Tuesday, 18 September 2012

The beauty of capturing things we cannot see

Photographer: Matthew Pillsbury

When I first started doing this, I was already entranced by the beauty of capturing something that we cannot see with our own eyes. I love photographs that depict a sense of mystery as it gets us the human mind to tap into that part of our brain that helps us to analyze and think on a more deeper level. We are so used to seeing solid things, that we don't have the time to appreciate looking at the beauty of capturing images that we can not see ourselves.  Matthew Pillsbury was, and is till this day a Photographer that highly motivates me. For my A-level coursework in Year 12 I experimented capturing these sort of Photographs as I was not only interested in the mystery of it, but also the supernatural side of it as it captures ghost like images through our movements.

                                                                       Example of his work: 



                      Examples of my own work:



This took a while more me to do as I had to find the right location and set the right Shutter Speed on my Camera. Before I started to do my final Images, I asked my Cousin, who has very grateful to be my model at the time, to do some test shots. I ended up getting a large variety of shots much like the ones above, however the result was only final when I found the correct exposure and shutter speed through a series of tests. Because I couldn't obviously take some of the Photographs myself I had to set my Camera up on a tripod and put it on a 10 second time. In that 10 seconds I can work exactly where I should go and what I want to capture on the camera. After getting the images I wanted I printed them of and layed them on top of my table looking at which ones where the best. I viewed a lot of his photographs on the interenet, in order for me to be more inspired and take more photographs.

On the International Centre of Photography website, I also watched his video about how he did this and what he thought about his own work. The video boosted gave me some more knowledge on his work and kept me motivated long enough to do even more. I had the chance to view his pictures In the International Centre of Photography Studio ( New York ) whilst on a College trip in 2010 and 2011, however, I didn't get there in time and his work was already removed from the display. But despite that, I still enjoyed viewing all the photographs inside the studio as I got to analyze some of the pieces with the rest of my group.

http://lectures.icp.edu/videos/Pillsbury2008.html (Link to his video/lecture)

http://www.icp.org/ (ICP site- The International Centre of Photography is a small studio in New York)

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