Topic 4: Memory / Vintage

TIME

Creating a sense of space in a photograph constructs an environment in which your viewers can spend time. Once you have this, you have the potential to present evidence of past events in this location. Or the possibility of future events can be hinted at. Or even the absence of time, aka timelessness, can be the point. In this way nothingness can be something. [re: Zen Philosophy]

In all of these instances we are using time as the main variable. Most of the photos up to now have been in present time, but time stretches in both directions. Time in the past resides in our memory. Future time is in our dreams and is a product of our imagination. Timelessness can be a strong emotional state if one feels suspended in it.

The term vintage refers to the past. The Vintage Effect in photography is becoming very popular with Smartphone and Lomography photographers. But first we must understand the meaning of the word vintage. Some definitions of the word Vintage include:

• representing the high quality of a past time; classic: e.g. vintage movies.

• of, imitating, or being a style or fashion of the past; retro: e.g. vintage clothing.

• old-fashioned or obsolete.

• too old to be considered modern, but not old enough to be considered antique.

MEMORY

The word vintage has both good and bad connotations, but since this all has to do with images from the past, it all has to do with memory. When organizing the content in your photos you have to think about how we remember things, places, events, people, etc.

It is also said that we only remember the good sides of things. Then maybe vintage implies some kind of positive emotional attitude. But there are also nightmares – bad memories. You could follow this course of thought as well.

For example, I had a student who went back to the sites where significant and usually traumatic things happened in her life. She shot self-portraits at those locations. You never knew what the exact story was, but the feelings were strong. Another student went back to her high school steps and superimposed a current self-portrait over a shot her friends had taken before they graduated. Each photograph was made translucent (by lowering the opacity of each image) so neither really seemed ‘real’.

Another way to create translucent people is to shoot with a long shutter speed and have the subject person move slowly through the frame, or stand still for half the exposure time and then quickly move out. There are smart phone apps available can control your shutter speed to make long exposures possible. 

LEGACY

In the photographic world, vintage is often used to refer to photographs shot on film that are usually at least 20 years old so the prints are now fading and the colors have shifted. Another variation of the vintage look is the Instant Film look a.k.a. Polaroid. These prints also have their own peculiar color balance and the color of these prints shifts through time in a different direction from that of conventional film. Yet another variation is a technique known as cross-processing. This is when positive color film (for slides) is developed in the chemicals for negative film (for prints), or vice versa. This creates unusual color shifts that are somewhat unpredictable. Other photographers have found old film that has been damaged and have made prints from these negatives. I had a student who would boil her film and then freeze it, producing a 'damaged' or broken look. This gets into the territory of ‘marks made from process’, aka intuitive, or improvisational, or unintentional, all of which are part of another conversation that we will get back to...

The key point in all of these examples is that the colors are not “normal”. There is a precedent in the amount and direction of the color shifting because all this came from chemical film processes. In digital photography we often try to emulate chemical processes. After all, this is our legacy. This is where the vocabulary of photography comes from. Digital technology now gives us the power to push things a little bit further and in directions that were not previously possible. But you have to be careful. If you push things just enough you get really interesting looking photographs because they are within the realm of believability. If you push things too far you get photos that just look weird or worse, fake, aka unbelievable.

VINTAGE/ RETRO

We return to the question: What is the vintage look and, more importantly, why would one want to use it? If you answered, "Because it looks cool", then you are missing the point. Vintage refers to photographs that look old. What are the attributes of old photographs other than the technical described above? The colors are faded, the edges are bent, the saturation is reduced, the details are unclear, and so on. How do these attributes line up with potential content? The form of any piece must reflect or support the content. If you are making photos that deal with the past, then you should have a specific memory or type of memory of a kind of situation in mind when shooting. If you are making photographs about faded memories where the details are less clear, and the feeling has gotten softer and fuzzier, then maybe the vintage style supports this content.

You should go through the list of fx that are attainable with various Smartphone apps and experiment with them to see what visual modifications they produce. When you have some of that under your belt, stop and think about what photographic content would be best be expressed using these appearances. Then make those photographs. And you may not be able to just walk around and wait for the world to hand you photographs. You may have to make them happen. This is where the photographer moves from being a ‘gatherer’ to being a ‘hunter’, aka a person who makes photographs happen. [ref: Intuitive vs. Directed Shooting ]

Remember to share your experiments with your classmates. Please let the class know early if you find any other apps that work well. People are encouraged to find new ways of doing things that are different from what is prescribed. These people will get better grades. Share any discoveries and how you have used these tools by posting entries to the smartphone recipes blog site. 

note: be sure to avoid the obvious photo clichés, e.g. the expressive hands of old people, aka pictures of your parents or grandparents, the gnarled roots of might trees, old things such as old truck and classic cars, etc… Don’t just take pictures of old things - this has to be down through Ambience and Feel.

