Posts Tagged ‘underwater photography’
Funny and Comical, Bunny and Animal
We get our weekly-three pack of interesting Photography News underway with the fad du jour . . .
Funny and Comical, Bunny and Animal
If you’re under the impression that the ‘Funny Animal’ fad sweeping Instagram and the Twitterverse is a recent phenomenon, think again. Your great-grandparents were doing it, baby!
Earlier today ITV published a picture story, Newspaper archives reveal amusing pictures of animals shared since 1900s – and they’re showing us several actual newspaper images from the 1900s!
You can see a chimp dressed up like a toff (with top hat to boot) or you can see four chimps without any dressing up but having tea . . . like you and me!
A cat dressed up like a right royal lady is much more fortunate than a poor small dog forced into . . . a clown’s suit!
Credit the British Newspaper Archive for the, er, ‘donkey work’ behind this effort.
‘Underwater Waves’
Mark Tipple has an unusual photographic calling. He focusses “on the aesthetic of the waves from below or the body language of the people evading them,” reports Wired in Crash Into Me. The very first photograph in the 15-image album, snapped serendipitously, is the one that started it all for Tipple.
Though the first one was serendipitous, the photographer clearly has both, gobs of skill and gobs of guts to photograph what looks like an underwater explosion (descending on a diver).
Another image is pure abstract art comprising of big daubs of white plus fine brushstrokes in various shades of green.
Shooting up into the sun, Tipple has managed to create a reverse whirlpool effect in a cool blue image.
Without the cue of the diver, at first glance would you not have thought that this photograph was one of a grim, moody sky? As it is, Tipple has captured oceanic storm clouds, as it were.
This is Underwater Photography like you’ve never seen it before.
Doing it with Light
We’ll close on a ‘light’ note with Darren Pearson. PetaPixel has published a gallery of his ‘light paintings’.
Light Painting is another burgeoning trend; however, it is not a fad but a photographic niche. As such, there are many styles and techniques here.
Pearson actually makes drawings or sketches with light-sticks, usually humourous ones, in just the right settings.
Shouldn’t this particular style of ‘Light Painting’ more accurately be called ‘Light Drawing’ or ‘Light Sketching’? Check out the gallery and see if you agree.
Christy Lee Rogers’s Underwater Fine Art Photography
Yesterday’s post on our BPro sister site featured three news items and galleries about Underwater Photography. We’re continuing that theme today but with an extreme twist. The images we’re looking at are not regulation underwater photos, i.e. there are no pin-sharp depictions of marine life here. Instead, Christy Lee Rogers uses water-based refraction, diffusion and distortion to artistic advantage to create what is accurately termed ‘Underwater Fine Art Photography’ or ‘Fine Art Underwater Photography’.
The trick here is that Rogers herself is not in the water; she photographs from land while her subjects pose in a pool.
Jordan G. Teicher on Slate says that Rogers’s images “look like Baroque masterpieces” and that is only a slight exaggeration, for the photographs are indeed that good. The gallery on Slate is loaded with high-res images.
Some of Rogers’s photos look like, well, what they are: underwater photos. Others, however, resemble a painting that is a cross between an ‘Old Master’ and an Impressionistic canvas.
Teicher writes that Rogers’s “visual style . . . is often compared to that of the Baroque painter Caravaggio,” which makes sense. However, there’s clearly some of Michelangelo’s chiaroscuro in a few photographs, such as The Innocents. Apart from the light-and-shadow effects, a troubling mystery lurks in this image – something is not quite right.
If we’re going to talk of paintings and the masters, the photographs here will bring to mind more than one. For instance, doesn’t the lovely Drowning in her Sea suggest William Waterhouse in an uncharacteristically impressionistic mood?
A few images are more like Abstract Art than Baroque or Old Master paintings. Reckless Unbound is a visually luscious arrangement of hues both arresting and calming – brilliant carmine anchoring pastel greens and limpid blues.
How much of her work and which images are the result of anticipation and execution, and how much and which ones are the outcome of happy chance, only Rogers knows. To the viewer, the visual delights brought by these photographs are completely independent of their provenance.
Weekly Roundup: From the Unusual to the Weird
Hurricane Sandy
Yesterday’s post contained a link to a photo of Hurricane Sandy from space. Today let’s see Sandy up close and personal from the street, courtesy of some skilled – and intrepid – photographers.
You’ll see flooded roads, submerged cars, 20-foot waves, power outages, and New York in distress in this album. See the locals getting alarmed and making preparations and cleaning up the wreckage further south down America’s East Coast and the Caribbean in this album. Now these photos are great examples of that much-used word, ‘Photojournalism’.
Sandy also brought about some unusual nature-made photographic effects further north in Syracuse. There, photographers didn’t need any filters to shoot photos of an otherworldly peach-pink sky. Sometimes it’s just about being in the right place at the right time!
Alien Effects, Alien Figures
Some Sandy-like effects can be created artificially by talented craftsmen. Have a look at these equally arresting, slightly otherworldly landscapes which the photographer, Matthew Albanese, calls ‘Strange Worlds’. These landscapes are indeed ‘strange’ because they’re all shot inside his studio! Surely that’s not giving away the game too much?
Just as ‘strange’ is Chris Bucklow’s people photography . . . for he takes photographs without any camera! Bucklow’s visually striking and artistic images also make no use of Photoshop; he uses a rudimentary yet advanced technique using a cardboard on which a figure is mapped out with “thousands of pinholes.”
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Even though we close with a ‘straight’ photography item, this one too is well off the beaten track: you see, it’s about an underwater shoot . . . and the subject is turtles! Closer to home, Australian Geographic reports that Doug Perrine has taken the first underwater photographs of flatback turtles.
The eight-image album is worth a view even though it offers no tips for aspiring underwater photographers – heck, it’s probably rather unlikely anyway that you’ll be pulling a ‘Thunderball’ anytime soon!
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