Sex and Death.

Naboo32

Naboo32

Messages
3,278
Name
Andy
Edit My Images
Yes
AJH_5902.jpg
 
Sorry but i aint got a scooby what this means.
 
The picture that I posted first was a 'reject' from a series of shots that I made to depict the 'cycle of life'. I was curious to see how recognisable the image, which I saw in that frame (too pornographic to explain now :p), would be to anyone else :thinking:. As it turns out, not at all, so I needn't have worried :LOL:!

Anyway, since this is the 'Creative' part of the photo gallery, I might as well post the rest of the series, to see if it's any clearer when all are viewed together (and much smaller) just what it was that I was trying to depict.

Thanks for looking and don't worry if you're thinking it's all b#@**%s - most other people will agree with you :D!


'Conception'
AJH_5907.jpg


'Childhood'
AJH_5906.jpg


'Maturity'
AJH_5802.jpg


'Disillusion'
AJH_5933.jpg


'Sickness'
AJH_5934.jpg


'Death'
AJH_5899.jpg
 
The first time I visited the Tate Modern I was confronted with so much 'art' that I didn't get, I came away thinking it was all a big bunch of arse. There was even one exhibit that consisted of a pool of water on the floor with a couple of yellow cones sitting in it. This left me thinking any old cleaner could have created it.

I have that same feeling of inadequecy now.

Am off to look at some Pre-Raph Paintings...
 
Well I can see it looks like a character of some sort humpimg another and also looks like a skull. Not keen on it thouhgh...Sorry.
 
Thanks to everyone who posted a response :). It's really helpful to me to know how other people view photography and to see how well received, or not, my attempts at 'painting with light' are.

Clearly, I haven't managed to score a 'hit' with this series of pictures, but then this is something of a new departure from me and so I don't really epxcept to get it right first time ;).

G'night!
 
Andy, at least you are artistic, unfortunately I'm not.
 
Actually I really like them, mainly because they remind me of primitive art made within Photoshop - but with a camera.

Not a great explanation I confess but art is basically in the eye of the beholder - you should either like it or not - the explanation shouldn't really matter (though I confess, it helps some people sometimes)
 
On the Huh said:
Andy, at least you are artistic, unfortunately I'm not.
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Well Zulfi, I'm trying to do something different with my camera for a change (keeping the 'subject' static and moving the camera to create unpredictable shapes, some of which vaguely resemble human expressions or acts).

Whether or not that is 'art' is pretty hard for me to decide :|. I guess that if nobody else 'sees it', then it's failing to 'say' anything and that makes it either very bad art or just pretentious BS :(.

RobC_was_taken said:
Actually I really like them, mainly because they remind me of primitive art made within Photoshop - but with a camera.

Not a great explanation I confess but art is basically in the eye of the beholder - you should either like it or not - the explanation shouldn't really matter (though I confess, it helps some people sometimes)
Click to expand...

It's certainly 'primitive' art, Rob :LOL:!

By way of further (unneccesary ;)) explanation, the light source for these 'drawings' was a row of three arched windows, covered by Venetian blinds. Because there were three of them and they had quite distinctive shapes, it was pretty hard to control the final images that came out and a lot of trial and error was required to figure out how to move the camera (during the 1-2 second exposures), in order to get shapes that looked like faces.

AJH_5779.jpg


Anyway, I enjoyed the experiment and am grateful to everyone who expressed their opinions :).
 
I must be getting old....:shrug:
 
Art is just someone expressing a desire to create something and doing so. Whether these worked or not is only half the job, what counts is that you tried. The more you try, the better you'll get and at some point, you'll hit upon something that you really like.

For me, these are more art than photography. And art will always be subjective so don't be disheartened, you should be the judge of good and bad first and foremost.

:]
 
As photos I actually quite like them. However I really aren't a fan of the rather ostentatious titles each of them have. I can see fabric behind the idea yet I don't feel these particular photos pull off the theme. Not sure how you could achieve the theme you want with that style of photography.