VINTAGE/ RETRO ƒx APPS

There are so many apps available and each has sometimes thousands of fx and presets possible. It is very easy to see that this is where things get out of hand. It is impossible to write a tutorial on his. In order to give you a head start however, here are some lists of the fx available with several very good Camera Apps: SnapSeed (by NIK), Photo fx (by Tiffen), and Vignette. Each app has a tutorial section built into it and a web site to accompany it. You should run through those first, and then start playing.

APPS of Choice:

SnapSeed (Apple + Android)

By Nik Software, Inc., respected maker of computer photo filter fx software

home site: https://support.google.com/snapseed/

for instructions, video tutorials, etc.

• Black & White: neutral, contrast, bright, dark, film, darkened sky

• Vintage: 

• Drama:

• Grunge:

• Center Focus:

• Tilt-Sift:

• Retroflex: 

• Frames: 

note: This app retains the full resolution of the camera and does not reduce file size!

Photo ƒx (Apple)

by Tiffen, Inc,. respected maker of optical camera filters.

home site: http://www.tiffensoftware.com/products/iphone-ipad-apps/photo-vex

and there is a tutorial page in a drop-down menu

http://www.tiffensoftware.com/tutorials/photo-fx-tutorials

In Photo ƒx, you can choose from 76 filters containing 878 presets organized in 8 different filter groups. 

Some of the filters in their respective categories are:

• Film Lab: Bleach Bypass, Cross Processing, Faux Film, Grain, Three Strip, Two Strip

• Diffusion: Black Diffusion, Black Pro–Mist, Bronze Glimmer–Glass, Center Spot, Cool Pro–Mist, Diffusion, Glimmer Glass, Gold Diffusion/FX, HDTV/FX

• Grads/Tints: 812 Warming, Color Spot, Color-Grad, Dual Grad, Mono Tint, ND–Grad, Nude/FX, Old Photo, Strip Grad

• Image: Black & White, Fluorescent, Haze, Levels, Sharpen, Sky, Temperature

• More: Close-Up Lens, Depth of Field, Vignette, Wide Angle Lens

note: This app retains the full resolution of the camera and does not reduce file size!

Vignette (Android)

Vignette is also a full-featured camera application, featuring digital zoom, time-lapse, self-timer and more. It has more than 70 customizable filters and 50 frames useable in any combination to create many photo effects. 

Examples: http://vignette.neilandtheresa.co.uk/filter-examples

 • Retro/Vintage styles
• LOMO/Diana/Holga toy camera styles
• Instant camera styles
• Cross-process, duotone, charcoal, tilt-shift and much more
• Photo-booth and double-exposure
• New: Touch to focus
• New: Share your personalized saved effects with other Vignette users
• Take pictures at your camera’s full resolution, even with effect (paid version only)
• Use the flash and front-facing cameras on most devices
• Self-timer, time-lapse and steady-shot modes
• Digital 10× zoom
• New: 21× optical zoom on Samsung Galaxy Camera EK-GC100
• Store location data in pictures (geotag)
• Use the volume rocker as a shutter button
• Edit imported photos
• On-screen controls for exposure, zoom, flash and switching camera
• Launch from the lock screen in Android 4.0+
• Remote shutter with Bluetooth remote, wired headset or Sony Ericsson LiveView
• Time- and date-stamp pictures with adjustable size, color and format
• Rule-of-thirds and golden ratio composition guides
• Optimized for taking pictures underwater
• Share pictures via third-party apps

 note: The paid version of this app retains the full resolution of the camera and does not reduce file size!

Some other possibilities:

Vintage Camera: (has only 1 camera, 20 effect presets, no post-processing one saved, saves at 1280 x 1280.)

Retro Camera Plus: has 6 cameras, but saves at only 512 square

XnViewFx: a reasonable number of fx, including retro, color and texture, etc.. Allows saving presets. Saves at full resolution.

Photo Toaster: reasonable collection of modifiers but no radical style or retro fx. Good for subtle, tasteful photos. Saves at full resolution. 

