Find a scene that has depth. From a fixed position, take a sequence of five or six shots at different focal lengths without changing your viewpoint. (You might like to use the specific focal lengths indicated on the lens barrel.) As you page through the shots on the preview screen it almost feels as though you’re moving through the scene. So the ability to change focal lengths has an obvious use: rather than physically move towards or away from your subject, the lens can do it for you. But zooming is also a move towards abstraction, which, as the word itself tells us, is the process of ‘drawing things away’ from their context.
Zooming also allows you to capture details at higher resolutions and this has been memorably explored in cinema. The film Blade Runner (Dir. Ridley Scott, 1982) provides a prescient vision of the future of photography from just before the dawn of the digital age.
The blade runner Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) treasures his old, silver-based family photographs but, like us, he uses a screen for viewing images at work. With his ‘Esper’ machine he can navigate around an image in virtual three dimensions by using voice commands. The resolution is incredible (think Google Earth) but at maximum resolution where you would expect to see pixels the image just dissolves into film grain.
In Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up (1966), David Hemmings plays a disaffected young photographer (based partly on David Bailey) who accidentally photographs a murder. Hoping to understand the situation that he’d unwittingly witnessed, he frantically ‘blowsup’ the negatives to the limit of intelligibility, but the result is inconclusive. The frustratingly unresolved situation is a favourite motif of Antonioni as a comment on modern life.
‘Google Arts and Culture’ offer a digitally immersive exploration of cultural institutions around the world through a combination of very high-resolution images and Google’s own ‘Street View’ technology. While Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’ shot on a gigapixel camera is admittedly impressive, zooming in to it ultimately just resolves to craquelure and dust. https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/about/users/
Taking inspiration from the examples above or from your own research, create a final image for your sequence. In EYV the important thing is to present your work in context, so make it clear in your notes what you’ve been looking at and reading. The focus here is on imagination and research skills rather than the technical aspects of zoom.
Before even starting the exercise I wanted to check which mode in my camera is Aperture priority mode, so I did a quick search and found this great video 'manual' for my current camera (Canon M5)
The aperture priority mode is AV.
I also did a great course in Skillshare Fundamentals of DSLR Photography by Justin Bridges
Even though my camera is mirrorless, this course covers all the technical skills I needed to learn as a base. Until now I photographed quite intuitively, so it was good to learn the fundamentals of photography - Shutter speed, Aperture and ISO in depth.
I started by doing my research about the movies and artwork mentioned, so I am more prepared to do this exercise.
I haven't watched either of the movies so I needed to read and watch futher in order to understand what these forms of zooms are.
As I found this video from the Blade Runner, showing the Epser machine, I could understand better what the description was talking about.
I thought it was very cool to see that in 1982 Dir. Ridley Scott had the imagination to come up with such a machine, which later on - nowadays, is used by google earth for instance.
I also searched the movie Blow Up to understand how the photographer there was using these ideas of blowing up images to find out evidences.
I found this article which also have a video from the movie, so I managed to understand better again what the brief was talking about.
I really like investigating things as well as investigating movies, so I really liked these two examples.
I also was trying to research google arts and culture, and found Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’, but for some reason I couldn't zoom into it, but I understood the point.
I wanted to bring in these ideas into my final shot, so I wanted to do this research first.
I decided to go to the forest near my house as there are beautiful paths which can create very nice depth of field.
My lens is 15-45 and has few segments for focus:
15, 18, 24, 28, 25, 45
I decided to take a photo on each segment.
Placed my camera on a tripod and took photos according to the segment, on some I had to adjust focus.
I wanted to hide an element in the field so only when blowing up the image people can find a pair of sunglasses. Inspired by the examples.
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