Month: <span>March 2017</span>

Published March 31, 2017 by

April Fool’s Day and prank photos

April Fools, prank, prank photo, illusion,
Halifax, NS, 2011                 © Avard Woolaver 

For decades, prank photos have been popular on April Fool’s Day. They typically appear in a newspaper or online with an alarming or puzzling caption like “Wisconsin State Capital Collapses” or “Bicycle Flies Over Amsterdam.”

Before Photoshop, the process of faking a photo was more complex, and could involve multiple exposures, airbrushing, hand retouching, and other composite photo techniques. This usually required a lot of work in the darkroom. Most early April Fool’s prank photos seem crude by today’s standards, but sometimes they were pretty slick–as in the 1926 German photo of a “Triple Decker City Bus.”

Some pranks are evergreen and may even become expected. U.S. political writer Andrew Sullivan, who now writes for New York magazine but for years had his own blog (the Dish), celebrated April Fool’s Day every year by RickRolling his readers. Yes: every single year. Andrew has a New York column scheduled to appear this Friday; check it out to see whether he’ll do it once again.

Where photos are concerned, digital technology immediately made it so much easier and faster to manipulate and retouch for effect. One of the best known of recent years is a photo spoof that appeared in the April edition of Popular Photography in 2005. Dorothea Lange’s famous picture of a migrant mother was given a digital makeover so that she would fit in better with magazine advertising. True, it was a clever commentary on the superficiality of retouching; but it hit a nerve and produced hundreds of comments, both positive and negative. (Many people found it more demeaning to the subject than funny.)

Do keep in mind that a prank is just that. Once a year we are allowed to take some liberties. If you’re the person doing the fooling, be sure you’re not stepping on anyone else’s dignity in a misguided attempt to be humourous.

And if you’re the one who gets fooled, remember to enjoy it. Of course you’re the smartest person in the room! Obviously! So if someone is able to put something over on you on April 1, appreciate their cleverness and laugh it off. You can always start planning right away for next year.

Colour Observation Photography Social Landscape

April Fools Day Avard Woolaver cookie humour Nalifax Nova Scotia photography prank smiley face social landscape

Published March 30, 2017 by

McDog – photo by Avard Woolaver

dog, Humor, McDog,
McDog, Windsor, NS; 2013                           © Avard Woolaver

from the series: Wish You Were Here

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Avard Woolaver Canon Rebel T3 colour documentary dog humour McDog photography social landscape

Published March 29, 2017 by

April Fool’s Day photo tricks for kids

April Fools Day, photo tricks, forced perspective,
Stay Posted, Newport, NS; 2011     © Avard Woolaver             

April Fool’s Day is approaching, and if you are thinking of a trick for your kids or grandchildren, you can do it with photo tricks. This can be done in several ways, but perhaps the most fun is the use of forced perspective—a way photographers use optical illusions to make an object appear farther away, closer, larger, or smaller than it actually is.

This is going to go over best with really young children. You can set up a shot to make the child look bigger or smaller than an object in the frame, and give it to the kid to “fool Grandma” or “fool Dad.” It takes a tiny bit of pre-planning but isn’t much work, and doing it creates a warm memory you share with the child.

You might want to use familiar objects that are part of the child’s everyday world—a stuffed toy, a porch railing, your car—for instance, you can set up a shot so that the child seems to be balancing the car on one upturned hand.

Photo manipulation and trick photography has been present since the beginning of the photographic medium in the 1800s. In 2012, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York showed how photographers long before the digital era regularly employed techniques of manipulation in their work. Mia Fineman, assistant curator of photography at the Met, told PBS, “Fake decapitation was the LOLcats of the 19th century.”

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Photo tip: For successful forced perspective shots, use a tripod; use a wide-angle lens, and an aperture to keep subjects in focus (f16 of f22). If you want to force perspective to create an illusion of size then use two subjects that are universally recognized–the palm of a hand and a car, or a fence post and a skier.

“Stay Posted” is from the series: Wish You Were Here

Colour Documentary Observation Photography Techniques

April Fools Day Avard Woolaver forced perspective new topographics Nova Scotia skier

Published March 27, 2017 by

Hands chart our passage through time

hands, hand portrait, Nova Scotia, 2017,
Hands, Newport, NS; 2017          © Avard Woolaver 

We can learn a lot about people by looking at their hands. Close-up photos of them are often taken when the subjects are newborns or elderly people, but probably relatively few are taken during other phases of life. Hands can say a lot about our interaction with each other and with the world. UK photographer Tim Booth believes the hands tell a more honest story about what a person has been through than faces.

American portrait artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) paid particular attention to hands in order to reveal his sitters’ temperament.  Stephanie Herdrich, in an article on the Metropolitan Museum website, writes, “Sargent’s accentuation of hand gestures reveals details about his sitters’ personalities or moods and, in some cases, the sitters’ relationship with the artist.”

Another thing you might take note of when photographing is how your own hands are changing over time. For me, it’s one way I see my own age. In the past few years I’ve developed vitiligo (loss of skin pigmentation, resulting in white patches) on my hands; they look quite different from the way they did a few years ago. It doesn’t bother me and I don’t try to cover it up—it’s mostly a cosmetic thing, not a real health concern—but it is a part of me that has changed, and changed quickly. Since I respond to so much of my daily life from my perspective as a photographer, one way I can notice physical changes over time is through photographs.

You’ve no doubt had the familiar sinking feeling that comes from looking through photos from a few years earlier and thinking, Wow, I’m getting old. I looked so much younger then. (When it hasn’t even been that long, sometimes.) This is something my wife and I talk about often. Age is always at our heels; youth is always receding in the mirror.

Nothing keeps reminding us of that like ordinary snapshots. In that sense, the snapshots that document our most everyday moments become the ones that most accurately chart our passage through time.

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Photo tip: It’s a worthwhile endeavor to document the hands of family members over time to see the effects of time and age.

“Hands” appears on Photo Vogue–Vogue Italia website.

Colour Family Photography Portrait Social Landscape

2017 Avard Woolaver documentary hands Nova Scotia photography

Published March 22, 2017 by

Poetry is like the latent image

sunrise, Toronto, poem, poetry, latent image, imagery, image,
Sunrise on Gerrard East, Toronto, 1982   © Avard Woolaver 

In analog photography, the image is invisible and remains hidden on the film until it magically appears during development. Poetry can remain in our minds like a latent image. Here is a poem I wrote about this phenomenon.

 

Latent Image

 

Immersed under a film of random moments

A whisper of time when all was exposed

Then quickly hidden in a latent image

Time passed, time past

The moment is, the moment was

But I remember it differently:

I thought the light on the horizon

Was a holy orb

Lifting my spirit upward

I needed the picture to be whole

 

–Avard Woolaver, 2017

 

“Sunrise on Gerrard East, Toronto, 1982” is from the book: Toronto Flashback (1980-1986)

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Avard Woolaver colour film photography latent image poem poetry sunrise Toronto Flashback (1980-1986)