Oh What a Lovely Day.

Carlisle Catholic Club, 2012

Picnic Benches on a lovely summers day 2012.

Trophy Cabinet. Carlisle Catholic Club 2012.

Its interesting how a bit of sporadic weather can shape an entire project. I confess to not really venturing out of the house with a camera on a sunny day (thats Stephen Shore's thing), but rather race to the front door when the storm clouds gather and the rain threatens to spoil someones picnic. Having said that, the last few weeks (or was it years) of crazy wetness did force me to think inwards and I found myself in all kinds of places strange and quite (Wim Wenders).

Who Can Improve on Nature? Magazine Editors

Jill Greenberg

The picture of a sheep that was whitened for a Women's Health magazine article on sleep.

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

Published: July 20, 2012

The magazine editors knew they had their cover shot. The model, just emerged from a small pond, produced a look for the camera that exuded intelligence and confidence. The only problem was the water droplets clinging to the model’s ears. So the photo editors had the ears retouched and the December 2011-January 2012 issue of Garden and Gun went to press.

Enlarge This Image

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Teenage girls with Spark a Movement stage a mock fashion show this month to protest the use of retouched photos of girls in Teen Vogue.

Its flawless cover model: an English Labrador named Deke.

As long as magazines have retouched photos — as long as there have been magazines, basically — there has been a debate about the line between improving an image and outright manipulation, especially in women’s magazines where models are made to look younger and thinner and any blemishes are removed. The debate was revived earlier this month with Seventeen magazine’s announcement that it would “never change girls’ body or face shapes” in the magazine.

But the practice of retouching, once largely confined to fashion spreads and advertisements, has become much more common in recent years across all editorial photography, according to many industry professionals. Skies are made brighter, animals become flawless, grass is made to look greener and, in a recent issue of Women’s Health, sheep were made to look whiter.

The increased manipulation of images has conditioned readers, already accustomed to digital effects in movies and on television, to expect not an accurate photo, but an image that’s a heightened version of the truth.

“There is an impulse I’ve seen over the last several years to improve on reality,” said David Granger, the editor in chief of Esquire, who has had to request stripped-down versions of editorial photographs so that he can understand what the original image looks like. “People think, ‘I should manipulate this to create a more beautiful photo.’ ”

The chief reason retouching has become so prevalent is technological: with digital cameras and computers, anyone can alter a photograph and that shift has driven a change in the business. After Bob Scott, a freelance commercial photographer, shot a professional golfer for a Golf magazine in early 2010, he noticed that the magazine had removed some white specks on the AstroTurf from beneath the golfer’s feet to make the ground look like a flawless green carpet.

Mr. Scott said younger people coming into the profession simply consider it part of the job.

“When you’re graduating out of a university and studying design, you’re coming out with these skills where you’re using Photoshop as a tool,” Mr. Scott said. “They’re creating these plausible realities.”

Retouching has become so prevalent on editorial pages that magazine industry executives have considered introducing guidelines on what is considered acceptable. Sid Holt, chief executive of the American Society of Magazine Editors, said that in the past the industry only established guidelines regarding advertising and editorial conflicts. After much discussion, the society concluded that editors can continue to regulate themselves for now.

“It’s really the responsibility of the individual brands,” Mr. Holt said.

Magazine editors often have widely different interpretations of these standards. Maggie Kennedy, the photography director of Garden & Gun magazine, said that the magazine had removed the water from the cover dog’s ears so that the copy on the cover stood out.

“We’re not altering the animal’s body,” Ms. Kennedy said. “Ours is about accommodating design and copy.”

Margaret Russell, editor in chief of Architectural Digest, said that for covers she is comfortable making skies outside windows bluer and flowers on a table more intense. On the June cover, she had a vase of flowers shifted off-center on a table and she sometimes edits out lighting fixtures on ceilings because it is difficult to read titles over them. But she does not change the color of furniture or remove the Andy Warhol paintings from walls.

More Here.

Interesting what you can find in a barn...

That There Project.

And so onto what is to be the final stretch of my memory project which has changed its title so many times I have reverted to calling it the That There Project Thingy.
Trudging the swamps of the North, knee deep in the mire, I realised that the end is now in sight and I shall soon make the decision to stop shooting. Sometimes only a clean brake will do, like an online divorce with no children, pets, or large amounts of mula.
Its been an interesting project, fun at first, but then things got a little serious when the education gestapo started to ask questions. But who can blame them when they are subjected to a landscape luminere such as I...
I enjoy the university challenge and all that, but sometimes I just need to go off and spend time in a field watching the clouds like all those great poets and painter types.

Full-time photography is an endangered species, but so what?