Camera 360 Ultimate: also has a reasonable collection of adjustments, fx, and borders. Saves at full resolution.

Additional Tips

You have to keep track of what you're doing. It is easy to start working intuitively until you get just the look you want. Then you realize that you have no idea how you made it. Knowing how to repeat your process and create similar looking photographs to create a set of related shots is part of the craftsmanship that we are seeking. Eventually you need to know how to duplicate specific looks so you can build a ‘personal visual vocabulary’, that uses a ‘visual toolbox’ that is specific to you. This is what the photo recipes are all about - knowing how to do what we want to do, knowing how to repeat it, and then sharing this knowledge with others.

Some apps keep track of what you've done and allow us to save those fx actions as a preset. If you have that ability, you can apply the same effect to other photographs to retain consistency within a series of shots. It is preferable, however, to vary each shot even slightly to have variation and project the feel of being hand-made into the photographic work. You can then create a recipe from these presets.

Teaching Points - Topic 2 - Color/ Passion

When I asked you to tackle the topic of Passion I did not expect you to use over-saturation as the main tool. My previous classes did not do this. Maybe I was thinking of a softer form of passion, more to do with the passion between people, about relationships, and even about environments. Perhaps I will alter this topic for future classes by renaming it, ‘Color/ Ambience’. I am trying to get you to elicit a feeling of environment through the use of color. The color of an environment changes through the day because of the changes in the angle of the sun and the way the atmosphere alters the color of the sunlight hitting us. [When the sun is setting and it drops below the edge of the earth, the earth’s atmosphere bends the sunlight letting only the longest wavelength, the reds and oranges, illuminate our world.] One problem with color photos is that they tend to look too normal, aka regular. It is desirable to alter the color away from normal to make a more interesting photo. Most cameras pump up the saturation automatically, so it is better to desaturate to take things in the other, unexpected direction. [Most TV’s and Computer Monitors come with the color saturation turned up as well!]

I do have to comment that there are still a number of photographs that come under the heading of Photo Clichés; dogs, babies, flowers, sunsets, City Hall, lights, graffiti, etc. Please re-read the Photo Clichés document. Avoid people posing for a photo, or worse, hamming it up for the camera. That turns that shot into a snapshot. If people are aware they are being shot they become self-conscious and it usually doesn’t work. Simply asking people to close their eyes can make a big difference. The problem with snapshots is that the essential meaning is not actually contained within the photograph. Snapshots are used to trigger people’s memories, so the image is in their minds, not so much in the photo. This is not what we are looking for in this class.  

Typical Color Clichés include anything with intense color. If it is seen that you are shooting just to grab the color, and there is no deeper meaning behind that subject, the photo is not going far enough. Shooting graffiti, or architecture just for the shapes, is appropriating  some else’s art. It is preferred that you make your own art directly from the raw material that the world provides for you. If you are using architectural elements such as graceful curves to enclose a space, or edges of buildings that cast sharp shadows, then you are on the right track. Cute animals (are there any animals that are not inherently cute?) are a classic form of snapshot. Sunsets are a classic content of picture postcards and those are too commonplace. The feeling generated by the light of a setting sun can however be used to create an evocative setting for a subject. Flowers are another classic photo cliché and should be avoided. They are just too easy. Lights seem to be overused these days. The light cast by a fixture, however, can create an environment with ambience, as described above when talking about the sun, just this time it is interior rather than exterior.

note: If you are going to do more work in B&W, as I have encouraged, they have to be toned, even if just slightly. Dead flat B&W is not enough.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Let’s start this analysis by looking at the simplest use of color, the Monochrome images. In this case they start with an industrial setting. Chi Hwan aligned the bottom up with the frame to give stability to that huge blank wall. Veronica’s photo is similar but the color is a bit too real. I have desaturated it just as an example of how the feel can be altered simply. It gets a little more run-down looking with less color and the sky is a bit more somber. Kristen’s stairway is thrown of center by the wall and all the tones fall into the same hue. Kendel’s boarded up window and doorway pose questions about the fate of not only that building but the people who lived inside. Kristen’s next shot has the yellow of the janitorial items blending in with the color of the limestone walls them selves. This picture also addresses the person who uses this equipment. 

