Research - David Hockney

I started reading about David Hockney's work on the internet and decided to complete my research with some of his painted images.  David Hockney is English and was born in Bradford 9th July 1937. After schools and colleges he moved and spent years in America as an artist.  There he did a lot of photo montage work (joining more than 1 image together). before returning to England.  He happened upon doing that style of work by mistake; when he had to take photographs on an assignment and couldn't get the camera lens wide enough to get it all in the frame, he took lots and glued them together, then noticed how he liked the effect.

David Hockney is a photographer and painter and started painting in watercolours a few years ago as he started to spend more time in East Yorkshire.  His links there stem from when he worked the land as a young man and he still regularly visits family in Bridlington. He describes the East Yorkshire landscapes as having "the sort of wide vistas you get all the time in the American west."
He also paints in oils on canvas:

                                                                  By David Hockney

The grandness of this image just shows how David Hockney likes to put lots of images together to form one large one.  It is very colourful and striking and he painted it in oils. There is lots to look at and the colours are bold, with just a hint of blue sky far far beyond, just showing its tip like a border to the top. I enjoy colour in pictures and he uses lots. There are 60 different pieces of canvas work in this....He must be the master of montage.

By David Hockney

This image shows him painting on 6 canvas pieces in a woodland scene in Yorkshire.  He would set up all his gear and each piece of the 6 would take a couple of days to complete in situ. He likes to take this same scene and others,  in different seasons showing different colour effects. I have featured this because I love wooded areas to photograph and this picture struck me and  seeing the lengths he goes to to create his art.  I like his portrayal of the trees and groundwork.

By David Hockney

 Talk about England's green and pleasant land - this must be it! I like this image and find it strikingly colourful again and very vivid.  There is no sky to be seen, he has filled the frame with just fields, hedges and the odd building.  There are many different shades of greens and the way the other bold colours filter in, makes the scene balance. I like the little red house in the foreground with its tall conifers, and the way the winding road leads the eye from foreground right through to background. It is good that he managed to depict so many different fields within one image, and all the different shades of greens make them stand out, and it all adds to the interest.  It makes your eye want to search out all the nooks and crannies of the scene.

I can't really compare my photograph work to the paintings here, except for the similar subject matter, being that of landscapes of fields and trees; their composition and shape; the way I often filled my frame with an image that didn't contain much sky; and the celebration and enjoyment of nature's colours.
                                                                          The End.

Research - Marja Leena Pelho

I was looking for a female artist to research, as all my other research blogs have been male ones.  Then on spotting some work by Marja Leena Pelho on another class mates blog I decided to look at more of hers on line.
Marja Leena Pelho is a digital manipulation artist who works worldwide and lives in Espoo, Southern Finland.  She works mostly in advertising and experiments and mixes her own photographic material and RF imagery with that of other photographers or stock images combining them to achieve what the client wants.  Interestingly she studied to be an architect first and says that sometimes she feels like she is creating a building when she is working on her images, as they  can be so complicated with many layers, layer masks and adjustment layers.
She was featured in a cover article for PEI (Photo Electronic Imaging) Magazine in August 2000, which included a tutorial about the making of the cover.

This is the cover and it sounds like another photographer has taken the winter background scene and Pelho has taken the summer portion and manipulated it in.  I think this has a nice effect and see how it would be appealing on the front of a magazine.  I enjoy winter snow scenes with trees and of course sunshine and greenery is also attractive so the two look a very good combination contrast  in my opinion.  I like that the woman is sitting small amidst the snowy tall trees, on something warm like a bed of sun drenched flower grass with a headdress of flowers around her hair.  The sun is shining on her and also on the snow that surrounds the idyllic cut out scene.  Its surprises me how a scene within a scene can look so good, but then this is manipulation at its best and I would love to be able to achieve work like it.

Marja Leena Pelho describes herself as a photographer/designer/digital artist that specialises in photo manipulation and special effects, and sometimes will create images just for her. She has professional knowledge of preparing files for cmyk offset printing and uses this to print her own images when possible.

