Normality

Sami Serola

Latest assignment by Ted Forbes is "eye level", and also it is reminded to take the "depth" into account. Although, shooting eye level is indeed typical way to take pictures, it suddenly turns out rather challenging when trying to do so in purpose. And this is because usually one first and foremost only focuses on what to shoot and how to compose, and the choice of camera level becomes more or less only as a last choice. At least that is how I work with a camera.

So, when doing the other way round, I suddenly became more aware of multiple other variables like what focal length to use. Somewhat obvious choice probably is to use a wide angle lens and shoot something like a landscape. Or telescopic lens to capture a detail somewhere further away.

Then I started to think something I read years ago, when I was just beginning to take photography as a serious hobby. It was an article on a booklet introducing (advertising) Olympus Zuiko lenses, and how to use them creatively. On one article some professional photographer was telling how to use "standard lens" (50mm on 35mm film format) as a "new telescopic lens", to pick up details. At that time among professionals wide angle lenses were sort of popular, and then any longer focal length had started to feel as a "long lens". Except normal lens then was like a lightweight and small choice instead of using "real" telescopic lenses.

"History of standard lenses" especially on amateur photography is rather interesting. First cheap and easy to make 50mm lenses (or 80mm on roll film formats) were what everyone had and used. It is usually described this normal lens "has a similar angle of view to the human eye, giving photos a natural feel". Indeed it is how we observe the world from a "safe distance", and therefore this normal lens gives images a look what may turn out even "boring" and flat.

When other lenses (focal lengths) became easier and cheaper to manufacture, something like 35mm lens first became as a standard on pocket cameras, and also as a wide angle focal length on cheap kit zoom lenses (35-70m zoom lenses). And today 28mm equivalent lens (or even wider) has became more or less as standard on mobile phone cameras and many pocket cameras. It means something that is seen as a common, then also becomes as a normal on the majority of images we take, display and see these days.

Then among more serious amateur photographers, shooting with DSLR cameras, it is very common to use extreme ends on focal lengths instead of using so called "old good normal lens". Only when we need very "speed lens" (large aperture), we choose the 50mm prime lens. But also this is quickly changing because also other focal length lenses with large aperture has became affordable.

Very recently also zoom lenses has turned out "faster", providing such apertures as f/1.8-2.8. It means the traditional "normal lens" had become even less obvious choice of focal length to be used.

Therefore I have decided to "take a step back" to "the age of normal lens view", and shoot with it on an eye level for the current Ted's assignment. It is kind of interesting to experiment how to imitate what once was a "standard", and yet try to make the image interesting, and also try to give a feeling of depth in the image.

As a first attempt of mine I took a shot of empty billboards at the university corridor. I sort of got fascinated by the idea of "tabula rasa", when I saw them "waiting to be moved and used" somewhere again. Then the outcome was surprisingly monochromatic, with a tint of sepia in it. I only desaturated some blue hue out of the left side of the image, and as a result, got almost nostalgic image with a feeling of renunciation in it.

Low angle

On this shot I  could not see where the camera was pointing.

Sami Serola

While planning what to shoot for the weekly challenges, I have also tried to get my head around on the photo assignment #2 by Ted Forbes, which is low angle photography. Long time ago I optimistically thought a good photographer can use any camera to take good shots. And indeed that is true, but even a damn good photographer can't take super macro pictures without super macro lens.

During this year I have planned to focus on using my new mobile phone camera. It provides a pretty good quality, but for example for someone like me, who has previously used to use full rotating camera display, and remote control display, it really sucks when trying to shoot close to the ground. Especially it is difficult when I also would like to point the camera upwards, and not able to see the display.

My recommendation is to find a pocket mirror to use it for aiming. Couldn't find a handy one yet, but certainly will as soon as possible.

Here I was lucky to get those people just on right places.

Anyway, when taking pictures for the low angle shooting assignment, I kind of recalled my favourite ways to compose pictures taken from low angle (close to the ground). First of all I think wide angle lens is the best, because it much helps to really make it clear the view point is close to the ground. By following the classic recommendation to have something close to fill the foreground, and showing the context tiny on the background, it makes the view point sort of obvious.

