For my Pecha Kucha presentation back in week 3, I showed an assortment of shots by Trent Parke. One thing I found fascinating about Parke while researching his work was that he often uses light as his primary inspiration for his photos, as seen below. This week’s prompt: chasing the light – why and how does it matter?, reminded me of a quote of Parkes’ that went, “I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical”.  I really liked this quote because I feel like it emphasis how important lighting is. 

I thought that the concept of lighting for photographs was pretty straightforward, but after completing the exercise for the week, I realised that it’s actually quite technical and requires a bit of thinking. I found the slides very useful and will be using them through the semester to reflect on.

I’m quite interested in food photography so I think that for my Mimesis project I’m going to sift through some of my fave insta photographers and chose one that will challenge me.

The reading this week introduced me to the term HDR (high-dynamic-range) and described it as a technique where, “the surfaces of the subject matter seem to glow, the tension between shadows and light intensifies, and colours somehow appear simultaneously more muddled and more vivid” from which I took that it makes photos look more luminous than a standard photo. The main idea of the reading was centred around photographing ruins and how using the HDR technique could be argued to provide a dynamic range similar to that of our own eyes if we were seeing them in the flesh which I would have thought would be ideal but Kushinski argues that this could do a disservice to the photo by making them look ‘more than real’. Which after doing some googling of HDR photos, I think I would have to agree with – they almost look like animation or photos from fairytale book. What I found crazy was that our iPhones have a HDR feature built into them so you don’t need to go out and buy a fancy expensive camera anymore to take there really visually interesting photos anymore. Our phones will take over the world one day!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Kushinski, A., 2016. Light and the Aesthetics of Abandonment: HDR Imaging and the Illumination of Ruins. TRANSFORMATIONS Journal of Media and Culture, (28).