Hiroshi Sugimoto
Hiroshi Sugimoto is a sixty-nine year old architect and photographer from Tokyo, Japan. He has had multiple artwork sets and exhibitions such as 'Snow White' which focuses on a bright white rectangle in interesting places and 'Surface Tension' which focuses on photos of seascapes. The artwork set I'll be focusing on is 'Conceptual Forms' because in this artwork he focused on machinery and different types of mechanisms and taking a photo of them in black and white. He used machine that look like they were made from spare parts of a vehicle or industrial machine. The main thing that makes these images interesting is that all the machines look as if they are functional and would actually move if you operated them. Another thing that makes this set of images interesting is that the background is totally black so the focus is all on the machine itself.
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Richard Kagan
Richard Kagan is a 73 year old photographer who has a focus on machines and mechanical item such as sowing machines and scissors. In his photos he mainly uses things that you can buy from a shop that has already been made. The items he uses look as if they are old and have been very rusted and broken down a bit giving them a sort of vintage look which gives an interesting effect on the photo. Another thing that makes the images interesting is that it is all in black and white which helps enhance the vintage effect that the rust and cracks give it. The black background makes it so that we don't focus on anything other than the object itself. In some of the photos the object looks as if they are floating so that nothing is off the screen and so that you don't have to look at it at a weird angle. Kagan probably achieved this effect by using very thin string such as a fishing line to tie it to. Most of the objects he used are common items that can easily be found in a house or some sort of urban place such as a wrench, cork screw and exhaust pipe.
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Len Mitchell
Len Mitchell is a photographer that has many different sets of amazing photos. These photos, although they aren't directly related to machines, have aspects of the machines theme such as cars and mechanical components. They are from a set of his travel series called decay, in this set all the photos are of broken down things such as buildings, household items and what i'm going to be focusing on, machinery. He took photos of old cars that are very rusted and worn down and components like tracks and cogs that are also rusted and worn down. Everything in these photos look unusable which shows that they are decaying. Some of the photos are in black and white which could show that they are quite old machines.
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Martin Dürr
Martin Dürr is a German photographer who was a website full of different styles of photos. I will be focusing on his machines set because it is the same theme that I am doing. All of his images have been made black and white, I think he did this because if the machines are have different colours on them it will move the focus off the machine and onto the colours. All of his images are of engines which is a type of machine. They are all different engines from different vehicles such as cars and planes. None of the photos have the full engine in them, they are all a specific part of the engine, this is probably because in a full engine there are so many parts that it would become confusing which parts the photographer want you to focus on.
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Kevin Twomey
Kevin Twomey is a photographer that likes to use interesting techniques such as diptych pairings. This is a technique where you have two similar images together that compliment each other and work well with one another. He does this with objects such as hoovers, footballs as well as using people as models. He also takes pictures of the machinery inside old calculators and typewriters.
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Homework
These are all pictures of a BMX. I took photos of this because it counts as a machine and it has a lot of mechanical parts on it such as the drivetrain, the headset and the wheels. I used a flash in hopes that it would sort of highlight the main part that I was taking the photo of. Those worked for some of the photos but some there was too many parts. In these photos I tried to compose the photo so that the main part that I was taking the photo of was centred so the people looking at the photo would focus on that part.
I think these images worked the best because you can clearly see what part of the bike I was taking the picture of because they're centred properly and they're lit up by the flash. In a way this was a response to the artist research because I tried to use the techniques of the flash like Hiroshi Sugimoto.
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Homework 2
For this homework I took more photos of machinery. The only object I used during this set of pictures was a BMX chain. To make it look interesting I made the chain into different shapes and then I took pictures of them. The chain is made up of lots of small links which allows it to be made in lots of different shapes which is the main thing I like about it. One of the things I don't like about these photos is the background; I should have used a more plain background such as black or white. Another things I don't really like is the fact that in some of the photos the chain gives off a reflection of the light hitting it. To stop this I could try and get a black chain then the reflection would be less.
Experimentation
In this experimentation I decided to use a spare BMX sprocket that my friend let me borrow. I used the sprocket by putting it in front of different objects and things around the school to make them look more interest and to create more of a focus on either the sprocket or the object behind the sprockets. The shape of the sprocket also helped to make the photos more interesting, this is because the teeth make it more abstract.
Further Experimentation
For this experiment I used spare BMX parts as the machinery objects. With these parts I placed them on the table at the back of the class it the studio area and with the bright lights pointed at the objects. I then used a DLSR camera with a macro lens on to get very up close to the objects then took the picture. I then put a filter on the photos to make them black and white which makes them more interesting in my opinion because it makes the pictures look very dark but then the bright lights make it look lighter.
Further Experimentation
For this experiment I decided to use the same objects as last time (the spare BMX parts), but instead of using a macro lens I used a normal lens and a long exposure. The length of the exposures ranged from 8 seconds to 4 seconds, this is because some of them looked better with a longer exposure. In some of the photos I had one of the objects on the table already and then I placed one of the other objects on top of it during the exposure and it gives the object on top a ghostly effect making it sort of transparent so you can see the object underneath. For the other photos I had all the parts I wanted to use on the table and then moved some of them which sort of drag out the object making it look very distorted.
Further Experimentation
For this experiment, I took twelve separate photos of the parts in the studio at the back of the classroom with the lights on to make them more clear and bright. I then took the twelve photos and edited them in photoshop to make 6 total images. The first thing I did was put one photo on top of the other so that there are two photos in one picture. I then inverted the colours on the base photo and then I made the opacity to about 45% so that you can see both layers. I liked this because the base photo contrasts the top photo so which makes certain parts of each photo stand out. Something that I don't like much about these photos is that in some of the pictures it's hard to see which parts of the photos belong to which photo but this could also be a good thing because it would mean people would have to look at it for longer to understand whats going on in the photo so that they don't just skip over it or not pay much attention to it.