Creative Practice Showcase

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Crafting High Dynamic Range Photographs to Create a Classical Oil Painting Look

Creative Practice Showcase
Rehan Zia  

HDR photography allows artists to capture the full range of tonal values in high contrast real world scenes allowing for better latitude and creative control during post-production. With specialist HDR cameras being too expensive for the consumer market, the alternative method of photographing HDR images is by blending multiple varied exposures of the scene. The resulting images have characteristics in common with classical oil paintings in terms of the scene dynamic range depicted, as well as the softening effect inherent in the production process. HDR production and tonemapping processes can also amplify camera sensor and lens artifacts that bring unwanted attention to the fact that one is looking at a photographed image and not a painting. The images presented here were produced over the course of the author’s visual practice-research PhD journey exploring how HDR images can be crafted to create a painterly look reminiscent of classical landscape oil paintings whilst keeping unwanted camera, lens and software artifacts to a minimum, thus illustrating the extent to which digital technologies can be used to replicate pre-digital visual practices. The workflow, techniques and approaches are grounded in the photography and film visual effects disciplines.

Abstract Insularity and the Window to Worldliness

Creative Practice Showcase
Robert Tracy,  Louis Kavouras,  Adam Schroeder  

Professors Robert Tracy, Louis Kavouras, Adam Schroeder We wish to develop a fresh response to the intimate relationship of art/dance/music---specifically American modern dance (Erick Hawkins’ self-sensing”), jazz (Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke)---and the visual arts---as seen in the contemporary abstract paintings of Ethiopian artist Eyob Mergia. Immediately following WWII, modern dance, Jazz and bebop music proved to be a transformative force from 1945 and, when nuanced with the aesthetic abstract devices utilized by Eyob Mergia, a compelling echo of constructed tonalities reshape themselves into a two-way formal relationship of hearing/seeing/feeling across the media. A compelling and original perspective emerges and this development reshapes the creative image-making process juxtaposed with (not against) the repetitive devices of tonal language. This assessment should show that American jazz and East African abstraction does not subordinate one to the other but, in actuality, finds formal inspiration in both tonal and color tonalities.

Digital Media

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