Keavey Henshaw
Unit Four Photography
Edward Weston
Examples and Analysis
Edward Weston was a 20th century American photographer. who was been refured to as
"one of the most innovative and influential American photographers
"
and
"one of the masters of 20th century photography."
He was born on the 24th of March 1886 in Illinois and died on the 1st of January in 1958.
As you can see from the image to the left, there are numerous different elements which have been demonstrated by Weston. Some of these being the use of colour pallete, contrast, and angle. These different aspects give off an abstrate feeling to the piece of work.
Abstract defines as a piece of work which emphasizes formal elements for example shape rather than specific, recognizable objects. This is exactly what Weston has done in all his images.
Westons work is that of world renowned quality. With his signature being upclose photography of different objects he gave his audience pieces of artwork to marvel at. These photos though did not demonstrate clearly what the objects are, they forced the audience to make their own interpration of what was in the photo.
This style quickly spead and caused his audience range to grow rapidly, people of the time and still to this day are facinated with his iconic style.
At first glance it is not obvious that this image is of a piece of lettuce or a similar piece of vegitation, and this aspect of not specifically knowing what the image is of is a huge part of Westons work. His work in some respects falls into the relms of surrealism, although he was not labeled a surreal photographer of the time.
My Photography - Creation Process
In response to the Edward Weston iconic photographes I decided to take some of my own in his style. After looking through his varied selection of images I noticed that shell's where a common theme, from this I chose to take pictures of shells myself.
-
To start with I set up a black screen and some lights, by doing this it would allow me to direct the light only at the object i was taking photos of, and it would allow me to get a specific amount of contrast between the fully lit parts of the shells and the shadowed parts
-
Once the background and lights were set out properly I took an array of shells and started to take pictures of them, as previously thought the light cause I'd chosen gave the exact effect I wanted for these images.
-
After all of the photos had been taken and I was happy with the amount of photos I'd taken, I began to transfur the images from my SD card to my laptop.
-
When all the images had been moved from the SD card to my laptop I started to sort through the few hundred images and direct the good and bad ones into different folders. This in turn made it easier to pick and choose which images I wanted to continue further with and edit in Photoshop.
-
Moving the images I wished to edit into Photoshop, I firstly began by changing the hue and saturation of each image. This in course made all the images black and white. By doing this it made each image stand out more against the black background and make the shadow parts blend into each other.
This started to archive a Edward Weston feel, and make the images I took look more effective and give them the surreal quality Westons images have.
-
I then started to add contrast layers over all my images to make them look even more effective. This in turn made the image darker and the image more unrecognisable.
-
Finally I finished up changing the exposure levels and the different effect I'd added onto the image before saving them as a JPG image onto my laptop and uploading them to this website.
My Photography - Experimentation
Below are a few images which i took and decided to experiment with. These experimentations were done so I could test how well the images would look without being cropped. These images were taken of the full objects and also multiple objects arranged together. This did in fact work very well, due to the fact that Edward Westerns work is iconic because it is not always obviously what he's taken a picture off. Therefore I decided to re-take some of the photos without it being obvious of what the objects I used were.