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At a time when photography reduces the extraordinary moments of world's life in ordinary facts of everyday's life, in this workshop we want to return to the true basics of photography, question the above and introduce the students to looking at the world around them with different eyes to search for the extraordinary in the ordinary things of their lives.
Photography is a way to record what we see in the form of bidimensional images.
Recent technologies allow photographers to record such images under almost any condition. High speed film, high shutter speed, and finally and most of all, on-camera flash pushes more and more the recording towards snap-shot photography.
In some cases snap-shots are what we are looking for: the spontaneity of a face
expression, of a gesture or of a party scene.
However, in most cases, technology makes us lazy!
We forget about the beauty and potentials of existing light (and shadows), that of image composition, and those offered by the basic camera features.
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the Technique
This workshop will be based on the use of PINHOLE-CAMERAS i.e. CAMERA OBSCURA.
This basic and primitive technique let us obtain photographic images from a box with a tiny hole on one of its sides.
The sensitive paper is placed inside the box, opposing the hole; it is the dimension of the hole that determines the quality, in details, of the final image.
1. Due to the extremely small dimension of the hole, the paper needs very long time to get exposed.
2. Due to long exposures, the box need to be absolutely still during the shooting.
3. All subjects which during the shooting will move, will show blurred.
Points 1, 2 and 3 basically tell us that to obtain a good image, the box has to be placed so to remain still for the whole period of exposure
and that the light on the subject has to be good enough not to increase the exposure time further. |
about the CAMERA OBSCURA
The Camera Obscura is not a "recording" device, just a darkroom with a tiny hole on one of its walls. Such hole it's able to project the
image of what is outside, on the inside wall on its opposite.
The use of the Camera Obscura goes back to Middle Ages (100/1200) where scientists used it mostly to observe the Sun's phenomenons,
too dangerous to be observed by the naked eye.
Only centuries later that it started to be used to reproduce in drawings, landscapes and later even portraits.
The recording device was the big step missing to photography: First a way to record the image, Second, making the image stable enough
not to disappear after a short time.
It was 1824 when the first image was recorded by Nicephore Niepce, then Daguerre kind of by-passed the problem of stabilizing paper
images, by producing stable images on copper, but those you could not reproduce them, and where very difficoult to see as the image
was formed on a mirror-like surface in mercurium. Finally it was thanks to Fox-Talbot that we had stable paper images.
About 25 years after the first image was ever captured, round 1850, photography was widely used in most of the fields we know it today. |
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