However, I won't just leave my critique there, I'll add input on how you might actually change achieve it. Have you considered just using the fact that initial bright lighting could be considered as "birth", whilst dim light or "twilight" being considered as "death"?

Could also expand upon the theme and use coloured lights for emotion, i.e. red for anger?

Very much interested to hear you're thoughts on my critique of what you've done. I don't mean to sound offensive or anything btw so sorry if I come across that way. I just feel honesty promotes better photography!
 
I'm afraid that in your first image I totally see both of your subjects.
Perhaps that means something questionable about me!
 
If that's sex, I'm doing it wrong!!!!!!!!!!

It is good to try these things, but I'm afraid I don't think it's worked, even as an abstract :(
 
Although I am aware of freud's psychosexual stages - I'm still not grasping this. As an image it doesn't work for me but of course art and photography is completely subjective. As long as your happy producing them thats the main thing.
 
Many thanks again to everyone who took the time to respond to this thread :). It was, quite simply, an experiment. An experiment to see how easy (or not) it would be for other people to see the same things (all facial expressions, actually, apart from the "Conception" one) as I was seeing in these patterns of light. Clearly, the answer is that to most people these are just splodges of light and they don't see any faces in them at all, let alone faces showing the different characteristics given in the titles :shrug:.

This is important for me to know, because it means that trying to 'paint with light' in such a loose way is clearly not going to cut it if I want everyone to see the same things in them as I do. Obviously, these were very crude (in more ways than one :D) attempts to use this technique (of moving the camera around in front of a stationary light source), but I have to say that final results are really lacking in 'image quality' and are not really what I envisaged when I started out :|.

Quite honestly, I don't think that I will be persuing this idea any further, as I can't really think of a way to go from the results that I got here to what I wanted. That's OK though, I'm not an artist, just a hobbyist playing around with an original (to me) idea - no big deal that it fails to come across ;).



James J said:
As photos I actually quite like them. However I really aren't a fan of the rather ostentatious titles each of them have. I can see fabric behind the idea yet I don't feel these particular photos pull off the theme. Not sure how you could achieve the theme you want with that style of photography.

However, I won't just leave my critique there, I'll add input on how you might actually change achieve it. Have you considered just using the fact that initial bright lighting could be considered as "birth", whilst dim light or "twilight" being considered as "death"?

Could also expand upon the theme and use coloured lights for emotion, i.e. red for anger?

Very much interested to hear you're thoughts on my critique of what you've done. I don't mean to sound offensive or anything btw so sorry if I come across that way. I just feel honesty promotes better photography!
Click to expand...

Hi James :)!

Thanks a lot for your detailed critique and helpful suggestions.

Reading between the lines here, I get the feeling that you (and many other people who posted) are seeing only completely abstract shapes here and not the facial expressions, which I referred to earlier on. If that was all that I saw too, I wouldn't have given them such 'ostentatious' titles, whereas in fact, the titles are just descriptions of the 'faces' that I see in the shapes and their place in the 'cycle of life' (which was the theme). I was really trying to spell out my intentions and not shroud anything in 'pretentiousness', but that is doomed to fail when people still can't see the idea behind it even with such 'straight' titles.

Never mind, as I said, these efforts were my first and were (let's be honest), simply not good enough :thumbsdown:. I didn't think that they were particularly great when I posted them, but this is the first time that I've ever visited the 'Creative' part of the forum and I just guessed that these were the sort of experiments that went on here all the time ;).

Your tips would be great if I was trying to make truly 'abstract' art, but as these were supposed to be more 'impressionistic', I don't know that changing colours and light intensity is going to be enough to make the difference. Anyway, as I said in the last post, I'm done with this idea for the moment.

Cheers,

Andy
 
You are right in that I didn't see the facial expressions! Makes a bit more sense taking that into account lol. I feel if someone puts a lot of effort into making something, a detailed look at it and analysis is warranted.

I'd still like to see what you could do with coloured lights though, especially if you are forming faces out of them.
 
The set are a little small to truely make out, but I wouldn't give up on your experiments. It's certainly interesting to do and see the results.

