A Photo Student

Surprise Surprise, another short week this past week. Snow knocked out Tuesday’s History of the Book class.

In Monday’s Digital Imaging class we talked about skin tones. We were advised to work in CMYK and not RGB in the info palette for skin tones so that the info palette would display as percentages and not on a 0-255 scale. To switch to CMYK go to palette options drop down menu in the upper right of the palette.

Here’s a photo of some info from class:

Skintones. Click to view large

In CMYK, yellow should be your highest value followed by magenta and then cyan. The K in CMYK is for black and that value will be determined by whether or not the subject in the photo is black or not. This is just a starting point and then you can tweak as needed.

We also played a little with the history brush.

Tuesday’s class was cancelled which is a shame as Kiki Bauer was going to come visit and talk to the class about book design.

Wednesday morning in Visible, Invisible we talked about Antonioni’s film Blow-Up which has a lot to do with illusion, reality and point of view.

Plot via Wikipedia:

The plot is set in a day in the life of Thomas (Hemmings), a professional fashion photographer. It begins the day after spending the night at a doss house where he has taken pictures for a book of art photos he hopes to publish. He is late for a photo shoot at his studio with Veruschka, which in turn makes him late for another photo shoot with many other models later in the morning. He grows bored and walks off the shoot (also leaving the models and production staff in the lurch). Exiting the studio, two girls, aspiring teenaged models (Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills), ask to speak with him, but Thomas drives off to look at an antiques shop which he might buy. Wandering into nearby Maryon Park, he sees two lovers and takes photos of them. The woman (Redgrave) is nettled at being photographed, and Thomas is startled when she somehow stalks him back to his studio, asking for the film. This makes him want the film even more, so he misleads her into taking another roll instead. He makes many blowups (enlargements) of the black and white photos. These blowups have very rough film grain but nonetheless seem to show a body lying in the grass and a killer lurking in the trees with a gun. Thomas is frightened by a knock on the door, but it is only the two girls again, with whom he has a romp in his studio and falls asleep. Awakening, he finds they hope he will photograph them then and there, but he tells the girls to leave, saying, “Tomorrow! Come back tomorrow!”

As evening falls, Thomas goes back to the park and indeed finds a body, but he has not brought his camera and is scared off by the sound of a twig breaking, as if being stepped on. At a drug-drenched party in a house on the Thames River near central London, he finds both the French model (who tells him she is in Paris) and his publishing agent (Peter Bowles), the latter whom he wants to bring to the park as a witness. However, Thomas cannot put across in meaningful words what he has photographed. Waking up in the same, now stilled house at sunrise, he goes back to the park alone, but the body is gone.

Befuddled, he watches a mimed tennis match, is drawn into it, picks up their unseen, imaginary ball and throws it back to the two players. While he watches the mimed match, the sound of a ball being played back and forth is soon heard. As the photographer watches this alone on the lawn he fades away, leaving only the green grass as the film ends.

Here is the final mime scene:

In Right Here, Right Now we talked about heterotopias. Read Foucault’s essay about them HERE. We also briefly mentioned Beate Gütschow’s constructed landscapes (read an interview HERE) .

Beate Gütschow

Spring Break is next week. I’m heading out of town to shoot right after classes this week so things might be a little quiet on here. I’ll try and post a few things from the road, but no promises.