I also absolutely love using portrait (vertical) composition on this kind of shots because the verticality kind of increases the distance between what is seen on the foreground, and the tiny things on background. This idea works especially well on the "trash season" series of mine. All kind of garbage people toss away and drop on the ground, looks enormous when seen from the low angle point of view and taken with the wide angle lens.

Patterns in Art

Sami Serola

I decided to make a comeback here at Shoot & Tell blog for numerous reasons. First of all, I need to start keeping some sort of a journal on my photography. That is what I discovered after accidentally finding Ted Forbes's Youtube channel and his photography assignments:

 The idea is to record the creative thinking and flow in some way, in order to reflect one's own work. However, I think I like to utilize modern digital format for it. Although, I much like handwritten journals and diaries, they does not allow such useful features as ability to search afterwards, with words in text and keywords. Moreover, digital text is superior because it makes it easy to copy (for example copying pieces of my own text from here to elsewhere), edit, and share.

I was first going to start yet another private blog, but then I realized there is really no good reason for that. Here "we" already have one perfectly good publishing platform and area to use. If this becomes noticed and "used" also by others, it is only a good thing. Having a shared journal still is something I have tried to achieve for a long time. And this is because of the reasons I said above, to make things to become searched, found and shared more easily. But if this attempt of mine stays unnoticed, it doesn't matter either. I still have a place where at least I have an easy to use digital journal.

And to get things started, I grasp on ideas that has been going around my mind today, after reading two challenge assignments where I am personally involved to. First one is Saturday Self-Challenge at Ipernity and Flickr, where this weeks challenge is to shoot patterns. And the other one is The Sunday Challenge (at Ipernity), where this week's topic is no more and less but Art, and yes, definitely with capital A! So, the idea is to start my journal with these two concepts, and how they are related.

My very first approach was focused only on patterns, and especially patterns that appears in nature. On Sunday morning I went out to local cemetery to shoot barks of trees. I indeed got some rather interesting shots. But when reflecting what I got during that day, and after reading the photo assignment for The Sunday Challenge, I really started to wonder what we take as art, and what art is about. Definitely not the first time for me or anyone to think this, but the very crystallized idea I came out this morning was that art is like balancing between repetition and being unique.

 What somewhat every artist likes to be is unique. In other words, we all want to come up with something truly original, something that is never seen before. But there lies also a great risk of being way too alien to audience, to critics (including ourselves) and to the whole society. Our whole education actually aims to this. We try to learn how to copy patterns (phrases, images, techniques) that makes our input for the society similar enough to become recognized as a pattern within the larger cultural fabric. And yet we also need to get that piece of pattern look unique enough, to make it look like something new becomes discovered, and avoid for example risk of just copying others too much.

And when reflecting my Sunday catch, I noticed one shot, where I first noticed the "eyes" that I saw on side of old spruce trees, trees where the lowest branches were cut some time ago. As a living creature we are learned (partly by repetition and copy, partly maybe because of DNA) to recognize such patterns as faces and eyes. In computer science this is called as pattern recognition, where the attempt is make computers to do the same for us: recognize common patterns for example in the image. For modern people this can be useful for example in photography, to automatize the camera focusing based on face patterns. For the primitive animal inside of us the face recognition is important to help us recognize the both, the potentially dangerous creatures, and those that belongs to our own kind and especially the close ones (those that belong in to our pack/family).

Altogether this is somewhat also the reason why we especially get drawn to images where we recognize anything that looks familiar. It is very much based on this concept of pattern recognition. We become exited when we see a human figure in the picture. And this is probably because it tricker multiple things in our mind. We start trying to find out whether the figure is something (someone) we know, belongs to our pack, or is danger to us, or looks attractive. Then it also may provide us such values as possibility to identify with some of our own experiences in that image, and to reflect our own feelings and believes.

Then the opposite is probably a very non-figurative art where we find absolutely nothing familiar, except maybe some colors, or in a long run, similar works of abstract art. And there we approach the risk of becoming too original and alien. The majority of audience then just "don't get it".

Photography then is a very much as an art form of ultimate copying and attempt to still do that in some original way. Which then leads me back to this weeks challenges. How to illustrate patterns and kind of repetition creatively?

But I will return to this topic later on during this week because the idea of a journal is not to say everything at once, but to record one idea at the time, like making a quilt (a pattern) out of small pieces.