The windows in the next few photos are the linkage of this series. These are some good examples of how lighting can produce ambience, some outside, some interiors. The upstairs light in the photo by Chi Hwan allow me to sit up there all day. The streaming light in Ali's photo creates an unearthly space that transcends the actual locale. (this is Tuttleman Hall - remember no photos on TU Campus!) The last photo by Mariah adds real color into the equation. This is one where I questioned the saturation at first, but now I believe that it really looked like that because it is nighttime (or it is a really weird place). 

This is echoed by Michael and Dan in the next couple of street photos. There is a book by Alex Webb called Hot Light / Half Made Worlds: Photographs from the Tropics. There are many walls like this green one down there, and Alex makes the best of it. He includes people, usually truncated, to add personality to the environment. Do a Google Image Search for his work and you’ll see what I mean [note: well, only about 1/3 of the photos that come up in that search are what I am talking about, but you can see which ones have the light and shadow and broad colors.] These two photos make good use of bright color because they still look believeable.

Dan’s vertical pole links us to the next couple of shots by Natalie and Kati, both of which include a vertical element like that. When you push these up against the edges of the frames you get tension, and tension is good in photographs. I think you have to watch out for halos and I wish Kati’s foreground was just pavement, but still, this is an effective photo that establishes a real sense of place waiting for something to happen. 

The next few shots all have the street itself as the subject. The drawing and text in both of Mike’s photos is intriguing. Ashley’s shot removes all space and makes an almost abstract study of the gravel and stone slabs. This is almost a painting.    

From here the foregrounds open up again for the next several photos. Various things happen. The figure walking in the background of Dan’s photo makes it a more active photo while still keeping the people anonymous. The foreground in Ashley’s photo takes up the entire bottom half of the frame, and there is still this purple line on the ground. Curious! In Dan’s next shot the line becomes a rainbow and the foreground becomes a sea of automobiles. Joe’s photo keeps the same horizon line but in a very different space.

The next two photographs of fences remind me of an old topic of ‘Borders/Boundaries’. Bridges are things that link two areas while fences are things that divide. That’s a good topic if anyone wants to run with it. The little wagon photo by Garrett has a softness of both color and focus that puts my mind into memory mode. It’s not exactly my childhood but it still makes me think of playing in the driveway behind my house with all the other kids on my block. Please take note of these elements because they can be used in the 4^th and last topic, ‘Memory’. 

The next 4 photos take us back to the landscape. Mike’s photo gets us up very close. The negative space between the leaves is just as active as the leaves themselves. The framing in the shot is excellent. Ashley pulls back a little bit but still does an excellent job of framing this little stream. It makes what could be a generic scene into a special place just by the angle of view. Julie’s photo also has a limited viewpoint that forces the viewer to poke around to see just what is going on. This is a visual mystery. Kendel’s photo also removes a lot of the spatial cues and plays with complementary color; red against green. 

The next two photos almost go abstract on us. Caitlin’s shot is close-up of some kind of structure, probably a sculpture, but is obscure enough that it works. Chi Hawn’s photo is one of a few where this intense color really works. This is an outrageous place with hanging lights but that is not so obvious until you look at it for a while. And the Photo is divided almost in half, adding to the visual structure. 

Now we get to the portraits and self-portraits. The first two, both by Ian, have the faces obscured, first by water and then by light. Kendel’s photo cuts the face with light while Mariah’s cuts the face with the frame. This enhances the gaze in her eyes because pushing things close to the edge of the frame enhance their power. This is the other case where the subject can project their personal energy right through the lens. This is a talent that is required in the acting profession.  It is a matter on confronting the camera without self-consciousness. Hollie’s goes even farther to eliminate the eyes, making it that much more anonymous and makes us ponder the subject that much more. 

The next set of photographs considers the space around the figure, giving us that much more information to evaluate the person in the frame. Veronica’s flag photo makes us stand further back creating a great environment for the figure with maybe a little bit of political commentary the same time. And speaking of political commentary, Garret’s photo of beer and pool make their own statement and helps us learn something about the subject of the photo. The extended foreground of the pool table is another powerful visual tool. And we all know what happens to people with red shirts who drink too much beer? Well, Ian’s next shot answers that question. Mariah’s photo presents us with a very different back that is sensuous because of the content and that is enhanced by the quality of light in the room.

The last little shot that didn’t seem to fit anywhere else is Caitlin’s picture of a pitcher on a table. This shot uses angle of view and closeness to frame the shot while the soft color and soft-focus background adds to the feel and evokes memories. Another beautiful photo to keep in mind when we get to the 4^th topic, Memory.