 Finland is such a small country, there is not enough work there for her skills, so  Pelho is happy to work on worldwide assignments, as she considers file transferring no problem with a fast ftp connection.

She owns her own Company Quadretto selling her digital images and photo manipulation illustrator services.  When she is not working she enjoys taking care of old roses and perenials that she grows from seeds in her summer cottage garden.

I can see how the influence of flowers in her garden leads her creativeness to output an image like the above.  Money doesn't grow on trees, but maybe it does on flowers.  I have seen another of her images where she has processed money notes onto leaves too.  These are unusual ideas and this one is so bright and lovely, you wouldn't think money was involved at all, only as the pattern of the flower petals. The  centre piece holds much clarity and the way its green echoes out through the money petals is effective.  I wonder what sort of lens she used for this image, if she did take the original flower, but then to me only the centre looks real and the petals look self generated somehow with her wizardry.  It made me look closer at it anyway and was worth featuring I thought.

This is my green and yellow flowered image in comparison, where the petals are real.  The colours are not the same at all as I took this in a bunch of flowers on a window in the sunshine and zoomed in to show the inside of the flower.  Again the image leads the eye into the centre just as it does in Pelho's.  It is not in the same league obviously, and not manipulated.

Keeping with the same golden colours I liked this image as soon as I saw it, because of its landscape qualities and the richness of the sunlight.  It looks like the ground scene has also been used as the sky scene and I am not sure what the objects are in the foreground but landscape pictures do tend to look more effective where the photographer uses a different solitary object in the front foreground. Could they be cabbages or flower bulbs? Either way I like the overall setting, with its antique look.  Its hard to guess what an artist is thinking when they create work with the intentions of satisfying their client's needs.

I also liked this image as soon as I saw it, with me having an interest in moon shots, this is good the way the silver letter is made of the same moon material and glows with some sort of planet in the distance.  the shiny hard surface contrasting with the rough parts work well and I bet there was alot of work in the design of the large letter.   Pelho likes the way her images don't portray all the work that has been required to achieve the results.  So we can only guess at the hours involved in such fine work.  

The planet in the distance adds much to the whole perspective, for me... if I put my finger over it, the image doesn't look so appealing.  I think she has chosen the colours well with the tiny planet in the background being blue just echoing a bluish shimmer that halos the moon, if it is meant to be the moon? It could be a different world.  I wonder what the 'e' signifies? that is of course, if it is in fact an 'e'.

Light Fingers

Shutter 0.3 aperture f4.0 iso 3200

This is my shot of a moon between 'fingers' (a favourite tree stub I featured in the light task) and it does have a blue/green small planet in the background. I am not sure how that got there, though I like its position above the moon and tree as though it was intentional. I used a tripod with this shot perched in the middle of a somewhat quiet road, so I had to keep stopping looking at the camera controls to check if any traffic was coming. I did this every time I heard a car and when one was turning into my street I just picked up the tripod, camera intact and stepped onto the pavement.  Of course each time I went back I would have to re-jigle the camera to try to capture the same position and exposure, so it was fun. I managed to get a few shots with the moon at different positions, up and out the fingers by my moving forwards and backwards with my set up, my zoom was full out.

Research - The Cottingley Fairies

I wanted to research this story from the web, as when I started to read it, I found I had to continue to see what happened at the end:-
In 1917 a 9 year old girl (Frances) and her mother from South Africa came to Bradford, England to stay with Frances' cousin and aunt Polly Wright. The cousin Elsie, 16 years old, and Frances would often play near a stream known as Cottingley Beck, much to the disapproval of their mothers.  One day, after Frances had particularly got wet feet, from slipping down stones into the water, her mother demanded to know why they were being so defiant to visit this forbidden place, and Frances replied: they go to see the fairies!
Not believing the story, Elsie later claimed to have seen them and suggested they take her fathers camera to prove it.  They were back within half an hour eager for the glass plate to be developed, which the father duly did in his darkroom, after tea.   To their amazement the photo showed Frances on the bank with 5 fairies dancing before her.  Her father knew she was a talented artist, however, who enjoyed drawing fairies, so dismissed the idea they may be real. Then later Elsie was photographed with what appeared to be a gnome, so  her father stopped them taking the camera out.

