Filed under: Photography, Technology | Tags: D3, Flash, Manfrotto, Nikon, Photography, Sydney
An interesting shot this one – it involved securing the camera to the car with a Manfrotto suction cup and arm. The camera was fired by Pocket Wizard, roughly an eigth of a second to get the blur off the tunnel walls, and at the end of the expsoure, the hotshoe fired another PW that in turned fired flashes on the back seats and one on the dash. Sweet. If not nerve wracking.
An attempt inspired by American photographer Irving Penn’s series known as The Trades. Penn was a master of simple light and careful composition. Although he used studio flash (as was used here, one softbox feathered to left background and one camera right ro subject, triggered by PW), Penn was also famous for using window light – especially his series of portraits taken in tent-like studio that he took to New Guinea and other countries with fascinating results.
Clarity, composition, careful arrangement of objects or people, form, and the use of light characterize Penn’s work. Penn also photographs still life objects and found objects in unusual arrangements with great detail and clarity. While his prints are always clean and clear, Penn’s subjects vary widely. Many times his photographs are so ahead of their time that they only came to be appreciated as important works in the modernist canon years after their creation. (Wikipedia)
Following my attempts to emulate Irving Penn, this photo is based on the work of Helmut Newton. It kind of drifted from Newton’s sometimes stark lighting, but ended up being a fun shoot.
Helmut Neustädter (b. 1920, Berlin, Germany – d. 2004, West Hollywood, California, USA) was a German-Australian fashion photographer noted for his nude studies of women. During WWII Newton was interned by British authorities while in Singapore, and was sent to Australia, arriving in Sydney on 27 September 1940…In 1942, he enlisted with the Australian Army and worked as a truck driver.
After the war, in 1945 he became an Australian citizen, and changed his name to Newton in 1946. In 1948 he married actress June Browne, who performed under the stage-name ‘June Brunell’. She later became a successful photographer under the ironic pseudonym ‘Alice Springs’ (after Alice Springs, the central Australian town). In 1946, Newton set up a studio in fashionable Flinders Lane in Melbourne and worked primarily on fashion photography in the affluent post-war years. He shared his first joint exhibition in May 1953 with Wolfgang Sievers, a German refugee like himself. The exhibition of ‘New Visions in Photography’ was held at the Federal Hotel in Collins Street and was probably the first glimpse of ‘New Objectivity’ photography in Australia. Newton went into partnership with Henry Talbot, a fellow German Jew who had also been interned at Tatura, and his association with the studio continued even after 1957 when he left Australia for London. The studio was renamed ‘Helmut Newton and Henry Talbot’. Newton’s growing reputation as a fashion photographer was rewarded when he secured a commission to illustrate fashions in a special Australian supplement for Vogue magazine, published in January 1956. He won a twelve-month contract with British Vogue and he left for London in February 1957, leaving Talbot to manage the business.
He left the magazine before the end of his contract and went to Paris where he worked for French and German magazines. He returned to Melbourne in March 1959 to a contract for Australian Vogue. He settled in Paris in 1961 and continued work as a fashion photographer. His works appeared in magazines including, most significantly, French Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. He established a particular style marked by erotic, stylised scenes, often with sado-masochistic and fetishistic subtexts. A heart attack in 1970 slowed his output somewhat but he extended his work and his notoriety/fame greatly increased, notably with his 1980 "Big Nudes" series which marked the pinnacle of his erotic-urban style, underpinned with excellent technical skills. He also worked in portraiture and more fantastical studies. (from Wikipedia)</i>
Following my attempts to emulate Irving Penn and Helmut Newton, this photo is based on the work of Richard Avedon.
b. 1923, d. 2004, USA. In 1944, Avedon began working as an advertising photographer, but was quickly discovered by Harper’s Bazaar and began providing images for magazines including Vogue and Life. Avedon is equally renowned for his photographs of celebrities and the non-famous.
In both cases he was always interested in how portraiture captures the personality and soul of its subject. As his reputation as a photographer became widely known, he brought in many famous faces to his studio and photographed them with a large-format 8×10 view camera. His portraits are easily distinguished by their minimalist style, where the person is looking squarely in the camera, posed in front of a sheer white background. Avedon would at times provoke reactions from his portrait subjects by guiding them into uncomfortable areas of discussion or asking them psychologically probing questions. Through these means he would produce images revealing aspects of his subject’s character and personality that were not typically captured by others. Avedon became the first staff photographer for The New Yorker in 1992.
He has won many awards for his photography, including the International Center of Photography Master of Photography Award in 1993, the Prix Nadar in 1994 for his photobook Evidence, and the Royal Photographic Society 150th Anniversary Medal in 2003. (from Wikipedia)
