Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
When Sigma started the global vision range the Art series, in particular, became a household name for high-quality lenses.
My personal favorite is the lovely 105mm f1.4 Art that is as wonderful as it is large! That is a common theme with the Art series. As they often sacrifice size and weight for image quality.
So imagine my surprise when Sigma released a new 85mm f1.4 DG DN Art lens that is roughly half the weight of their original DSLR version, the 85mm f1.4 DG HSM Art.
The Library of Congress has created a fantastic online trip down the history lane. Newspaper Navigator is an online base consisting of 16,3 million newspaper pages, out of which 1.5 million are photos. It covers the period between 1900 and 1963, giving you a whole lot of historic newspaper photos and headlines in just a few clicks.
It’s always a good time to browse through online galleries of historic photos. But if there’s the best time for it, it’s probably now while we’re in isolation. Because of this, the British Museum has revamped its online collection sooner than planned. It has made 1.9 million images free to view, download and use under a Creative Commons 4.0 license.
Nowadays, we can find and learn pretty much anything we need on the internet. We can see what other people have created and how they did it, which can be a great thing. But it also has its negative side: it can often make us feel inadequate and question our own work. In this video, Chrystopher Rhodes of YC Imaging discusses why it’s important to “detoxify” from other creators’ content from time to time and stop caring about what they do.
I think the question of whether something is or is not art is a bit disingenuous, and can be used more as a tool for gatekeeping than true analysis or critique. There is no objective standard for what makes something enjoyable as a piece of art, whether that is a photograph, music, sculpture, or a blade of grass in a field. However when it comes to the deliberate creation of an artefact I think that the intention of the creator is very powerful, and can offer some strong insight into the way that work can be interpreted.
Us at DIYP love repurposing old and broken stuff. After all, that’s what DIY is all about. Photographer Fabian Oefner repurposes old cameras in a unique and artistic way, and I absolutely love it. In his project CutUp, he uses resin and a good ol’ saw to turn vintage cameras into amazing, trippy sculptures.
Walking past booth after booth at the PhotoPlus Expo in New York, I often heard camera company presenters explaining to their uncomfortably-seated, yet nonetheless-enraptured, audiences how they shot the “perfect” photo.
This was typically further explained as having achieved the perfect lighting, the perfect exposure, clear focus from edge-to-edge, etc. — typical technical rules we all know and try to follow, well, until we don’t. I wondered: Where does this obsession with perfection come from, and what is the cost to our creative output?
Many cultural institutions use social networks nowadays to promote their events. Geneva’s Museum of Art and History is no exception, but Facebook’s photo policy ruined its campaign. The museum posted images of two ancient statues that will be exhibited in an upcoming show. However, Facebook apparently thinks they’re porn, so it banned the museum’s ad.
I’ve always had a fascination with geometry and man-made structures, their perfection has a strong attraction on me. It took me time to realize that what I appreciated most wasn’t necessarily their symmetry or the simple repetition of shapes but the parallelism between the various elements of a construction, of an image.
To better understand what is parallelism you first need to deconstruct photography and bring it back to its essence. A photograph is light, shapes and colors (or tones, if we speak about black and white photography). Those are the visual blocks that form a photograph. Sometimes there are similarities between those different parts, for example, a rectangular shadow on the ground in the foreground projected by a traffic sign and the rectangular shape of a window of a building in the background.
Abstract art in photography does not attempt to represent external reality. Photography artists instead find shapes, patterns, colors, and textures for their visually stimulating photographs. This body of work in essence attempts to separate or withdraw something from something else like, for example, the intricate patterns of reptilian skin or the shapes and colors of rough seas or volcanoes.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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