5. Solidifying my ideas

3 main ideas have sprung to mind. 

Having spoken with Andy Thorpe after the practical on 29/10/14, it prompted me to think more creatively and it ultimately led me to three main ideas that i would like to decide between.

I can use some of the after/post production work on either idea. 

1. Initial idea of using the 'Timer Remote' to capture the image and the movement in between the start and end of one movement - showing the movement continuously but in one image, evenly spaced out. Showing each stage of the movement - passing of time. In post production, I can then layer on representations of time e.g. stopwatch, pocket watch, hour glass, sundial. Using light to give shadows that tell the time. E.g. half the body would be in darkness/shadow = 12:30pm or something. 3/4 of the body would be in view = 11:45. 

e.g. www.perfectlandscape.com/frozen_motion/Portfolio_1.html#22
e.g. www.perfectlandscape.com/frozen_motion/Portfolio_1.html#20


2. Using powder to show the passing of time. Jump in the air and powder falls around the dancer - giving the concept of movement in the picture and showing the passing of seconds as she jumps with the powder, but then parallel to that and juxtaposing the stillness of the dancer in midair. Perfectly still. 

e.g. www.loisgreenfield.com/galleries/airborne/index.html
This gives ideas for lighting too.

Simpler movement and maybe less complicated visually - more to prepare.  


3. !!!!! Dance is tied so intrinsically to time - portraying that in my images. - works well with the essay route too. Time being the core to dance. Could use an old pocket watch to hold the dancer up in the air - create the watch and the 'holding up' part in photoshop/illustrator. The pocket watch can be always supporting her - the chain of the pocket watch can tangle and entwine around her - showing the tie to the concept of time. 

e.g. www.loisgreenfield.com/galleries/airborne/index.html?pg=3 

The chain can support her - make it thick and tree/root like surrounding her. The idea of support ^ 

Richard Calmes Photography
James Rowbotham Dance Photography 

I have started to create the clock already - for practice more than anything, a first attempt. Followed these instructions ..... 

psd.fanextra.com/tutorials/drawing/how-to-create-a-stopwatch-illustration-in-photoshop/

4. Exploring time in photography

PHOTOGRAPHY, CINEMA, MEMORY; THE CRYSTAL IMAGE OF TIME. Damian Sutton.

p.39. 'The photograph is often considered timeless, negating time or simply poor in comparison to cinema. Andre Bazin, for example, might have talked of cinema as "changed mummified", but photography, for him, "embalms time" itself.'

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Potentially look at iconography/concepts that depict time in our day to day lives and merge them/forget about them in my images. Time lapse can help with this - opened, long exposure - allowing for movement to show the passing of time. Each photograph you see is generally still, excluding Bresson's decisive moment where they show movement within the image. They encompass a part of cinema - a moving image. 

3. Time Lapse Night

In relation to Stephen Wilkes Day and Night project, i've now done a quick night time lapse on my iPhone 5c to compare the two. 

I'm learning it takes a long time to generate 5 seconds of time lapse. Having watched Stephen Wilkes video on his website i learnt it took him 4 months to generate one image. He would stand on a crane and be lifted up to the birds eye view, before setting up his camera for a solid 15hours of photo taking. Over this time period, he would take 1400 images and then have to sift through each one to notice the smallest of differences and make a story in his image.

2. Quotes to fuel my imagination

A Short History of Photography, Benjamin, W. 1931.

• p.203 "the phenomenon of photography was still a great secret experience,".
• p.204 "all possibilities of this portrait art rested upon the fact that the connection between actuality and photo had not yet been entered upon."
• p.204 "The synthesis of expression which was achieved through the long immobility of the model, Orlik says of the early photographs, is the chief reason besides their simplicity why these photographs, like well drawn or painted likenesses, exercise a more penetrating, longer-lasting effect on the observer than photographs taken more recently. The procedure itself caused the models to live, not out of the instant, but into it; during the long exposure they grew, as it were, into the image."
• p.209 "What is aura? A strange web of time and space: the unique appearance of a distance, however close at hand. On a summer noon, resting, to follow the line of a mountain range on the horizon or a twig which throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or hour begins to be a part of its appearance - that is the breathe the aura of those mountains, that twig. [...] Day by day the need becomes greater to take possession of the object [...]".
• p.210 "They are not lonely but voiceless; the city in these pictures is swept clean like a house which has not yet found its new tenant. These are the sort of effects with which Surrealist photography established a healthy alienation between environment and man [...]. On the other hand, the renunciation of the human image is the most difficult of all things for photography."

The Ontology of the Photographic Image, Bazin, A. 1960. 

• p.4 "Thus, by providing a defence against the passage of time it satisfied a basic psychological need in man, for death is but the victory of time. To preserve, artificially, his bodily appearance is to snatch it from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life." The photograph naturally fights time, the photography can physically age and deteriorate but still holds that one moment in time at your fingertips. The Egyptians tried to fight against time by preserving their bodies.
• p.7 "[...] photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness. Painting was forced, as it turned out, to offer us illusion and this illusion was reckoned sufficient unto art. Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism."
• p.7 "Again, the essential factor in the transition from the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process (photography will long remain the inferior of painting in the reproduction of colour); rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying out appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays no part. The solution is not to be found in the result achieved but in the way of achieving it."

1. Time Lapse

The idea of time lapse. Stephen Wilkes http://www.stephenwilkes.com/fine-art/day-to-night/52fa8aed-0fd8-4f59-9230-47f50af4b6c2  - gathering multiple copies of the same images but at different times of the day and merging together to give a panoramic, progressive effect over the picture. 
Most influential picture for me:

Day to Night, Pont de la Tournelle Paris

This image is my favourite as there isn't too much going on in the sense of people but it shows a great deal of movement and is mesmerising for the audience. There are many channels where the eye can be led down which encourages you to explore each individual moment of the picture. Even though the image is still, there is a lot of moment and time progression happening which is amazing to look at and study.

My version of basic time-lapse....getting used to the idea.! 
iPhone 5c generated.

 

From this small test I can see the sky moving over a very short space of time which is very interesting for me. I'll see what it looks like in different locations. This was shot overlooking Park Row. - birds eye view like Stephen Wilkes.