My inspiration - Part 1 - Hiroshi Sugimonto

• Sugimoto was born in Tokyo, in 1948, and now splits his time between there and New York. 
• His main preoccupation as an artist is with time, and how best to capture its meaning. 
• His tool is the camera, and he self-deprecatingly likes to say that he applied to study photography because it was the easiest discipline to be accepted in at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where he received his BFA in Fine Arts. 
• But given the last century’s long debate about the value and place of photography in fine art, Sugimoto’s body of work is proof that the medium belongs firmly alongside sculpture and painting. If a photograph is a record of what we see, then Sugimoto is obsessed with how we see. 
• One of his earliest and most impressive series is the ongoing Dioramas series, which he began in the mid 1970s, in which he photographed prehistoric scenes of life on display at the American Museum of Natural History.

Sugimoto is a master of the long exposure and the large-format camera; the scenes are static and preserved, but in the true black and white tones of his gelatin silver prints, they are not entirely lifeless, either.
Sugimoto’s ability to trick the eye – even in just an instant – juxtaposed with his open acknowledgement of the scene’s artificiality, demonstrates both his playful curiosity and also his rigorous technique.
‘The stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake,’ Sugimoto has said before of the Dioramas photographs. ‘Yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I’d found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.’

Sugimoto has inspired me completely because he gave me the idea on which to focus.
The passing of time. The fact that human movement in long exposure doesn't exist.
All that's left is the nature, the movement of the sea, the sky and so on.

Project Proposal

My project is focused on Long exposure photography. My inspiration comes from Hiroshi Sugimoto and his Seascapes. I am also interested in night photography.

Because I can't decide between long exposure and astrophotography I decided to focus on Pictorialisms.

In my project I want to illustrate the passing of time. What we can't see because of the blinking of the eyes. And that the camera is similar to a brush, but it's colours are the light itself.

I inspired from this pictures:

Landscape - first try

This will be a weekly section of the blog like the "People that I love" with pictures I took of places that I love and are part of me.

Kit that I use - Part 1

Hi guys, as I decided that my project is gonna be on Long Exposure I realised that I need a kit to be able to take long exposure pictures during day light. This is why I bought some Neutral Density filters along with cpl filter and a remote for the shutter.

I bought them from amazon you can see them here:

I had to buy an individual neutral density filter of 10 stops because I couldn't find it in any pack and this one is the most important one.

Now, if you don't know what filters are exactly and what to do I found a nice example. Also, I think the simplest definition of them is that they are like sunglasses for your lenses. 

For example, one might wish to photograph a waterfall at a slow shutter speed to create a deliberate motion-blur effect. The photographer might determine that to obtain the desired effect, a shutter speed of ten seconds was needed. On a very bright day, there might be so much light that even at minimal film speed and a minimal aperture, the ten-second shutter speed would let in too much light, and the photo would be overexposed. In this situation, applying an appropriate neutral-density filter is the equivalent of stopping down one or more additional stops, allowing the slower shutter speed and the desired motion-blur effect.

Long exposure tutorials

This tutorials helped me for my shootings.

My pictures after I watched the tutorials:

Photographers I admire - Part 1: August Sander

• German Portrait and Documentary Photographer
• 17 November 1876-20 April 1986
• Regarded as “the most important German portrait Photographer of the early twentieth century” (Michael Collins, Record Pictures (Thomas Telford Publishing, 2004), p. 1842 )
• first book “Face of our Time” (German: Antlitz der Zeit) was published in 1929. 
• Known for his “people of the 20th century” project,that spanned the majority of his career

Technique and aesthetic styling

• Sander did not use the newly invented Leica camera. Instead he remained devoted to an old-fashioned large-format camera, glass negatives and long exposure times. This allowed him to capture minute details of individual faces.
• his portraits were anonymous. Shot against neutral backgrounds and titled more often than not by profession alone, he let the images – and the faces in them – speak for themselves.

Influence and Legacy

• One of the pioneers of Documentary/social commentative photography
• The ambition and reach of “People of the 20th Century” (both in terms of the quality of his photography and in his representation of a cross-section of society) made him a monumental figure of twentieth century photography.
• The work of conceptual artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher and Rineke Dijkstra, resonates with the influence of August Sander’s career-long project.

“The portrait is your mirror. It’s you.”

~August Sander