Photographic Exhibition

 

My local photographic society is holding its annual exhibition next month - April 4th until April 15th - in Teddington, which you may be able to see from the poster above. Perhaps you may like to visit if you are in South West London then. I have to plead guilty to taking the image on that poster - an "infrared" image of Richmond Park. Have a closer look at it in my Flickr photostream here.

I suspect the purists amongst you out there won't regard it an "infrared" - it was taken on a regular (ie unconverted and digital) Nikon D80 with an "infrared" filter, cutoff point at 720nm, and it needed a little processing afterwards with Photoshop. Does this matter ? Not in my opinion. However, I have to say that I still prefer the results I used to get from Kodak HIE infrared film. Shame it is no longer manufactured.....

Portraits - Irving Penn Exhibition

Back to the National Portrait Gallery in central London on Wednesday last to see the Irving Penn exhibition. My last visit to the Gallery was to see the Beatles to Bowie exhibition a few weeks back. This exhibition overlaps the that time scale to a certain extent - the sixties - but covers 7 decades in all.

The prints are presented chronologically (as was the Beatles to Bowie exhibition) and as this exhibition features only one photographer you can see a developing style over the years. For example there is a change from the 1940's whole figure shots (with minimal props), then the closely cropped head and shoulders shots from the 1950's onwards,  and laterly emphasis on the face and eyes (eg Al Pacino), and sometimes with the part of the face in deep shadow (eg the portraits of Pablo Picasso and Issey Miyake). I also liked the portrait of Lisa Fonassagrives-Penn in the Harlequin dress, possibly because being more high-key was a little different to the rest ?

There are 120 prints in this exhibition, all monochrome and taken on film. Yes, no digital. I wonder if digital has caught up yet tp film technically  - in monochrome -  to the sheer quality of what was on show. 

The exhibition continues until June 6th, 2010. Its worth the £10 entrance fee.

Swinging Sixties

Visited the Beatles to Bowie photographic exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in central London last weekend. The exhibition covers the music scene in London during the years 1960 to 1969 aka the "Swinging Sixties" .  Given the years covered by the pictures, I was a little surprised to find a mixed audience attending - at least mixed age wise - I was expecting to see mostly people who have some claim to have been around at the time, and not so many younger people who obviously weren't.
The term "Swinging Sixties" and photography brings to mind Bailey, Donovan and Duffy, and it was good to see all these 3 photographers represented - although I could only find 1 from Mr. Duffy (see previous post wrt TV Documentary) which was of the Shadows with fashion model Ros Watkins.You've probably seen many of Bailey's and Donovan's work over the years - I have - especially of young looking Beatles and Rolling Stones as they were starting out. One photo I hadn't seen before - but liked very much - was a black and white low key portrait (taken in a studio?) of the Moody Blues.
The exhibition also contained much memorabilia for the period eg LP and EP covers, sheet music and also some of the music press of the time. Interesting to see the exhibition photograph and then how it was used on an album cover or in the press, eg the 1961 McBean colour photo of the Shadows.  Speaking of album covers, many of the albums (LP's ?) from the earlier years of that decade were in mono (it was stated clearly on the cover), stereo only became standard later. Also whilst colour photography was available throughout  the decade  - as just mentioned - the photos from the earlier years were in black and white, with colour dominating the later years.
I wonder what the younger people who visited this exhibition would have thought about things then - music on vinyl records (in mono) - not downloadable MP3 .... no video's ......
Also managed to catch the Turner and the Masters exhibition at the Tate Britain. No prizes for guessing which exhibition I preferred.

Guernsey Salon of Photography

Some good news - for me anyway - arrived today in the mail today, in the form of a CD from the Guernsey Salon of Photography. One of my images had been accepted for the 2009 Salon,  and the CD contained the results and acceptances for this Salon. My image is "Richmond Park in Winter", which (at the time of posting) is up on the banner to this blog. It's also in my FLICKR photostream - you can click on the link to my photostream in this blog - the image is a few pages in, and its called "Richmond Park in Winter #1" there. The CD also contained a slideshow of the accepted images and mine included also !

