Man Ray was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all.
This is one of his best known pieces, its called dust breeding, it’s a photo of a years worth of dust sitting on a glass plate, he collaborated with Duchamp.
After learning about this photo, i realised that they had carefully planned this out, collecting the dust after a year and leaving it how it naturally fell really interested me, it shows how dynamic natural beauty really is. it also shows how much change can occur after a period of time. a similar concept to this is
Traces of Time
Man Ray’s dust breeding helped inspire me to take photos of surfaces, as they are one of the easiest things to photograph to see how much it has changed,.
Surface Textures
Candle
Slow Shutterspeed
Painting with Lights
using a slow shutterspeed, we were able to create lots of different shapes and words using light wands and the light from our phone torches, we took out lots of different lights and set the tripod and camera up in a dark classroom, we held the button down for 10 seconds and then drew different things with the lights, we did names, rainbows, random wiggles and lots more,
Refined Light Painting
These photos took lots of attempts as we had to try and get the name in the shot, the second one reminds me of graffiti, i like this because it wasn’t intentional but looks really nice and very colourful.
Fast Shutterspeed
Jumpology – Students
I enjoyed doing jumpology because it takes lots of practice to get the perfect timing to make sure they are in the air, the first photos we forgot to tell the models to jump and kick their legs up, so some of them look like they r still on the floor.
To do this, we had the camera really low and had the students jump and caught them mid air, this took lots of attempts as sometimes they were still touching the floor
Jumpology – Teachers
once we got more confident, we started to ask the teachers, we explained to them what we wanted the photo to look like, we told them to kick their feet up and show no emotion, (some took this a bit too far!!). we got the photos we wanted by crouching down to make them look like they are are higher up.
The role of the shutter speed within the exposure triangle
Shutter speed is used in photography to capture images with motion blur and to freeze movement. Most shutter speed examples include subjects which are moving – from wildlife photography to landscapes featuring motion, such as passing clouds or running waterfalls.
The shutter speed controls the amount of blur within the photo, the faster the shutter speed the less blurry the photo is where as the slower the shutter speed the more blurry.
Capturing Movement
During a dance class we took the camera in to capture the movement of the dancers as they started spinning, for this we used a slow shutter speed, this helped capture the dancers mid spin. we had the camera set up on a tripod to help us steady it and catch the motion blur.
Pinhole Photography
This was our first attempts doing pinhole photography, to do this we used small coffee cans that have a small hole cut into one part of the can, we then took photographic paper and placed it on the opposite side of the can to the hole and covered the hole with black masking tape to stop light getting in and ruining our photo, once these were set up, we took them outside and placed them on flat surfaces facing towards the building or infrastructure we wanted photographed. once we have it set up we took the black tape off for a certain amount of time depending on how much light there is in our selected area, after we have had the tape off for this time, we placed the tape back on and took it to the dark room.
the developing process: Put the photography paper into the developer (900ml water 100ml developer) we left the photo in here between 1 and a half minutes and 3 minutes this helps the photo develop properly, after that we put it into the stopper (water and one capful of stop) this stopped the developer from working, so the photo was complete, we left this in there for 10 seconds then moved it to the final process which is fixer, (800ml water and 200ml fixer) we leave the photo in here for 4 minutes, this fixes the photo to the paper forever. To then clean it up properly we leave it in a water bath for 1 hour.
