Portraiture

We received our new brief on Monday and its a very interesting subject to be working with for the next two weeks! We must chose a portrait from the context of Art History and using the college studio and lights we have to recreate that portrait in a modern day kind of style. I have been looking through some images I think I might like to recreate:

Developing In The Darkroom

We spent the remainder of time left on our brief developing our photographs in the Darkroom. I found that it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed using different contrasts and doing all sorts of tests! I will be uploading my final images in the next few days and hope you enjoy them! :)

In the mean time here are some really interestingly crazy darkroom techniques that I found helpful and some I would love to try out for myself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodging_and_burning

Double Exposures:

Hand Colouring:

Toning:

Solarisation:

Urban Environment

Having received our brief for our 'Urban Environment' project I started brainstorming and came up with my idea 'Window of Oppertunity' (A title with a bit of irony). I hope to take various photos of different windows from around Limerick City and compare them. I hope to be able to compare really dressed up windows to the old tattered broken ones I come across. Here are a few samples of different ones I took. No Doubt taking these photographs again with an SLR camera will be a challenge but I am excited at the idea of not knowing how they will look until I have fully developed them in the Darkroom!

Playing With Focus

Focus is something I enjoyed messing around with and looking at some of the images they are rather interesting to look at alongside one another.

I really liked these first three below. I began with focusing on the twigs and buds in the foreground, then I set my focus on the midsection of the scene and finally on the far background.



 

Below are some different focus related images I took.

Depth of Field

Depth of Field is the distance between the nearest and the farthest objects in an image. The focus may be on the foreground of an image leaving whats further away blurred out or perhaps the focus could be in the background leaving it sharp and the foreground of the image blurry.

Shallow D.O.F.



 

Wide D.O.F.

 

 

Shutter Speed

Having just gotten a DSLR I have been doing a lot of experiments over the past few weeks for college and also personal research.

My first was to do with Shutter Speed which is essentially exposure time (the length of time the camera's shutter remains open). Here are some of the experimental images I took.

 

Slow Shutter Speed

 



 

 

Fast Shutter Speed

 

 

 

 

Conor Horgan Talk In LIT

We visited the LIT campus the other day for a talk given by Film Director and Photographer Conor Horgan. He began by talking about his interesting introduction into the Photography world. He continued to showed us some of his work and discussed the stories behind them. He had a very interesting theory whereby photography is recognising when you are in the right time and place and taking advantage of that opportunity and other opportunities that approach us. He spoke of his introduction into video making and how lost he felt at first as he leaped straight into the deep end. He went on to talk about how he got into advertising and what that experience was like for him and showed us one or two of the advertisements he made. 

We then watched his feature film "The Last Time" which I really enjoyed. I was the story of a woman who found out she may not have long to live, but through her journey she longed to be intimate with a man for one last time, but looks in all the wrong places. I enjoyed the film and admired all the subtle gestures involved that helped build the story.

We also were shown clips from his film "One Hundred Mornings". He told us of his experiences on set filming, the actors and how it all finally came together.

We watched a little piece he made entitled 'Happiness' I loved this piece as the topic being so simple it really makes you think and you feel you can be involved in the piece. I was nice to watched and certainly brought a smile to most us in the room. Below is a link to this video and Hogan's Vimeo page where most of his work is available for viewing.

http://vimeo.com/58105653

We finished up by viewing his piece entitled "Deep End Dance". This piece was incredible to watch and the dedication and work that Hogan described had went into the making of this piece was just inspirational.

All over I enjoyed the talk and found it inspiring. Having done so much Hogan is certainly the established artist he deserves to be.

Photography It Is..

Having chosen Photography as my path to pursue for the next few years I am naturally excited to get stuck in! Our first project was to create a Personal Documentary using images and Microsoft PowerPoint. The aim was for us all to know each other a bit better.

Unfortunately I'm unable to upload PowerPoint or PDF files :/

In my documentary I addressed points in my life that have been significant to me, such as family, school, how I got introduced and interested in art and photography, professional history, coming to Limerick, attending LCFE and finally attending LSAD. I also touched on points of my first project 'To Sense My Space' and the work and progress I made from there.

The documentary was enjoyable to put together and I felt that it was a good starting point for us in Photography.

Still Images

Here are just a few of the still Images I used in the composing of my 3 min video.

Photography!

My first two weeks trying out photography were an adventure! We were given a brief to make a 3 minute long video composed of only still images and sounds. The idea was to portray a story, the idea and theme within the 3 minutes and get the main message across to the audience by just using the still images and sounds.

I chose to work on a theme of the homeless but after a talk with my tutor I decided to take my project in a new direction, perhaps one not even too different from the first.

My title for my piece was 'What's Left Behind' and I wanted to focus on the prints, marks and objects people leave behind them on a daily basis as a symbol of their once being there. This idea worked much better for me as I felt it was something that applied to everybody and I had a much better understanding of what I was working towards.

Hope you enjoy!

Title: What's Left Behind
Duration: 3 Min
By: Belinda Kiernan

 

Painting Fin

During my two weeks in Painting I learned a lot, from painting with a palette knife to painting using just tones. The experience was a good one and I enjoyed learning all the different techniques. Here are images of some of the paintings we worked on over the short time! And it was on to Photography next for me!!

Palette Knife

Although not a great picture of the painting, still my favourite of them all!

Another palette knife

 

Painting in tones using a primary colours (yellow) and a mixed secondary colour (purple)