Matthew Welsh Photography

March 7, 2016Matthew Welsh No Comments

Portraiture – Brief history

During the early part of the 1800’s, Jacques-Mande Daguerre developed the Daguerreotype. This relied on being put into a camera obscura and then developed in Mercury vapours on a metal plate, this process was only able to capture one image per plate and, this wasn’t very duplicatable which isn’t like today where an image can be duplicated many times over, and have copies everywhere.

The Daguerreotype was highly successful, not in Europe where it was developed, but in America in 1850’s New York. The most successful photographers had studios on the top floor of buildings, just off of Broadway (because of the amount of light that you are able to get, located at the top of buildings, and almost always on the north side because that is where you would get the most amount of natural light.).

This practice was the most common among early photographers and created a one off print which had to be kept under a bit of glass as the slightest knock could ruin the print and was really hard to repair and if it was repaired it had to be done by a professional, which I imagine would be quite expensive.

“The vast majority of American photographs made before the Civil War era are portraits.”(The Daguerreian Era and Early American Photography on Paper, 1839–1860 | Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016)

The first photographic portrait of a human being was of Robert Cornelius in 1839. he inscribed it with “The first light Picture ever taken. 1839.”

February 26, 2016Matthew Welsh No Comments

Brief 2: Found- Final Image

For the found brief I focused on unwanted items, receipts, drinks cans, and plastic bags all with a brown cardboard backdrop. The items all have been discarded and thus unwanted. When photographing these items I took into consideration many different elements such as; light, shape, form, material to name a few. With these considerations on the actual objects, I found that photographing them was quite difficult as they are quite small objects so photographing them I had to get in as close as my lens would allow but this made lighting the objects quite difficult. I normally use a studio lighting set up which is something I invested in off of amazon recently, this is so helpful when shooting in conditions where lighting is scarce or just in studio conditions in general. I added an on-camera flash head to fill in some of the shadows, directing it at the white ceiling to bounce down and make the item better exposed but leaving any shadows to make the image more three dimensional.

This triptych was focused on the unwanted items like I said above, I wanted to capture these items without being too obtrusive of branding but wanted the viewer to still know what the item was like the receipt having the Morrison’s branding on the top, making the receipt more generalised. I liked how I did frame everything to make it fill the frame and not leave too much negative space.

The materials I used played a big part of how I photographed them, the plastic of the bags was shiny so I tried to find an object that would have the same sort of properties as the bag which is why I decided to have to drinks cans which are metal and created a balance between them. I really like how the receipts contrast the other two objects as they are matte and don’t reflect the light rather they absorb the light and make it flatter.

The cans of energy drink I decided to include as they are cylindrical, and reflect light interestingly which I liked. I photographed the cans, decided that I would crush one of them, giving it a different look to make the frame seem more interesting.

Shadows are really important to these images. The way the objects interact with the light makes them cast shadows differently, the way the straight edges create harsh shadows. Giving the image a more industrial feel, whereas the images with rounded or softer edges help create softer shadows that soften the images from the hard industrial feel.

February 26, 2016Matthew Welsh No Comments

Found : Final Image creation

I found some discarded receipts a plastic bag and a few energy drinks cans. I also found an Amazon package laying around my room which had flaps that could be used quite interestingly to create shadows on the objects. I thought these items would work quite well together so I photographed them all separately and got these images in the contact sheets below. ContactSheet-002 ContactSheet-001 ContactSheet-003

I shot the first couple of the energy drinks cans on a bright blue backdrop which I thought would work because of the contrast between the red, the silver and, the blue. I shot these couple with a two light studio set up with my external flash and a 50mm f/1.8 prime lens. The colours did pop and I like the look of the images, but something just seemed fake about them, something that put me off of using the two lights and flash combination. I liked the use of three cans because there wasn’t any negative space created in the image where the eye could be led if there was either two or four. I knew after three shots that I had to change the ‘studio’ set, which led me to try using the amazon packaging that I found lying around.

I decided that I would remove one of the lights to make the light more harsh, and directional in addition to the one studio light I used the external flash pointing it up to the ceiling to bounce off of the white to get a more even light and to fill in the shadows slightly. This works very well for the images.

Because of the way that I have shot these images little editing was needed, as seen below, they are exposed well enough to see what they are without exposure correction in CameraRAW. I have enhanced them in editing to make them more cohesive and aesthetically pleasing to my eye. I have included the three images I have decided to go with in their original form and their edited final form.

February 26, 2016Matthew Welsh No Comments

Experimentation

The first item I found for this brief was a nice watch, now this was a little too formal for this brief and all I could think of was doing product photography. This was a little too boring and formal. I decided to scrap this idea and try something else that would be more interesting, so I am going to leave my experiments below. The images linked are sort of average. Shot under two studio lights and a fill flash unit on top of my camera. The studio lights emit a light of 5500k which is quite cold and are pretty bright in that sense, they gave some decent results.

I also had some old battered headphones lying around, so I thought they could work quite well and I also found a weird googly eyed pot with a lid that looks like a hat so I used them to see how they worked and to be honest. I hated the look they gave. They didn’t go together and they sort of clashed with one another. The materials that they’re made of clashed in a bad way, so this idea that I had totally gone out of the window and straight into the bin.

IMG_1073_e_2 — What I liked about this image, was the way in which the depth of field played a part in capturing you. it is basic product photography which isn’t a bad thing, just that the image is very plain. I originally took this image as a landscape image but soon realised it made more sense that it was portrait, even if the image looks like it is floating.

IMG_1057_e — I really liked this shot of the watch, the monochrome pallet of the shirt and backdrop really draw your attention to the watch face which has gold tones to it. The backdrop was originally blue but I felt that with some editing I could make the piece more cohesive.

February 15, 2016Matthew Welsh No Comments

Found in the University environment

During one of the workshops, we were tasked with going into the built environment around the university and taking images. I felt this exercise to be pretty easy as with having experience of shooting images. I felt at ease taking well compose images. The images I have included in this post are edited using camera raw and are some of my favourites. Also some of the colours in these images are rather startling as I decided to shoot them as such, creating a more muted colour and creating some interesting images.

I felt this image above had a very Cartier-Bresson feel to it. Something about the way that it was composed and how it feels. when I was capturing this image I could hear the person going down the stairs and thought it would be a good opportunity to use golden ratio which works really well here, it was a very decisive moment to look at. the sun was coming in fro the right so the rails of the stairs are a little bit overexposed which couldn’t be helped as the rest of the image is correctly exposed. I did try to remove the highlight it created in camera raw, but this did not work so I just left it there. Overall this image works.