Category: photography

Categories
photography

Marjorie Sear, Ballerina 1939

Miss Marjorie Sear in a beautiful hand-coloured photograph. This is the only colour photograph of her from a recently acquired and comprehensive set of Marjorie and her friends all in dance poses. Many of the photographs are dated around 1939 and this is likely to be from the same period.

I first came across Miss Sear when I bought a set of 22 sepia photographs of her. When I acquired this set the only identification was the envelope in which they came addressed to “Miss Sear.” They came in an envelope from Jerome Ltd of Kings Cross Road London. They were all date stamped 31 March 1939. It wasn’t until I was later able to acquire two more sets of photographs from the same source that I was able to identify her as Marjorie Sear. One photograph records her age as 15 on the reverse but there are obviously some when she is older and a few when she is younger.

A black and white version of the coloured photograph.

About half of the 60+ photos feature Marjorie with her friends in various dance costumes both on stage and outside. Whatever happened in their later lives they were clearly all enthusiastic dancers and liked to dress up.

As ever I am amazed how family treasures such as this set of photographs can disappear into salerooms and ebay having been lost or discarded. I know that these photos came from a house clearance and so I assume Marjorie Sear is dead and there are no relatives who survive her and want to keep her memory alive. How many more marvellous documents of social and personal history have been lost for all time? You can see the full set of photographs of Marjorie and her friends in this flickr album.

Categories
photography

About Cabinet Cards

I’ll be posting examples of my own collection of old photographs starting with cabinet cards. Cabinet cards were first produced in the 1860s but did not reach peak popularity until the 1880s by which time they had largely replaced the smaller carte de visite. Soon cabinet cards would also be overtaken by the introduction of the Box Brownie in 1900 making it possible for everyone to make their own photos.

The cabinet card shown at the top of this post is a fairly typical example of the ever-popular family group. I used this as part of the back cover design for my book Alchemists of time. Tracking down details of the studios and photographers who made these cards is not an easy job. Even when we have  the name of the studio on the card it’s more likely than not that the studio disappeared many years ago and often without trace. There are resources that can help but that’s a topic for another post.

It’s always nice to find cards from your own locality, in my case Derby and Nottingham, though the same problems of provenance apply. These two are from Derby, one a portrait of a girl, the other a “candid” shot of a woman sprawled out over chairs. Who said all Victorian portraits involve someone standing straight and with a serious expression?

Rabbit man is one of my personal favourites, this time from a Nottingham studio. I suspect the rabbits were bred to eat rather than being pets but we’ll never know.

Black for mourning is often to be seen as is white (for purity?)

And what’s this dog thinking?

And finally I couldn’t resist inserting myself into a cabinet card, the surround being from a Victorian photo album designed to take cabinet cards.

( If you think you’ve seen or read some of this before it’s quite possible as my former blog imploded so I’ll be recreating entries here).

Categories
photography

Experiments in pictorialism

Wikipedia says “Pictorialism is an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. There is no standard definition of the term, but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph as a means of creating an image rather than simply recording it. …. For the pictorialist, a photograph, like a painting, drawing or engraving, was a way of projecting an emotional intent into the viewer’s realm of imagination.”  The rest of the Wikipedia article is comprehensive and is linked to some famous examples. I recommend it if you want find out more.

So I set out to try and produce some photographs in pictorialist style. I started with this shot. I was the photographer and model was Arabella.

After some experiments and online research I managed to produce my own Photoshop action. And this was the result:

I then tweaked the photo more before posting it to my flickr stream. (I can’t remember exactly what I did with this one to get the result). It’s the photo at the head of this blog post. Overall I was pleased with the result though I can never be one hundred per cent happy with anything!

Later I tried some actions produced by Gavin Seim. He’s a photographer I have a lot of time for and he produces some high quality actions. There are a lot of people online forever hawking photoshop, brushes, actions and other extensions to Photoshop and I usually find their results pretty pedestrian. Seim’s the only one I rate highly and I use a number of his actions. So his pictorialist actions are based on works by Hamilton (a controversial figure now), Stieglitz, Orton and Coburn. I give a result for each of these below but it should be said that there are different mixes and a likely infinity of changes to the actions if you have the patience to work with them.

Finally I generated an AI version using Openart AI. Actually I generated a lot of versions, all using my original photo of Arabella as reference, but this was the closest it came to a pictorialist photograph.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is OpenartVersion.jpg

So which version is best, by which I mean which is the closest to pictorialism? I’d like to think it was the one I ended up posting on flickr but you may think differently.

Categories
photography

Some thoughts on AI, Art and Photography

I’ll have lots to say on AI in future postings but for now I want to confine my remarks and thoughts to the types of software that can be used to make and enhance creative assets. There are lots of them about and they are easy to use but how good are they and what is my experience with them?

As a keen photographer my go to program is Photoshop and just lately it’s been touting its AI capabilities and I’ve had cause to use those new capabilities. Take the pair of photographs at the head of this blog. On the left I have a photograph of the ballerina Erica Mulkern taken earlier this year. I was very pleased with this shot but I couldn’t help noticing that part of Erica’s right hand was out of the frame making it less than perfect. The photo of Erica on the right is after I used Photoshop’s creative fill action to make her right hand whole again. It took a couple of iterations to get right but it wasn’t time consuming. Can you tell that the right hand photo has been changed artificially? I suspect not but I know and it doesn’t make me happy. I’m not opposed to tweaking photos, no one is except the very few photographers who believe if it isn’t captured in camera it isn’t a pure photograph. In general I and most photographers will use filters, cropping, changing white balance, using third party filters etc., to achieve a desired result. But in all those cases I’m in charge of where to crop, how strong to make a filter and so on. In the case of Photoshop’s generative fill it’s just a matter of dragging a cropped area and letting it create the fill (half a hand for instance) or specifying in text what you want to see. It feels like some of the creativity is being taken away from the human creator.

But there was worse to come and you can see why in the two “photos” below.

I’m not the kind of photographer who’s just interested in one type of subject. I like to try my hand at many different things although I have an abiding interest in Victorian and Edwardian photography. Recently I’ve been reading and researching the topic of pictorialism in art and photography and decided I’d like to try my hand at reproducing something similar to the likes of Steiglitz or Clarence White. So, I looked up some examples of pictorialist photographs, experimented with using Photoshop layers to achieve the desired result, hired a model, travelled to a suitable location, took several hundred photos, imported them into Photoshop and post processed them to get the look I was aiming for. On the left you can see one of the photos of Arabella made to look something like a pictorialist photo. In other words to get to that photograph took a lot of time and effort and collaboration.

On the right you can see a photograph (or is it?) produced by Openart AI when given the prompt “A barefoot woman in a floaty dress in pictorialist style.” Time to generate this picture? About 30 seconds. This is the first time ever that I’ve been impressed by software purporting to be AI driven. Clearly I’ve not been paying sufficient attention.