Tenerife: Photo Shoot

Tenerife: Photos from February 2015

In February 2015, me and my family travelled to Tenerife (one of the Canary Islands) of r a week. I took out my sister's Nikon D40X and aimed to utilise some of the rules and theories of photography that I had learnt this courses readings and workshops with the photos I was to take.

From these photos, I wanted to find a connection between them in terms of what they represent about Tenerife.

From these photos, I took a long look at the array I had to choose from and realised that they displayed Tenerife as being a land of lost heritage, a place influenced not just from tourist culture, but cultures from all across the globe. It was from this I realised that the culture located in Los Cristianos, Tenerife, had been 'displaced' from it's origins. 

Therefore, I realised I needed to look more at the national heritage of Tenerife, and it's current influence from other cultures and possible photographers from the area.

Reading Notes

[NOTES COMPILED FROM MULTIPLE READINGS]

CR 9: Basics Photography: Lighting by David Präkel

• There are disadvantages to using flash photography. One being that the exposure is only correct for a set distance, which can produce overexposed foregrounds, which I seem to have taken a lot of photos of as well as dark backgrounds
• Shiny surfaces pronounce really bright reflections when using flash 
• Many photographers use bounce flash or diffusers to improve the light quality 
• Guide Number (GN) = distance (m) X aperture (F.no)

CR 9: Analog to digital: the Indexical Function of Photographic Images by Corey Dzenko

Quoted from the reading 
"Digital technology allows for greater ease in editing than analog photography, because it transforms photographs from objects into data. Thus, digital imaging technology theoretically disrupts previous notions of the indexical connection between photographic images and 'reality'."

• Digital photography challengers the historical belief that photography is a representative of reality in comparison to analog.
• With digital technology, it is arguably easier to edit and create images of objects that never existed in reality, thus casting doubt on the reliability of photography's connection to the real. In her article '"The Shadow of the Object': Photography and Realism," Sarah Kember quotes Fred Ritchin's reactions to digital image ­making in the early 1990s. Ritchin called computer­imaging practices "the end of photography as we have known it" and lamented, "Certainly subjects have been told to smile, photographs have been staged, and other such manipulations have occurred, but now the viewer must question the photograph at the basic physical level of fact."
• On a theoretical level, digital photographs present a challenge to the indexicality of photographic media. No longer does light bounce from an object and cause a physical and chemical reaction of the silver on the photographic emulsion; instead, the image is converted into data, which is seemingly not physical.
• While the process of reading photographs is influenced by the context of the image, just because a photograph is created or distributed with digital technology does not negate its indexical function as many theorists have suggested. Focusing only on the theoretical lack of indexicality in digital images ignores the social uses of analog photography that are now performed by digital images. Because photography functions in multiple areas of society, it is helpful to explore a vernacular example apart from an art context.
• Social applications of digital photography still rely on the assumptions about the functions of analog photographs. The benefits of the new technology, such as the ease of editing and transmission, have resulted in the adoption of digital photography in practices previously completed with analog photographs such as in photojournalism, snapshot photography, and scientific imaging. In using digital images, conventions of earlier formats are maintained in order to create a transition between analog and digital, instead of a distinct switch. For example, online newspapers, which involve digital technology in both the capturing and distribution of images through the internet, use conventions of printed newspapers.

Photo Shoot: One Day in Amsterdam

Photo Shoot: One Day in Amsterdam

Me and my sister went on a spontaneous trip to Amsterdam to meet a family friend there since they'd be studying there for the rest of their academic year. We stayed there for 2 nights and I brought along my sister's camera on one of our days out and took a few photos throughout our day around town. Here are the photos I ended up taking in Amsterdam.