Gurney Journey

Photographer Levon Biss came up with a way to photograph insects in extremely high resolution.


Biss teamed up with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to record some of the best specimens from their collection.

Edward Linley Sambourne (1844-1910) was an English illustrator and cartoonist who discovered the benefits of photo reference.

Many of his cartoon illustrations for Punch can be associated with photographs of figures in costumes.


Sometimes his wife or kids posed, and he often posed himself. He also recruited professional and semi-professional models, such as the local policeman.
Edward Linley Sambourne on Wikipedia
Article in the Camera Club
Related previous posts: 
Charles Keene's cartoons about artists
Using Photo Reference

The slit-scan camera technique, which he calls "photographic timelines," freezes and compresses moving objects. The faster they move, the more they're compressed.


This is the reverse of what we're accustomed to seeing, namely detailed, stable backgrounds with blurred moving objects.

Johnson's technique also works wonders with dancers, distorting their forms like melting glass or taffy.

Via Singularity Hub
Explanation of the method on Design Boom.
Jay Mark Johnson's website

Peter Culos says, "I'm experimenting with video now and I was wondering what you use to produce video."

Peter, I shoot all the videos by myself while I'm painting. Sometimes I ask Jeanette to take a couple of shots, but she's usually busy painting. Shooting while you paint is a little distracting, but kind of fun once you get used to it.

My gear is pretty basic, nothing fancy or expensive. Here's some info, broken down into 1. Shot List, 2. Camera Gear, 3. Audio, and 4. Editing.

SHOT LIST
You don't need all this coverage, of course. This list is just a memory jogger. A variety of shots makes editing fun later.

ARRIVAL / MOTIF CHOICE
• Walk into scene (watch 180 rule)
• Motif framed with hands + POV
• Reaction, explaining thinking
• Decision; Set down stuff

Painting in Wyoming with separate camera tripod

ESTABLISHING SHOT
• Walk-on, walk-off
• Shoot the local signage
• Overall shot of setting
• Master shot of easel / setup
• 2-shot if I'm painting with a companion
• Super far away in crowd, talking

POV
• Closeup shots of parts of scene
• Long hold of comparison for split screen (be sure action is center frame)
• Steadicam into scene
• Over the shoulder

Dylan says: "I was looking at your awesome blog and found the post about Sargent's Escutcheon. A point you made is that he captured the brilliance of the light by flattening the lights and keeping the majority of the modeling and chroma shifts in the shadows. Up until now I've always been used to blocking the shadows first, and kind of doing the opposite; keeping the shadows flat and keeping the variations in the lighted areas."

The heraldic insignia or escutcheon of Charles V of Spain,  part of a sixteenth century fountain at the Alhambra in Granada

"For myself," Dylan continues, "this has more or less become a method of capturing form, but I was wondering if you know of a context where this would fit an actual scene, as the flat lights fit the bright and sunny scene. Or, if there isn't a real-world context, how do you think the flat darks could be used best? I'm not married to the idea of flattening my darks, but rather I'd like to use it to its most usefulness, as well as introducing the flat lights approach to my process. If you have any thoughts on this, or know where I might be able to read about this, I'd be eternally grateful. Thanks for getting this far!"

Dylan, this is a really interesting question, and it crossed my mind as I was writing the post, because I'm kind of a "flat-shadow" guy for the most part. If I can give a very quick answer, I'd say that the flat shadow approach is better for conveying low-light impressions of form, especially for portraits, while burned out lights and opened shadows convey a feeling of light. This is particularly powerful in landscape where you want to emphasize the warm and cool contrasts in the shadow. Form is a Force of art, but Light is a Force, too. Depends on what your pictorial idea demands.

After reading the recent post about the photograph technique of cross processing, John Tija asks:

Cross processing (also called x-pro) is an experimental form of photography where one kind of film stock is deliberately processed in chemicals intended for another kind of film. The resulting color schemes are weird and unnatural, offering traditional painters some interesting inspiration.

via crossprocessing.info

Here, slide film has been processed in C-41 print film chemicals. The result is a high contrast image, with a hue shift toward greens and yellows and a boost in saturation. There's also a considerable amount of vignetting at the edges, a result of the lens.