Points of View

Spent this afternoon at the "Points of View - Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs" in the British Library near St Pancras Station in London. The exhibition covers the early years of photography drawing from the Library's collections. Hardly surprising (and rightly so) that Fox Talbot features heavily.

The exhibits finish in the 1st decade of the last century, catching up to Kodak's box camera et al, so colour photography is still some way off, never mind digital.
Quite a few cameras as well as photographs are on display and compared to today's offerings the cameras look big, bulky and heavy. Coupled with long exposure times its aamazing that the photographers achieved the results they did. I liked the display on the cartes de visite - this were very popular in the mid 1800's.

The exhibition runs until March 7th, 2010, and is well worth a visit. Better yet it is free.

3 Exhibitions and Some Footie

Busy weekend just gone - 3 photographic exhibitions to visit and a footie game to enjoy.

Visited the 1st Exhibition, "A Double Take on Photography" in the Garden Gallery within the marvellous surroundings of Osterley House, west London - to view Black & White and Infra Red photos. If you didn't make this exhibition, visit the web pages of the two exhibitors,

http://www.alanabercrombieimages.co.uk

and

http://www.phildrakephotography.co.uk

The 2nd Exhibition was the Jane Bown:Exposures 100 Portraits at the King's Place Gallery, York Way in central London and almost exclusively black & white pictures of the famous. Liked the photos from the sixties. How times changes, strange to see people allowing themselves to be photographed whilst smoking. Most of these photographs would have been taken on film, and this shows in the quality of the prints.

Exhibition #3 was London Independent Photography's 21st Annual Exhibition at the Cotton Centre in Tooley Street, again in central London, near to London Bridge, where there were both colour and black & white panels on display.

All three exhibitions are worth a visit - and even better in these recessionary times - free entry.

The weekend finished with a visit to Upton Park to see Arsenal throw away a half time 2- 0 lead and let West Ham score twice to earn a well deserved draw. Had seats in the Bobby Moore stand - behind the goal - and for once all the goals were at this end - in front of us - rather than the other end. Four goals, one penalty and a red card, an exiting match. Can't complain about that for entertainment. And even better news - THAT team from Manchester lost.

Spend a little time (probably would have been more if the activities on the pitch weren't so entertaining) watching the professional photographers in their goal line enclosure. Looks like they're all into digital cameras these days. There were 4 still cameras on small tripods placed behind the goal net during the 1st half - all on automatic exposure and wifi upload? All 4 should have had excellent views of both Arsenal goals during the 1st half. Only 1 remained in place for the second half. I wonder if they made it up the other goal? If so they missed 2 wonderful West Ham goals.

Local Newspaper

I had some good news on Friday last (18/09/09) - a local newspaper published one of my photographs, a sunset view of the Thames at Richmond, taken near Twickenham Bridge. This is the picture -



The picture was cropped slightly top and bottom for publication, but otherwise shows up fairly well, and I'm pleased to see it.

You'll find it in the paper version of the Richmond and Twickenham Times on page 21.

Some very old Photographic efforts of mine

In the "olden" days I used to take mainly black & white, on film. The following two images are some examples. The Singer was photographed in Dublin and Fishing picture was taken in Amsterdam.








I'm more up to date now having converted to digital. I certainly don't miss spending time in a Darkroom except for that brief moment, when, after working the enlarger, putting the exposed sheet of paper into the developer and watching the image appear. Magical ! But perhaps not so magical when the safe light was switched off in favour of the ordinary light. But thankfully pungent chemicals are a thing of the past (hopefully !)

blogging and other activites.....

I need to get my head around this blogging activity. It's new to me. I had been planning to make daily posts, but as you can see from the dates of the posts, this hasn't happened. It seems so self-indulgent and pretentious. Perhaps this will change in time....

Anyways, another thing I've been getting my head around is this reportage. My photographic education - such as it is (I've done some City and Guilds modules, I've got an LRPS and been through the club circuit) taught me that the technical aspects of a photograph were about as important as the content. So I was somewhat appalled to see the technical quality of some of the images shown to us earlier. What seems to be more important here is intent and emotion .... those touchy feely ideas ...