I like the old fashioned look of this image firstly and it being in black and white helps.  I have said that I am a fan of colour photography, but some old pictures like these do look classically good in my opinion.   Considering this was taken by a novice on such an old style camera, with glass plates, which was what was used as film in the olden days, and even with the grainy look,  its still impressive.  The blurry waterfall in the background shows they had the camera on a very low shutter speed and this would help to show the movement of the fairies dancing.  We can't see them that clearly, but you get the picture and Frances' facial expression, looking so matter of fact and directly at the camera, is delightful.

Again with an old era look I like this scene. Elsie shows off the old fashioned attire better in this one which adds the brightness and you see her face looks to be smiling. The gnome's shape is realistic with its wings and spritely legs and I am liking the trees included in the background, albeit blurry. In the first image Frances' face is clearer than Elsie's here, but in this image the gnome is slightly clearer than the fairies, whilst the backgrounds are both blurry, showing similar camera settings have been used. Her seat position is good, angled and leaning in to greet the gnome. I find them both very soft looking images, with Frances having a more determined look.

Two years later when the mothers were at a meeting for Theosophy (a philosophy that covered the possibility of nature spirits), they mentioned the photos to the speaker. News from here travelled onto Edward Gardner, a leader in this kind of movement who wrote to Polly Wright stating the photos were the best he had seen of their kind and asking for the glass plates.  The pictures  were presented to photographic expert Harold Snelling, who was known to undoubtedly spot fakes.

"What Snelling dosen't know about fake photography isn't worth knowing" it was said.
Snelling's report stated that the plate was a single exposure, the dancing fairies were not paper/fabric or painted onto a background, and fascinatingly, that they had moved during exposure.

Gardner showed the photos to his cousin Sir Arthur Conran Doyle, (the author of Sherlock Holmes and The Lost World) who being a member of the spiritualist movement, believed the living could communicate with the dead via psyphics and seances and had Gardner interview the girls.

In 1920 Gardner took a new camera and asked the girls to go out to take more photos of the fairies. 5 pictures were taken in total and a well known clairvoyant went and also claimed he could see the fairies.

The debate went on for years and the world lost track of the girls, then in 1966 The Daily Express did a follow up and found Elsie who told them it may have been a figment of her imagination.  She still wasn't giving much away and then in 1971 the BBC in a programme called 'Nationwide' covered the story and Elsie was evasive.  The BBC crew concluded the fairies had been paper cut outs that were made to stand up with hair pins.
Finally in 1981/82 both Frances and Elsie were interviewed for an article in 'The Unexplained' where Elsie admitted all 5 had been faked.  Frances claimed the first 4 were fake but not the last one, and both ladies concluded they had seen real fairies by the Beck.
The hoax that had carried over years turned out to be the method concluded by the BBC, with the paper cut outs and hat pins.  It was said that a pin can actually be seen in the image above on the gnome, but what a fascinating story.
Some people had though Elsie's father had been in on it, but she had denied he knew anything. Elsie herself said she was surprised so many people had been fooled, with what appeared to her, to be a very obvious fake.

I love the story because that is what it was, a children's story taken out of all proportion, that went on for years being believed by so many. I like the images... It was great manipulation in a different way.   I too couldn't wait to read all the article to discover the outcome? But then I can be gullible.

This shows how the manipulation of images has been around a very long time, and can be very appealing to a lot of people.

                                                                    Who goes There

Whilst I don't have any images containing fairies,  if I was to manipulate images with them in, I would choose an angle shot of my my 'Autumn Gold' scene for their home, which I have turned to black and white here, because the tree is so old and to compare it to those above.  My image is obviously much clearer using years later camera  technology, but their scenes are much brighter with the whites of the falls, fairies and the dress, so stand out more.  This tree holds 2 imaginative goole like faces upon it in my opinion and I think the black and white actually seems to add a creepy atmosphere.  The texture is still apparent in the bark, but I do prefer it in colour, (see a previous blog) because the colours lift it and show more detail.