Negative film processed in slide chemicals via crossprocessing.info

When negative film is processed in slide chemicals, the results can go many different ways, but this one is lo-fi, contrasty, and grainy, with a saturated warm color bleaching and infusing all the lights.

Photo by Chick Dastardly-JennR.Williams, via EpicEdits

With X-pro, you never know how it's going to turn out. This one gets contrasty, with a green-red split in the midtones.

Photo by Laurent Butre via The Darkroom

The colors aren't always saturated. Sometimes they're relatively muted, but still with the high contrast and the hue shift. In this link the photographer describes the process he used.

If you want to check out more examples, check out any of these galleries:
Epic Edits: Ten Reasons to Love Cross Processed Film
The Darkroom: Cross Processing examples

The effect can also be simulated digitally with filters in Instagram in or with Photoshop. Here's a link to a Photoshop tutorial.

How can we use this as artists?
Traditional painters can use cross-processing as a jumping off point for exploring color schemes. One way is to use a strongly colored underpainting. The second example in this post of the guy riding the bike could be painted over an orange base color, leaving that color as the stand-in for all the light values. The scheme in the lower scene of the little kid on the Harley could be simulated with a green-red-yellow limited palette, taking care to bleach the lights, sink the darks, and vignette the edges.
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In Australia in the 1920s, the accused was shown in close-up and in a standing pose, with the name written on the negative.

Arthur Munby with Ellen Grounds, a "pit brow wench," 1873

The first thing that comes to my mind when one thinks of jobs for Victorian lower class women are domestic jobs: kitchen and washing and that sort of thing.

But Victorian women also worked in rough, dirty jobs outside the home that one would think were suitable only for men. For example, the so-called "pit brow wenches" worked at the top of coal mines to shovel the chunks of coal into waiting railroad trucks.

They wore trousers and would come home black with dirt. Other women worked inside the mines, crawling on their hands and knees, pulling mine carts with chains attached around their waists.

The work of these women might have been largely forgotten were it not for Arthur Munby, who had a fascination and an admiration for them. He convinced many of them to pose in photographic studios, as cameras in the 1860s couldn't function in the low-light conditions that prevailed at the worksites.

He also carefully documented them in interviews and notes, leaving behind a rich sociological record.


Munby even courted and eventually married a servant woman named Hannah Cullwick, but he had to keep the relationship secret from his family for 20 years.



Paintings of Victorian working women were rare, and tended to show a sanitized view with soft hands, a smile, and a bright white apron. In 1859 Munby had lunch with John Ruskin, telling him about his project, and suggesting that "some one ought to paint peasant girls and servant maids as they are —coarse and hearty and homely — and so shame the false whitehanded wenches of modern art." But nothing came of it.

Some of the strangest trades for women could be found in the dark alleys of London that upper-class people rarely saw up close, much less photographed. James Greenwood reported in his book Low-Life Deeps:

"Strange trades are carried on in these slums, and occupations are followed which in civilised parts are never dreamt of:, except it be in exceptionally bad dreams.... There is an awful little alley, for instance, in the neighbourhood of Hales's tallow factory, consisting of about twenty houses, inhabited almost entirely by folk who collect the ordure of dogs, which is used for tanning purposes." 

"There are but few left there now, I am informed, but not very long since the residents of this delectable spot consisted chiefly of "cat-flayers" - whose sole means of living was to go out at night with their sacks and sticks, hunting for cats to be slaughtered for the sake of their skins...It is unfortunate... that to be saleable the hide must be taken from the body of the animal while it is in existence, and still more so that the villainous cat-flayers are not deterred by this difficulty. I was further informed that the neighbourhood used to be scandalised by the presence of the flayed carcasses of poor grimalkins lying about, but that now that indecency is avoided by an economical arrangement on the part of the flayer. He now puts his dead cats in the copper, and makes further capital of their bones and fat."

Above quote from Victorian London.
Book: Victorian working women: Portraits from life by Michael Hiley
Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick on Wikipedia