New Website!

Hi all!

Just a quick update, with moving countries and the subsequent change in circumstances I’ve put the 365 Portrait Project on hold. I still intend to focus on portraits in my photography, just not in such a regulated project!

In the absence of blogging I’ve been keeping busy by integrated my old website and this blog into a new website. Going forward I can be found at Marie Keating Photography which will hopefully be a marked improvement!

Thanks for all your support, advice and comments during the first 2 years of my blog and 365 projects, it’s been an interesting experience!

Marie 🙂

Melbourne Without Football

“Everything in moderation, including moderation”
Melbourne revolves around AFL but here are some other things.

Melbourne – Travelling

I’ve been a bit slack with portrait pictures with the AFL International Cup on so I thought I’d post some travel pictures from Melbourne instead.

Locked In – The Bathroom

Locked In is a new photographic project I’m starting. The aim is to lock yourself in a space for 20 minutes and in that time take only 10 pictures. The idea is to gain an initial view of the space and then see beyond the typical stimuli to find pictures that you wouldn’t otherwise have thought of.

My first location is the bathroom in my house and here are the 10 pictures:

   

Black and White Portraits

Karl Heiner once said: “Life is like a good black and white photograph, there’s black, there’s white, and lots of shades in between.”

I’ve just noticed that the last few entries in the Portrait Project have been predominantly black and white. There’s a great article from Joe Farrace on how black and white portraits create impact.

I’ve noticed that when editing my photos I prefer black and white a lot of the time which is interesting because I intensely disliked black and white movies growing up, believing they were more boring in content because of their lack of colour. However photography has definitely made me appreciate what black and white brings to the moving image.

Here is some black and white inspiration from photographers who chose to convert and more who didn’t have the choice.

33 Amazing Black and White Portraits

Beautiful Black and White Photography

Yousuf Karsh

Philippe Halsman

Nadar

The following is a great quote form Nadar also:

“The theory of photography can be taught in an hour; the first ideas of how to go about it in a day. What can’t be taught… is the feeling for light – the artistic appreciation of effects produced by different…sources; it’s the understanding of this or that effect following the lines of the features which required your artistic perception.

What is taught even less, is the immediate understanding of your subject – it’s this immediate contact which can put you in sympathy with the sitter, helps you to sum them up, follow their normal attitudes, their ideas, according to their personality, and enables you to make not just a chancy, dreary cardboard copy typical of the merest hack in the darkroom, but a likeness of the most intimate and happy kind….”

Project 365 – 25th Oct 2010

Day 268 – One of the Crowd

For my last college assignment I was taking street photos in Newtown. One thing I learnt, especially from going through the printing process later was to focus on getting your subject standing out in the picture. Maybe that means moving around or in appropriate cases asking the person could you take a photo, just in a different location. I think before I had been focusing too much on expression and meaning alone but meaning doesn’t mean much if you can’t see the person’s face clearly because the light hasn’t fallen on them.

We had learnt before that the eye sees much more detail, and a greater tonal range, than the camera does. However its really not until I went out, took loads of shots aiming for a specific theme and brought them back to be analysed (ah er criticised more like!) by our lecturer that I really learnt the value of available light. And since I really can’t take criticism I really can’t believe I’m saying that, though its true!

Quote of the day: “According to my principles, every master has his true and certain value. Praise and criticism cannot change any of that. Only the work itself praises and criticizes the master, and therefore I leave to everyone his own value.” – Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

Project 365 – 19th Oct 2010

Day 261 – The Yellow Line

A piece about design from my college research journal:

There are many definitions relating to design and many different meanings relating to each one. Some would say they are designing websites, others buildings, more have designs on becoming a rock star and design strategies in their life to make it happen. I believe that design, by definition, is very simple, it is creation. Design is anything we have to conceive in our minds and take steps to bring into being.

 

In the context of photography, design has more specific elements and principles:

Elements:                                                            Principles:

-Line                                                                        -Balance: Symmetrical

-Shape                                                                       -Balance: Asymmetrical

-Form                                                                        -Unity

-Texture                                                                    -Emphasis

-Space: Perspective                                                -Contrast

-Colour                                                                     -Pattern

-Value                                                                       -Movement and Rhythm

 

Quote of the day: “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.” – Douglas Adams

Project 365 – 8th Aug 2010

Day 189 – Pictures

Pictured is my friend Hugh, who I was taking a few photos of today for his website. In case it’s not obvious he is a film maker!

Film has such an interesting relationship to photography in that its very similar but also completely different. Film is a series of photos that combine to give a sense of movement, and photography takes one of those moments and immortalises it. It can tell more of the story by freezing time to allow a more considered contemplation and it can add an air of mystery by what it doesn’t show. It can also lie. Similarly video or films are moments put together to tell a story that resembles life, or in some cases is purely a product of imagination. Also similarly what the filmmaker choses to focus on narrows a narrative for the viewer and points them to the story. Neither is never the full story but every piece of art is a self portrait of the artist as well as what they want to say.

I’m terrible though, for someone who spends hours each week looking at photos, whether they’re in books, magazines, billboards, adverts, etc… I rarely watch examples of the moving image. I haven’t been to the cinema in forever and, apart from the news and the odd chat show, only watch one TV programme a week (Rush, Channel 10, Thurs 8pm!). I guess the influence of a sporting life in Ireland meant I was never home for the ‘good’ programmes in the afternoons and spent the most of my teens and twenties seeing TV as something that could be missed, in the grand scheme of things. (Pity I didn’t tell myself the same thing about the internet!)

As busy as I am now TV rarely gets a look in and too many bad or even average films have convinced me that cinema can so often amount to ‘2 hours of my life that I’ll never get back’! I should make time for it though, now that I can deconstruct images a little better (note a little, not a lot!), and try learn something from the people who were obviously good enough to get their show on TV or the big screen. I find it takes a bit of effort though, to analyse what you are looking at as well as getting caught up in the emotional drama, and too often it’s just easier to watch rather than actually see.

Quote of the day: The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. – John Huston