• By Alex Hare
• Arts - News, notes and quotes on the Arts world -
• Sunday, 15 July 2012 at 10:00 am

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The British Journal of Photography carried an interesting piece about the photographer that has just won the prestigious World Press Photographer award.

It reported that the photographer in question, Samuel Aranda, was staring at his finances wondering how he was going to pay the next month’s rent when he received the call confirming his win. On one level I find this slightly reassuring but, on another, very depressing.

Reassuring in that it means I’m not alone in wondering where the next pay cheque will come from, but depressing that even someone contributing regularly to major publications and providing us with important photo journalism of world events is under the financial cosh from doing so.

This anecdote is indicative of the experience of many of us in full-time photography. No one can recall a time when there was less money available for photography whilst a demand to fill all the pages in our papers, magazines, websites or PR and advertising campaigns remains so strong.

Now, I’m not saying the industry deserves to be awash with cash simply because ‘hey, we’re artists, man’. Neither am I expecting sympathy from people for the plight of the full-time photographer – it’s tough for everyone right now. What I’m really concerned about is the fall in the quality of the photography we will experience as a result of undervaluing this commodity. As I see it, the quality of images that we are presented with from advertising to editorial is now under threat.

I remember standing on the platform of the London Bridge tube station on my way home from work one day (back when I had a ‘proper job’…) and being confronted by a poster campaign encouraging me to visit Turkey.

They’d used some very poor quality images that were crudely composited together to create a fantasy land; a seascape, with a waterfall flowing into it (in the Med?!), with a Disney style castle on the shore. It looked awful.

I found this cheap-skate, corner cutting photography insulted my intelligence and it seemed to me that if they couldn’t be bothered to show the country at its best in their advertising, then I couldn’t be bothered to go there. It obviously costs less than commissioning some quality photography of what is undoubtedly a stunning country but, and I kid you not, it made me decide to got to Greece instead that summer in protest!

The bottom line is, I think we are at risk of losing something here. I don’t mean some fancy, creative career for people like me that do photography full-time, rather a stream of quality photography that can only be produced by someone putting in the (full) time and dedication required to do it.

This has nothing to do with the amateur Vs. pro debate, by the way. There are stacks of great photographers in the amateur category but they have other jobs and their work is therefore sporadic and limited in volume. The issue is that without photography being valued enough to make it pay a full-time job, how can we have the flow of good photography the market is capable of carrying if the majority of the image suppliers are just dabbling, albeit to a high standard, during their weekends and summer holidays?

I accept that market forces are at play here and with tighter budgets these days the full-timer must either hang in there and offer something the part timer can’t, or get another job.

So when are we going to notice this slow erosion of the quality of our photography in the media we consume?

Maybe not until we look back in a few years time to an era when our front covers still carried startling photographs, from war zones to natural phenomena, when holiday brochures had really enticing landscape and travel images and when the ad campaigns we are bombarded with used quality imagery to engage us rather than bland mediocrity. My experience on the London Underground with the Turkish tourism advert is not isolated and I would argue that we have already passed this point of initial decline and the slide has begun.

So, if the quality drops, will we expect to pay less for the media we consume and the products we buy in response to inferior photography used in the ads? If our newspaper or restaurant meal was badly written or poorly cooked we wouldn’t expect to pay so much for it. Why should we pay full whack if the photography is sub-standard? Market forces can work both ways after all. If the media we consume can’t be bothered to entice us with quality images, why should we hand over top prices for their products? Just ask the Turkish tourist board who, no doubt, felt the pinch at my volta face!

New Smart Phone Photo Competition:

From the 2^nd July HTC will launch a new photo competition, ‘My Life: from Dusk Until Dawn’. The aim is to uncover the often unseen side of the UK at these times. Using your smartphone to capture and share photos via Twitter, weekly winners will be in the running to win a holiday to shoot the Northern Lights.

I’ve spoken to the organizers about the sticky issue of rights usage of your submitted material and, whilst the T&C’s aren’t available for me to check, they say that this isn’t a back door way of stockpiling your work for their own use. Please do check the T&C’s if you’re concerned though before entering.

To enter, upload your ‘dusk until dawn’ images via Twitter alongside a short description and share with the @HTC_UK, using the #DuskUntilDawn.

Have your say:

Do you place any premium on the quality of the photography you expect from the newspapers, magazines and websites you view? Is it on a par with what you expect from the design/layout and the written content?

Does poor photography turn you off or do you press ahead and invest your cash on the basis that the it’s ‘OK’ and the rest of the read will, hopefully, compensate for it?

Are you fed up with seeing bland or poor stock images used in the media and advertising you see?