However, for contemporary art you really need to provide a detailed write up about the images. Sometimes i feel that's more important than the image. ;)
 
Sometimes, or maybe 80% of the time, 'modern' art is just so rediculous.
 
I get the feeling that the concept came after the creation with this set.
Don't get me wrong. I love experimental and challenging photography / art, but the concept needs to be strong and fluent enough to be carried across without the need for explanation.
To me, its as if you have done some light painting, looked back at the images and said to yourself "ooh that looks like a skull, ooh an old man" just like you can with clouds. And then built the concept around the images. This method adds no more weight to the images than what weight they hold themselves and subsequently renders the concept and the images too bitter to swallow.
 
Simon photo said:
I get the feeling that the concept came after the creation with this set.
Don't get me wrong. I love experimental and challenging photography / art, but the concept needs to be strong and fluent enough to be carried across without the need for explanation.
To me, its as if you have done some light painting, looked back at the images and said to yourself "ooh that looks like a skull, ooh an old man" just like you can with clouds. And then built the concept around the images. This method adds no more weight to the images than what weight they hold themselves and subsequently renders the concept and the images too bitter to swallow.
Click to expand...

Well, you're almost right there Simon and nowhere here have I suggested otherwise ;). The fact is, that I was getting really tired of my 'static photography' and the limitations imposed by it (unless we were to get into the realms of Photoshopping things to the point of being unrecognisable ;)), so I applied some lateral thinking to the problem :thinking:.

The 'concept', if that's not too pretentious a term for my experiment :shrug:, was to choose a complex light source (with more form and texture than, say, a light bulb) and see what kind of images I could produce by manipulating the camera during a single exposure. I can't say that I've ever really seen anyone else do it, so I didn't know what to expect. Once I'd tried a few and seen the results, I realised that the only thing that I could see in any of them were facial expressions or body parts :|. I then decided to keep going until I had a range of 'faces', which could represent a human life from start to finish and to a very small extent, learnt how to move the camera to get closer to producing a 'face' (although it took hundreds of clicks to come up with these few). So, there was a specific intent behind it, but only once I'd tried it and seen how relatively hard it was to produce more 'refined' looking images than the simple shapes that I was getting :shrug:.

What excited me about this experiment, was the simple fact that I was creating (which I think is a fair description) something which couldn't otherwise exist in reality, or (most likely) ever be exactly replicated. A lot of modern, abstract art has this quality as well. For this reason, I decided to 'test the water' and see what the 'creative' part of the TP forum thought - that was all :).

Honestly, I find it quite amusing that my wordless OP has excited much 'heated debate' here :D. These are, by my own admission, some of the very worst photographs that I've ever taken and (frankly) some of the worst that I've seen (from the point of view of content) and yet I've had more views and posts in this thread for anything else I've ever done :LOL:! I suppose that it just goes to show what a 'sensational' title can do to attract attention.

Ultimately though, I just saw these shots as being something in the vein of, say, 'smoke painting' (which are pretty well covered on this part of the forum). Of course, nobody accuses the people who create those photos (where there is obviously no prospect of the photographer knowing what shape he/she is going to get) of being 'pretentious' when they name their photos ('The Dancer', 'The Crucifixtion', 'Buddha on a Bicycle' etc.) :p.

Anyway, everyone's entitled to their opinions and plenty of people here have 'called a spade, a spade' ;). Let's leave it at that.
 
Well unusually I've taken the time to read all of the comments before making my own comments on the photos and I've got to say they don't really do anything for me, they don't move me at all :shrug: but keep playing (y)

Matt
MWHCVT
 
Naboo32 said:
The picture that I posted first was a 'reject' from a series of shots that I made to depict the 'cycle of life'. I was curious to see how recognisable the image, which I saw in that frame (too pornographic to explain now ), would be to anyone else . As it turns out, not at all, so I needn't have worried !
Click to expand...
Naboo32 said:
AJH_5779.jpg


Anyway, I enjoyed the experiment and am grateful to everyone who expressed their opinions :).
Click to expand...

and there was me thinking it involved a glow in the dark condom......
 
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