Friday 10th February
Today we took out the Nikon D700 DSLR cameras and began to get to grips with how they operate and how to manipulate its certain controls such as ISO, aperture and shutter speed in order to create different stylistic effects. Our research this week stemmed from a variety different photographer such as the work of Susan Sontag, Nicephore Niepce and Louis Daguerre, who was an 18th-century French photographer most critically acclaimed for developed the practical process of the first “Daguerreotype” photograph in 1839.
A Daguerreotype
Similarly, Nicephore Niepce was an inventor from France who was most highly regarded for creating the original permanent photograph in 1826. Niepce produced it by creating a process called Heliography in 1816, which involved shining a light onto a piece of bitumen in a camera obscura to produce a photograph on a pewter plate. He later went into partnership with Louis Daguerre who developed his process to create the Daguerreotype without giving any credit to Niepce’s contribution.
Nicephore’s earliest photographs including Cardinals, landscapes and even Jesus Christ
Finally, Susan Sontag, on the other hand, was an American academic and political activist, who from the 60’s penned many essays on themes surrounding photography, human rights and liberalist ideology. Speaking about one of her most notable essays “On Photography”, Sontag argued that
“To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store”
-Susan Sontag, On Photography
This means that despite films and television also containing a subject that convey a story or message, photography is the only medium that you can tangibly hold and produce, and in turn allows to own a small document of our experiences and surroundings, for us to safeguard and explore.
Additionally another thing we learnt were the two main formats of image quality to shoot in RAW and JPEG (as well as it’s more advanced quality version JPEG.fine). Unlike Jpeg images, Raw images are much larger files where the data has remained a lot more uncompressed, and as result they often come out larger and more high resolution than Jpeg images. Here is a small breakdown of how you shot in RAW on a Nikon D700:
First you turn on the camera and press the “menu button”
Then you scroll down on the left hand side to “camera icon” and scroll down again till you select “image quality”
Finally you change the default setting from “JPEG Normal” to ” NEF (RAW)+JPEG fine” and begin to take pictures.
Nonetheless, once we were outside we took a series of photographs that focused on different subjects within our local environment. I shot in Manual Mode with a Single shot setting, with my aperture ranging from F3.5 to F5.6, my shutter speed from 1/1000 to 1/8000 and my ISO remaining at a constant 8000 ,varying in effect. Here are some examples of what I captured:
As you can see from the photographs above while the images argued are framed fairly with most of them at a decent level of focus and depth of field, for certain images my lack of experience became evident as the last two of Silverstone building came out extremely overexposed and washed out. This is because in areas of more light/sunshine I should have been more prudent in adjusting my ISO and aperture accordingly in areas of high or light. As a result, I have learnt to always assess the subject environment I’m shooting to determine the appropriate level of exposure of the shot.
Sources:
Daniel, A. (2018). Daguerre (1787–1851) and the Invention of Photography | Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art. [online] The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Available at: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dagu/hd_dagu.htm [Accessed 6 May 2018].
National Science and Media Museum blog. (2018). N is for… Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, creator of the first photograph – National Science and Media Museum blog. [online] Available at: https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/a-z-of-photography-joseph-nicephore-niepce-first-photograph/ [Accessed 6 May 2018].
Susansontag.com. (2018). Susan Sontag. [online] Available at: http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt.shtml [Accessed 6 May 2018].
Princess Manduma // Photography / 