Here are some things that caught my eye, and ear, on social media this week:
Bill and Joel Plaskett’s new album and tour,
Blog by Czech Republic photographer Pavel Petros,
Toronto in photos from the 1920s,
Wonderful art from Stacy Blint,
Photographing Japan’s cherry blossoms,
Lee Morgan – Theme for Stacey (1965),
Record snowfall in Newfoundland,
Norwegian artist Beathe C. Ronning
Aerial photography has been practiced since Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar, photographed Paris from a hot air balloon in 1858. Drones are just the latest method of doing aerial photography. New Canadian regulations make recreational drone photography more difficult, and, in many cities, downright impossible. But taking photographs with a drone is considered commercial, as opposed to recreational, so different rules apply.
Transportation minister Marc Garneau pointed out in a CBC interview that “people who use drones for commercial, academic, or research reasons already have to get a special certificate, and most fly them safely.”
Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky uses helicopters and small aircraft for breathtaking aerial photographs that call attention to environmental issues. In China, he had a lot of problems with slow-moving bureaucracy and decided to experiment with a drone. In a story in the Telegraph, Burtynsky explained, “The whole process started from the question, ‘How can I stand where I want to stand and shoot from where I want to shoot, in a place where I can’t get up in the air?’”
Drone photography has many potential problems. Lucy Davies, writer of the Telegraph piece, pointed out, “Drone photographers are on the increase, but the number of people who are getting decent results from them remains low. There is a saying in the industry that every production company has a broken drone in the cupboard, which is fairly accurate. It’s not as easy as it looks.”
Additionally, there are all the security and privacy issues. Tiny drones already exist, and they are only likely to get smaller. Every time I read a drone story, I remember Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slapstick, with miniaturized people zipping around undetectably.
Ultimately, it’s good to keep in mind that art is produced by people, not by machines.
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Phototip: If don’t have a drone to capture photos, try to find a high rise with a glass enclosed elevator.
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.
from the series: Wish You Were Here
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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