Photography and Cinematography

Before 1826 every image you saw would’ve been drawn or painted.

Photography “Light Picture”

• Medium of Photography is Light
  • Light can transmit an image
• Camera Obscura
  • Camera = Room, Obscura = Dark
    • A room where you can omit and control light
    • Originally invented to help painters. People would project an image on a painting
    • Does not produce Photographs
• Heliography (Helio = Sun, Graph = Writing)
  • Joseph Niepce invented heliography in 1826
    • Exposure time was about 8 hours
    • Light will affect a treated surface and record an image
• The Daguerreotype
  • Easily reproducible form of photography
    • Invented by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
    • This type of photography became very popular

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Boulevard du temple, 1839. Daguerreotype

Photography for the Public

• Kodak Company wanted to make cameras affordable so everyone could have them.
  • People would take photos and send in the film to have it developed. “You press the button and we do the rest”

Purposes of Photography

• Fine Art

Jerry Uelsmann, Apocalypse II, 1967

• Photojournalism
  • Television, Newspaper, News Correspondent

Sam Shere, Hindenburg, Lakehurst N.J

• Editorial Photography
  • Advertising and Fashion
    • Meant to sell things, promote an image, lifestyle, or fashion

Spotlight Photographers 

• Mathew Brady
  • His goal was to take a photo of every important notable person
  • Had daguerreotype salons
  • Photojournalism

Mathew Brady, Photo of Abraham Lincoln

• Ansel Adams
  • Preeminent photographer in the landscape genre

Ansel Adams, Moon and Halfdome

• Dorothea Lange
  • Photographer and Photojournalist
  • Best known for her documentation of the Depression-era

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936.

• Yousuf Karsh
  • Best known for his portraits of notable individuals

Yousuf Karsh, Albert Einstein, 1948.

 

 

 

Cinematography

• Kinemat = Movement, Graphy = Picture
  • Moving Pictures

 

• Celluloid Negatives
  • Invented by William Talbot in 1839, patent sold to George Eastman
  • New process that used paper instead of copper plates
• Studies of Motion
  • Done by Eadweard Muybridge “Animal Locomotion” in 1887
    • He made a sequence of images of a Horse galloping.

Eadweard Muybridge, Galloping Horse

• Persistence of vision
  • Retention of the visual image in the mind
  • 24 frames/second

• Zoopraxiscope
  • A set of cards/drawings that could be spun around to create the illusion of motion
  • A precursor to film

Three Necessary Elements of Film

• Flexible connected images
  • William Talbot – Celluloid
• Artificial light source
  • Thomas Edison – Light Bulb
• Projector
  • Lumiere Brothers

Technical Advances

• Sound 1927
• Color 1930

Terms

• Full shot – head to toe
• Medium shot – waist up
• Close up – head and shoulders
• Extreme close up – part of face
• Long shot – distance
• Pan shot – camera moving side to side
• Traveling shot – front to back
• Iris shot – darkening at edge
• Editing – creative assembling of film
• Cross cut – two or more scenes together
• Flashback – cut to earlier time
• Special Effects
• Animation
• Auteur – In film it means a person who has tremendous creative control over their film (D.W Griffith, Charlie Chaplain, Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Ingemar Bergman)

Thursday Class Review

• Fred Ott’s Sneeze
  • Also known as Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze
  • Directed and produced by William K. L. Dickson
  • In the short film one of Thomas Edison’s assistants, Fred Ott, sneezes.
• 1895 the Lumiere brothers invented the movie projector in 1895
• Gone With the Wind used the color Red expressively