse of what was to come. The Curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Van Deren Coke would later observe, "Brett Weston was the child genius of American photography."

- Helena Salvo

Jean Chamoux: horizontal lines, by mary capaldo

 Jean Chamoux (1925 - 2007) was a French photographer who started his career during World War II. He settled in Paris in 1947 and worked actively until the 1980s. He did a number of coverages in France and in the Middle East. Although he worked together with Robert Doisneauand Edouard Boubat, a famous photographer, he has always remained very discreet and has only exhibited his works once in the near suburbs of Paris.He was one of the first to take colored photographs on a wide scale and in big format print (4"x 5" and 5"x17"m) and the first to process his proper color films in Paris.

The photos I chose by him have very strong horizontal lines. The first picture of the two school girls have them the most. The pictures are rather simple but I feel they express what we were asked to find very well. 

Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams is best known for his black and white landscape photographs of the American West. Most of Adams' photographs are shot with a wide angle lens to emphasize openness in the photograph and to display great distance. In these selected photographs Adams has very strong horizontal lines towards the bottom or the top of the photographs. Sometimes there are multiple horizontal lines but usually only one really strong line.
-MARK GLASER

Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos

http://www.magnumphotos.com/CoreXDoc/MAG/Media/TR3/0/9/a/4/NYC11245.jpg
http://www.magnumphotos.com/CoreXDoc/MAG/Media/TR3/b/1/5/0/NYC37162.jpg
http://www.magnumphotos.com/CoreXDoc/MAG/Media/TR3/f/2/3/8/NYC11242.jpg
http://www.magnumphotos.com/CoreXDoc/MAG/Media/TR3/1/8/f/3/PAR129371.jpg

To me he always seperates the picture in half to create two distinct parts.

Arianna Fabri

Julius Schulman-Lines

Julius Schulman is an architectural photographer. His most famous piece is his case study # 22 which is a photograph of a home in the Los Angeles Hills overlooking the entire city. I can see many lines in his photos that match with the lines in his other photos. For example in the photos posted here there is a distinct slanted line at the top of the photos, almost a sort of slanted horizon.
-Christine Tampakis

More Information About the Light Meter

• What is the light meter? 
• A light meter (a.k.a. exposure meter) is a light-sensing device and is crucial to creating a high-quality photograph.

• Why is the light meter crucial? 
• With a light/exposure meter, the photographer can be confident that he or she will consistently achieve good results with accurate exposure, which is fundamental to producing a high-quality photograph. 

• There are 2 different types of light meters:
1. Hand held light meter
2. Light meter built into your camera (to know when you have achieved the proper combination of lens and shutter-speed settings, look at either a needle or diode display in the viewfinder or an LCD display on top of the camera) 

• Light meter built into the camera (the type of meter we are using in Basic Film class):
• More specifically, what does it measure? 
• It measures the sensitivity of the light compared to the ASA that the photographer has his or her camera set on (this number is whatever speed is indicated on the film box).

**WARNING: The light meter can give you a misreading!
How? When metering a scene, the light meter will see a very bright part of the scene (i.e. a bright background behind a subject in shadow), and will incorporate that bright part into the overall scene.












Sources:
http://www.ehow.com/video_4989620_light-meter.html
http://www.kodak.com/cluster/global/en/consumer/products/techInfo/af9/index.shtml




-Jennifer Maldonado

ANSEL ADAMS PHOTOS

Gabriella Di Benedetto
AS 199-1

Wide-Angle Lens Versus Telephoto Lens

The Wide-Angle and Telephoto lenses are two types of lenses that can be used to create a variety of design effects on photographic images.  The choice between the two will result in two photographs with distinctly different stories.  A wide-angle lens has the capability to project a much larger image circle than that typical of a standard, 50mm lens.   The telephoto lens on the other hand has the power to magnify images and gives the illusion that you have moved closer to the object you are photographing. For example, if you wished to photograph the Colosseum from the grounds on the outside with both a wide-angle lens and telephoto lens; the results will be two distinct images. The resulting photo from the wide-angle lens will allow for the Colosseum to be captured in its entirety, while using a telephoto lenses provides you with the means to capture the small details of its walls.

Wide-Angle Lens

Telephoto Lens

Allison Garlick

Telephoto Lens

The telephoto lens is used in taking photos that are far away, allowing more detail to be shown in the distance. The telephoto lens allows a person to take photos of a long focal length using a lens that is shorter than the focal length. The construction of the lens makes it a telephoto lens. Besides the normal lens in the front which is normal to most cameras, there is also a lens in the back which magnifies the front lens, thus increasing the focal length.

