Colour into tones in black and white

This was an interesting exercise. Unfortunately I could not find the colour sliders in photoshop under image/adjustments. Perhaps I have an older version of photoshop. Instead I used "enhance" to convert the photograph I took to black and white. I then adjusted the black and white photo to have more blue, more red and more green. Unfortunately there was no adjustment for yellow. There are very subtle differences in the photographs but in retrospect I might have been better to adjust the intensity setting when making these changes. None the less I can see from the course work that a black and white image can be adjusted by understanding colour.

Marville

On my tutor's suggestion I read a chapter titled "Marville" in Graham Robb's book entitled Parisians.

I very much enjoyed reading the chapter and as my tutor indicated it did give a very good insight into how early photography was used as a recording medium.

Marville was a french landscape and architecture photographer who was especially well known for taking pictures of ancient Parisian scenes before they were destroyed and the city was rebuilt under Baron Haussmann's new plan for the modernisation of Paris. A decade later Marville also took photographs of the new roads.

I thought the comparison the author made of Marville's photograph of Place-Saint-Andre-des-Art in 1865 with the one taken thirty three years later was interesting. As the author says "so much information is contained in that split-second burst of photons". It is fascinating that a photograph of that nature can reveal so much. A lot of information can especially be deduced from the different advertisements show in the photographs at the time.

I also found Robb's description of Marville's early experience of being a photographer and his meticulous printing and probable delight at the process evocative.

David Octavius Hill

David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) was a painter/lithographer who became interested in photography and joined forces in the mid 1840's for four years with Robert Adamson who was a photographer using the calotype photographic process invented by Fox Talbot. Hill and Adamson produced over 3000 paper negatives consisting of portraits, landscapes and scenes of everyday life which were considered the best paper photography of that time.
I particularly loved the photographs of children and families such as "sisters, the misses Griersons" and "Sandy (or James) Linton, his boat and bairns". The documentary quality of the photos such as the "oyster woman" and the photos depicting fishermen and fisherwoman give a clear insight into a different era. I think these photos really demonstrate the art of photography in their "story telling" and I can see why Hill and Adamson were credited as true artists in their field. Having lived in Edinburgh I was also interested in the early photographs of Edinburgh such as "Mons Meg, Edinburgh Castle", "Greyfriar's churchyard" and "The Scots Monument".

Albert Sands Southworth

Albert Sands Southworth (1811-1894) was an avid daguerreotypist (daguerreotype being the first commercial successful photographic process using a silver plated cooper plate and without a negative).
Southworth and Hawes set up an early photographic firm in Boston from 1843-63 and were hailed as the first great masters of photography in America. They produced fine detailed images with a mirror like quality and their photographic portraits were considered fine art.
From studying their photographs on the internet I can understand why Marcus A Root, the contemporary Philadelphia dauerroetypist said "....their style, indeed, is peculiar to themselves; presenting beautiful effects of light and shade and giving depth and roundness together with a wonderful softness or mellowness...."

Fox Talbot

I was pleased to get my Assignemnt 2 assessment back and my tutor helpfully suggested that I should look at some early photographer's work.

Fox Talbot (1800-1877) was a British inventor and pioneer of photography and he was the inventor of the calotype process. It was inability to draw that led him to experiment with a mechanical method of capturing an image. His experiments led him to discover the negative/positvie photographic process in the 1830's. He made a major contributions to the development of photography as an art creating images of landscapes, architectural studies, still life, portraits and plants.
From looking at his photographs on the internet I particulary like the etheral quality of his fern, plant and tree photographs.

Primary and Secondary colours

Each of these photographs were taken on an automatic setting and also on a setting half a stop brighter and half a stop darker. Generally the closest colour match to the colour wheel varied with different exposures (i.e. no uniform exposure gave the closest match in each case) maybe because as mentioned in the course work some basic colours can vary much more than others. This was an interesting exercise in discovering the diversity of colours and I enjoyed trying to find close matches to the colour wheel especially in nature. On reflection I can see that the blue and purple colours were too similar and not very good matches!

Colour relationships

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One photograph was taken for each combination of primary and secondary colours in the following proportions orange:blue 1:2,red:green 1:1 and yellow violet 1:3. As stated these combinations were not that easy to find and I had to crop the photographs to get closer to these proportions.

The top photographs of the church, the festival performer and the wheelbarrow all feature colour combinations that appeal to me. The photograph of the church featuring blue, red and yellow is probably technically imbalanced but I think it makes the photograph more striking. The photograph of the performer is also imbalanced featuring unusual colour combinations of red, yellow,pink and purple but I still think it works because of the tension of the imbalance of the colours.
I think the photograph of the wheelbarrow is much more subtle but I think the yellow accents in it work.

In conclusion this has been a useful exercise with regard to colour relationships. It has been interesting to learn that to make the most of colour combinations that it helps to take the brightness of the colour into consideration when determining ratios of colour in a photograph. However unbalanced colour ratios can sometimes provide a more interesting photograph.