Appropriate use

Tilt shift as an artistic technique has perhaps lost some of the shock of it's originality, except for those who aren't familiar with it. I decided to use it for my Constructions exhibition because I thought that it was now 'mature' and could work within the larger theme of playing with scale.

I had considered using it in combination with the proportional distortion I used for the principal images. The test shot for that is below. While I felt that it was an interesting image and that the techniques worked together rather than against each other I decided that for the exhibition my intentions were better served in other ways.

Stadium construction

In the end I made a secondary set of images using tilt-shift as a sort of complimentary exhibition within the main body of work. I found themes that I had not been fully aware of to do with scale and playfulness. The distorted panoramas gave the viewer an odd shift in perspective (literally and figuratively) and the compositing of sandpit toys into the construction site further meddled with the issue of scale. The tilt-shift images played with scale in a different way inducing a feeling of 'Am I looking at a model?'

I feel that I achieved something with this exhibition other than interesting images from an unusual viewpoint in that there was a sense of fun evident in a subject that has become divisive and turgid.

School of Art

Tilt shift masters

I first came across the tilt-shift technique in a post on bOING bOING, the culture/technology blog. It was about Olivo Barbieri's waterfall series, an image from that is below. Then I found a tutorial on using photoshop to simulate the effect of tilting the focal plane and I was off in a new creative hobby! I loved the 'Oh no! your messing with my brain!' comments I got from friends. Transforming familiar scenes with a false sense of scale was very interesting and lots of fun.

The images below are from early users of the technique and date from the mid 90's. I'm not sure which are digital blurs and which are optical but I am impressed with the artistry and how my brain gets messed with.

Vincent Laforet

Toni Hafkenscheid

Toni Hafkenscheid

Olivo Barbieri

Olivo Barbieri

Gérard Pétremand

Gérard Pétremand

Construction blurs

Red Girl

Princes Street

Orange Digger

Train Station

Construction blurs

Red Crane

Fence Boy

High street demolition

Queens Gardens

Yellow Digger

These images make up the secondary set within the Constructions exhibition. It's all about scale or something. Read the blurb:

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

What’s in it for me?

People keep asking me what I think of the stadium and my response is always ambivalent. Maybe I’m protecting my future commercial opportunities or maybe I think I shouldn’t criticise financial responsibility as shonky as my own. Either way this exhibition isn’t about the controversy.

I have taken on the task of recording the changes to the Awatea Street area as it changes during the stadium construction. This is part of a greater project of photographically documenting Dunedin’s industrial heritage.

The work put into demolition and construction make a great subject; brightly coloured machinery, busy working men, constantly changing structures and it is all done half hidden behind the white fence. To get these views over the fence I use a portable trampoline and take the shot at the top of the bounce … or maybe I use another method.

The distortion is a technique I have used before in other contexts and I find that it is useful to compress the visual information of a much wider panorama image into a bite sized chunk that is easy to digest and saves precious paper. The human brain is a wonderful thing; use yours to uncompress the images to their full width.

Big and small, wide and tall, nothing is fixed. Scale is illusory. If it’s about a game then we should enjoy having a play. That’s what’s in it for me.

Chris Reid

This exhibition is part of the course work for the Otago Polytechnic School of Art. Thanks to the Design department, University of Otago for the use of this venue.

REPURPOSED!

Mother and daughter

Cafe

Red Girl

All right, I'm taking over this blog. It was mine already but I hardly used it, now I have a new purpose.

This is now the interwebs workbook for my GradDip Photography course at the School of Art, Otago Polytechnic. I will drop in here various stuff I come across as I research and develop my course work. It's also a nice to have a skite site to show off new and interesting photography by me.

The above simulated tilt shift image, shot in New Edinburgh Way, is part of a set I'm doing to 'get my hand in' with tilt/shift. This is leading up to an exhibition in October as part of my course which will include some tilt/shift technique.

This work by Chris Reid is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.