Brett Weston seemed destined from birth to become a great photographer: Born in Los Angeles in 1911, he was the second son of photographer Edward Weston and also had a close artistic relationship to him (Brett Weston Archive, 2019). Edward removed Brett from school in 1925 and took him to a trip to Mexico, where... Continue Reading →

I consulted the contact sheet to decide which image I wanted to print as a photographic enlargement, which is way larger than the negative and made by projecting an enlarged image of the negative onto photographic paper. The first step was setting up the enlarger: I selected a negative from the contact sheet to work... Continue Reading →

Before deciding on a photograph to enlarge and print it is necessary to print a contact sheet – a visual representation of the negatives. To make a contact sheet, I placed a glass fronted contact frame centrally under the enlarger head. I raised the enlarger head to a height where the light just surrounds the... Continue Reading →

After shooting all the frames on a 35mm film, the film needed to be processed in a complete dark environment. In order to do so, the film from the film canister was loaded onto a film reel which holds the film in spiral shape. It is important to take as much time as necessary during that... Continue Reading →

Before I could start with the practical implementation of my photography project, I needed to familiarise with the camera control of the 35mm SLR camera. Therefore, it was necessary to have a look at the relationship between aperture, shutter speed and ISO and the effect all of them have on the exposure of a photograph.... Continue Reading →

For my project for the Illuminate festival it was necessary to have a closer look at the relationship between the additive and subtractive colours (also called primary and secondary colours) to understand colour contrast in still and moving images. Red, blue and green are the three primary colours. They are the only colours that the... Continue Reading →

Craig Whyte introduced me to the standard lighting technique used in visual media such a film or photography, the so-called three-point lighting technique. This versatile but simple system forms the basis of most lighting and was essential for our following lighting exercise. The three lights that are used for this technique are called key light,... Continue Reading →

Following the basic introduction lesson that we had last week I attended another Digital Cinematics workshop to learn more about the work with a DSLR film camera.   First, we recapped our work with the Canon 5D Mk II from last week. We agreed that the strengths of this specific camera lie within its good... Continue Reading →

The two week workshop Digital Cinematics was the perfect chance to look at creative technologies and ideas of cinematography using large sensor digital cameras. The camera we used for filming our own footage was the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, a full-frame digital single-lens reflex camera. As Canon (2008) announced it was the world’s first... Continue Reading →