Are you surprised that rates for quality photography have sunk so low that, for many, it’s no longer viable as a full time job?

Maybe you think that’s just market forces and it’s either adapt or die?

Tagged in: My Life: from Dusk Until Dawn, photography, Samuel Aranda, World Press Photographer award

AND A WHITE WINE FOR THE LADIES..

THIS HAS TO BE THE REASON WHY PHOTOGRAPHY WAS INVENTED

This full-circle scene combines 817 images taken by the panoramic camera (Pancam) on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. It shows the terrain that surrounded the rover while it was stationary for four months of work during its most recent Martian winter.

Opportunity's Pancam took the component images between the 2,811th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's Mars surface mission (Dec. 21, 2011) and Sol 2,947 (May 8, 2012).

Opportunity spent those months on a northward sloped outcrop, 'Greeley Haven,' which angled the rover's solar panels toward the sun low in the northern sky during southern hemisphere winter.

The outcrop's informal name is a tribute to Ronald Greeley (1939-2011), who was a member of the mission team and who taught generations of planetary scientists at Arizona State University, Tempe. The site is near the northern tip of the 'Cape York' segment of the western rim of Endeavour Crater.

North is at the center of the image. South is at both ends. On the far left at the horizon is 'Rich Morris Hill.' That outcrop on Cape York was informally named in memory of John R. 'Rich' Morris (1973-2011), an aerospace engineer and musician who was a Mars rover team member and mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena.

Bright wind-blown deposits on the left are banked up against the Greeley Haven outcrop. Opportunity's tracks can be seen extending from the south, with a turn-in-place and other maneuvers evident from activities to position the rover at Greeley Haven. The tracks in some locations have exposed darker underlying soils by disturbing a thin, bright dust cover.

Other bright, dusty deposits can be seen to the north, northeast, and east of Greeley Haven. The deposit at the center of the image, due north from the rover's winter location, is a dusty patch called 'North Pole'. Opportunity drove to it and investigated it in May 2012 as an example of wind-blown Martian dust.

The interior of Endeavour Crater can been seen just below the horizon in the right half of the scene, to the northeast and east of Cape York. The crater spans 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter.

Opportunity's solar panels and other structures show dust that has accumulated over the lifetime of the mission. Opportunity has been working on Mars since January 2004.

During the recent four months that Opportunity worked at Greeley Haven, activities included radio-science observations to better understand Martian spin axis dynamics and thus interior structure, investigations of the composition and textures of an outcrop exposing an impact-jumbled rock formation on the crater rim, monitoring the atmosphere and surface for changes, and acquisition of this full-color mosaic of the surroundings.

The panorama combines exposures taken through Pancam filters centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers (near infrared), 535 nanometers (green) and 432 nanometers (violet). The view is presented in false color to make some differences between materials easier to see.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2170196/Mars-Exploration-photo-Spectacular-360-panorama-captured-NASAs-Opportunity-Rover.html#ixzz200dNCAE1

The Return..

Abandoned Caddy. North Shores, Salton Sea. 2005/2006

One hot day in July 2006 we made a book edit in a hotel room in Santa Monica USA. It took a couple of hours and I remember thinking of the story I had heard when Robert Frank and his agent at the time done the edit for The Americans which also only took a few hours. With this in mind I day-dreamed of producing something as fine and famous as Frank.
The images in question were taken in and around the Salton Sea area in California, a place I had spent the last twelve months photographing obsessively amongst the mire and the deluge that was. After the edit was finished, which really was quite straight forward and a bit of an anti-climax as these things tend to be, my agent and I went for pancakes excited about the prospect of the new book; "Day trips To The Seaside".
Without boring you again with the logistics, the book was shelved and lay in dormant in a New York apartment. That is until now. I received these forgotten images this week, still in the same box I remember covered in post-its and reference notes and doodles. Pristine and bright like the day they where printed I worked my way through the series flooded with memories and feelings of importance. It was a wonderful experience going through the 80 images that made up the final edit with at least 80 percent of the work having not been seen in some six years.
I have mentioned on here many times my theory that every photographer peaks at some point in their career. After looking back over these images I am now wondering if I may have already done so...

Prix Pictet unveils 2012 shortlist - British Journal of Photography

Prix Pictet unveils 2012 shortlist - British Journal of Photography
Well I couldn't of been more wrong..

I PREDICT THAT EDWARD BURTYNSKY WILL WIN THE PRIX PICKET THIS YEAR WHEN IT IS ANNOUNCED LATER TODAY.
PLEASE NOTE TIME AND DATE..

In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working; he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures.
John Szarkowski