More Then Looking

For our first More Than Looking seminar, we focused on our senses. What we could feel? What could we see?

Some of us brought in different objects and materials with odd textures and we had to test them all and take in what our senses told us. We then focused on this with our photography. In small groups of 2 - 3, we went around the university and campus, for 20 minutes, taking photographs of what we thought was interesting and texturised before heading back into our seminar.

My photographs were mainly of leaves, fabric, and objects where you can visibly see the texture and you are able to imagine how it feels under your touch. Others in the main group had similar, but some incorporated colours and objects I would never have thought of photographing, which gave me a new way to look at these objects.

We had to describe a selected few images using only one word and the few that kept popping up were 'rusty', 'old', 'bright', and 'used'. For my own photographs, I used words like ' rusty', 'crunchy', 'cold', and 'seasonal'.

These are just 2 I have taken...

Lecture 2: Can Photography Be Art?

When photography was first invented everyone was amazed by it, but as years went on people began to question how it should be used. Many believed that photography should be used to photograph a true representation of life. Others believed different.

Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, Charles Baudelaire, and Francis Firth are three people that believe that photography is too truthful and it is taking away from other art forms.

Cornelius Jabez Hughes came up with three classes for photography: Mechanical (exact representation), Art (rearrangement), and High Art (haas a higher purpose to instruct, purify, and ennoble).

There are many books where the writer has believed that photography isn't art, but alongside this there has been many where photography is art.
Photographers and painters began to look at each others style and become influenced through their work. Painters used photography to help them with their colours, composition, and framing. Photographers looked at painters style of work and made their own version using photography. Degas, Delacroix, Courbet, Cezanne, and Manet were just a few painters that used photography to help there work develop.

Today, photography is categorised into art and you can find it in art galleries, where people enjoy the variation of styles.

Seminar 1: Types of Photography

There are many different types of photography such as: candid, photo journalism, editorial, astrophotography, and many more. When you list the different types, you start to realise that some may fall into the same category or have subcategories. For example, you have advertisement photography but within that category you can have fashion, beauty, sport, and 3D. This is the same for each type of photography and when discussed within a group, you can be easily begin a debate, but really there is no wrong answer.

So what is the most important style of photography? Well, different people have different opinions. Where some may say medical, others may say photo journalism. It's entirely your opinion, but remember to respect others decision. Some may also have different opinions on what is the most influential type of photography, with this day and age, you could say that the selfie is at the top, but in a seminar somebody else said abstract this is, again, your opinion.

Lecture 1: The Inventions of Photography

The Inventions of Photography

In the 17th and 18th many artists used camera obscura which helped them to develop skills that became new art. The 19th century was when the camera obscura was was ready where only a little or no modification to take a 'photograph' which was a sheet of light material that was sensitive that became the photographic camera.

It was in 1800 when the first 'photograph' was made. This was done by Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy were they had sensitised paper or leather with silver nitrate and then placed a flat object in contact with the paper and then exposed the paper and object to light which created the photograph, also known as 'sun prints'. Unfortunately they were not permanent.

It was then in 1826 when the first permanent photograph was taken. This was by Joseph Nicephore Niepce. The exposure time was 8-10 hours with bitumen coated plate in a camera obscura. It was a negative (reversed) image and it is called 'Heliography'.

In 1839, the first person in an image was created by Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre. The plate contained a latent image and the exposure at the end needed to be developed and fixed.

From Daguerre, photography expanded as in 7th Jan 1839 he announced his invention and then 19th Aug 1939 he joined a meeting of the Academy of Science and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris and demonstrated his invention.

And then it began...

1851 - Frederick Scott Archer introduced glass negative. This was called Collodion or Wet Plate
1868 - Ducas de Hauron publishes a book proposing a variety of methods for colour photography.
1871 - Richard Leach Maddox proposes the use of an emulsion of gelatine and silver bromide on a glass plate (the Dry Plate)
1888 - First Kodak camera containing a 20-foot roll of paper (enough for 100 2.5inch diameter circular photos)
1907 - The first commercial colour film, the Autochrome plates, manufactured by Lumber brothers in France