booooooooooookwork: August 2011

Tuesday, 16 August 2011

Stead, O (Ed.) (2001) 150 Treasures. Auckland: D. Bateman, Auckland War Memorial Museum

Photography by Krzysztof Pfeiffer

I took this book along to my first meeting with Museums Wellington, partially to keep some pieces of paper flat, and partially so that I would have some examples of photos used by museums. In the end the book was most useful in the former capacity. The photographs of objects that the museum is interested in is straight forward archival images, lit without shadows and with a reference to scale, and the other photographs are to be of interiors, so also not relevant.

Monday, 15 August 2011

Architecture Lecture

Click on the pictures to see them at a readable size.

These are notes form a contexts lecture on architecture photography, so I'm not sure if you're allowed to mark them or what but they're very relevant to what I'm doing (more so than to my contexts work) so I've put them in as one of my resources.

This is the part where you excuse my horrible scanning by commending me on the use of a real live book rather than the neatly framed jpegs of google images.

These are images by James Merrell from the book

Miller, J. & Miller, M.(1993) Victorian Style. London: M. Beazley

Colonial Cottage is of the late Georgian style, but as Victorian architecture and design was prevalent at the time it was build (1858), I thought it was relevant to do some investigation in this area. Besides, the more architectural photography of crowded rooms I can find, the better.

There is a fireplace in the living room, and a hearth in the kitchen and wash room. While I would like to document these elements, a straight on shot like those above does little to set scene, and therefore is not a road I intend to go down at this juncture.

The rooms themselves are very crowded, as you will see when I put up my room plans in a second. This limits the number of angles I can get when I'm shooting.

How cool is this bookcase/curtain bed!!

Don't worry, that isn't the only reason I've included it in, I'm thinking about cropping, how much of an object, such as a bed, is it necessary to include?

The kitchen table in the cottage is similarly crowded.

Just thinking about angles again.

Shacks and Cabins

Griffith, S. (2010). Shack: In Praise of an Australian Icon. Victoria, Australia: Penguin Group.

Mortaedi, A. (2006). Great Spaces; Cabins; Small Houses in Nature. Barcelona: Links Books

I am interested in these two book as both are full of photographs of the interiors of small structures. The problem I have had with more of the interior design books that I've been looking at is that the rooms are about the size of the whole cottage (garden included).

(shacks) Something that came up in the architecture lecture, and in advise I have found on photographing interiors is to shoot through doors in order to make the room look larger. I kind of think that it makes this room look smaller. However the framing of the door does change the reading of the photograph, making it more welcoming, I think. There are probably a couple of places in the cottage where this would be possible, but I'm not convinced that I like the result. Will have to experiment with digital.

(cabins)

(shacks) This is how I want my windows to be! Completely whited out but not creating camera flare.

(shacks) Thinking about shooting the girl's bedroom. If you look at the floor plan the bed is very close to the door, though it probably isn't possible to get this angle from there. However, shooting it from an angle (not through the door) will be helpful, as it can be difficult to make those big square things look interesting.

(shacks) just thinking about photographing crowded interiors.

(Cabins)

(cabins)

(shacks)

(shacks) crowded room

(cabins)

(shacks)

(shacks) I couldn't do a shot like this in the cottage as there's no way to get up that high. But then I'm not that impressed by the result.

(both shacks) This is interesting.... shooting through things like curtains and grass make the images kind of stalker-ish, I have no idea what meaning they were going for with this effect.