HISTORY OF IMAGING
(Summary 2)
In
this summary I shall be going through the process taken by a crew of 3 persons being
Ryan Muirhead, Tanja Lippert and Tia Reagan to produce a series of YouTube
photography tutorials, this particular video being about the history of
imaging.
They
start off with a humoristic video introduction in which they are dressed in a
kind of hippie style, followed by a one to one personal introduction, all three
of them point out the fact that they are photographers and share the same love
for 35mm film. Again the famous quote of eat, sleep, breath photography, which was
previously mentioned in summary 1 by Michael Yamashita, is again repeated confirming
its validity. They explain what the content of this series will be, rendering
the viewer curious and instantly inspired by the intelligent use of explanation
and short clips of themselves while using various different equipment, although
it is clearly that the main focus will be on film photography, Reagan points
out that there intention is to inspire photographers from all fields being film
or digital.
Muirhead
makes a statement that “In order to know
where you are going, you have to know where you came from” rightly so this
stands correctly for the photographic field, once a person has a solid
background about the origin of photography, he/she can see things from a
different point of view by having a more intimate approach, rather than just
snapping the shutter of a camera without any vision. Their first guest
photographer is Travis Lowell, which is also a professor at Utah University. In
his introduction Lowell states that he works mainly with large format cameras,
since life is so superficial and accruing too fast, working with a large format
camera enables him to slow down and actually think a lot more before taking and
image. In a whole days work only around 24 pictures are produced, this is a
great approach for having a solid vision before taking an image, on contrary to
the digital photographer which is a happy snapper taking hundreds of images
consequently without any real thought. Lowell explains the process of the
daguerreotype, he manages to briefly describe how it was invented but more
importantly he points out the fact that a Daguerreotype has a personal and
intimate value, since each image is unique and not reproducible. The Calotype
process is also explained in a manner to be understood by the amateur
photographer, together with the use of collodian and the wet process. After
this very part, one can understand the great difficulties encountered by the
photographers in that era, having to actually carry and set up a darkroom to
immediately process the glass plates, since the collodian required to be kept
wet for the whole process. This makes us realize the giant achievements in the
photographic world, and maybe complain less when carrying a camera for a long
period of time.
The
second guest photographer is Matt McDaniel, where he actually explains and
conducts the process of the tintype, which is also a wet process. Each of them
took turns in photographing each other, developing the images and evaluating
the end results. In the last 10 minutes of the video Lowell explains how
photography was transformed into a money making tool, where photographers used
to travel to exotic places, take images and sell them as stereographs or cards
de visit. The improvements in photography, which led to photography as we know
it nowadays was also discussed by Lowell, in-between the hosts expressed their
feelings and thoughts on what they have performed and learned.
As a
video this was produced with a huge dose of enthusiasm and lots of laughs, but
still it is extremely powerful in both technique and the history side of
photography. This informal approach works wonder to attract an audience which
otherwise would discard the usual boring video, their attitude alone gives life
to the documentary while other things like sitting and having a discussion on
the floor, puts away all the formality. A direct hands on approach is adopted
and keeps the viewer attention to the max, seeing this video conducted in such
way gave me both technical knowledge and inspiration to research further in
into the subject. Since the two guest photographers are established
professionals, they know what they are talking about, both have equipment and
original photographic works such as daguerreotypes to study and give demonstrations
of the various processes. I decided to venture in viewing the work of each
person involved in this production, and with no surprise all of their work is
utmost inspirational with creative thinking out of the box.
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