Claudia Rotondo

FILM

     The first flexible photographic film in 1885 was developed by Eastman Kodak. This original film was coated on paper. In 1889 the first transparent plastic film was produced. Before glass photographic plates were used. The first photographic film was made from highly flammable nitrocellulose with camphor as plasticizers. In the beginning of the 1920's, nitrate film was replaced with cellulose acetate or safety film.

 

      The discovery that the spectral sensitivity of a film could be extended by dye sensation was done by Hermann Wilhelm Vogel. In 1879 it was introduced that orthochromatic film to be sensitive to the spectral range from green to blue. This was very popular until the mid 1920's, when panchromatic film was sensitive to the entire visual spectrum. All these films were used to produce black and white images. In 1861 were the first experiments to be done with color photography.







Leonela

Wide-Angle Lense

From a design perspective, a wide angle lens is one that projects a substantially larger image circle than would be typical for a standard design lens of the same focal length; this enables either large tilt & shift movements with a view camera, or lenses with wide fields of view.

Longer lenses magnify the subject more, apparently compressing distance and (when focused on the foreground) blurring the background because of their shallower depth of field. Wider lenses tend to magnify distance between objects while allowing greater depth of field.

Another result of using a wide-angle lens is a greater apparent perspective distortion when the camera is not aligned perpendicularly to the subject: parallel lines converge at the same rate as with a normal lens, but converge more due to the wider total field. For example, buildings appear to be falling backwards much more severely when the camera is pointed upward from ground level than they would if photographed with a normal lens at the same distance from the subject, because more of the subject building is visible in the wide-angle shot.

Because different lenses generally require a different camera–subject distance to preserve the size of a subject, changing the angle of view can indirectly distort perspective, changing the apparent relative size of the subject and foreground.

- Aimone Condulmari

Fisheye Camera Lens

A fisheye camera lens is a variant of the wide angle lens that produces a distorted appearance of the image on the film. The photograph when developed has a convex appearance to it, almost as if it is bulging in the center of the image. The name for the lens is pretty self-explanatory and comes from the fact that the lens produces the same image as the way a fish's eye works. The lens was first mass produced by Nikon in the early 1970's, but before that was often used to shoot landscapes that were able to show the curvature of the Earth in the image. There are 2 types of fisheye lenses, the more commonly used full frame which covers the entire 35mm film frame, and the lesser used circular lens which produces an image inscribed within a circle on the film. The camera lens has progressed massively since it's inception, when it was just used for panoramic landscapes. The lens is now used in a variety of photography, include in Imax theatres, planetariums, art, skateboarding photography, among many other variants as well.

 an example of the full frame fisheye

an example of the circular frame fisheye

- Cody Barz

Fisheye Lens

Fisheye lenses are wide-angle lenses that take a very wide hemispherical image. Originally fisheye lenses were developed for use by meteorologists to study cloud formations and were originally called "whole sky lenses". From a photography standpoint, they became popular because of the distorted curved image they produce. Many photographers utilize fisheye lenses to suggest the curvature of the Earth. They are also used to estimate solar radiation and characterize plant canopy geometry when looking up at the sky.

Minolta X-700 instructions

Instruction Manual:
http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/hardwares/classics/minoltax700/index.htm

Youtube Instructional Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h29108cdqfo (part 1)

- Cody Barz
                                        

Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond

Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond

Hugh Welch Diamond, born in 1809, was one of the earliest photographers, and made a major contribution to the progress of the craft.

A doctor by profession, he opened private practice in Soho, London, and then decided to specialise in the treatment of mental patients, being appointed to Brookwood Hospital, the Surrey County Asylum. Diamond was one of the founders of the Photographic Society, was later its Secretary and also became the editor of the Photographic Journal.

He used photography to treat mental disorders; some of his many calotypes depicting the expressions of people suffering from mental disorders are particularly moving. These were used not only for record purposes, but also, he claimed in the treatment of patients, although there is little evidence of success.

Perhaps it is for his attempts to popularize photography and to lessen its mystique that Diamond is best remembered. He wrote many articles and was a popular lecturer, and he also sought to encourage younger photographers. Among the latter was Henry Peach Robinson, who was later to refer to Diamond as a "father figure" of photography.

Seated Woman with Bird
c. 1855

Mental Patient
1855

Recognition for his encouragement and for his willingness to share his knowledge came in 1855, in the form of a testimonial amounting to £300 for services to photography; among those who subscribed were such people as Delamotte, Fenton and George Shadbolt. In 1867, the Photographic Society awarded its Medal in recognition of "his long and successful labours as one of the principal pioneers of the photographic art and of his continuing endeavours for its advancement." The following year, at his own initiative, he relinquished any further salary as Secretary of the Society, and became its Hon. Secretary.

- Aimone Condulmari