This year marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of Blondie, and to celebrate, the band’s co-founder, guitarist, and songwriter, Chris Stein, has released a new photography book remembering its glory days. A Brooklyn native, Stein studied briefly at the School of Visual Arts before dropping out “to be a hippie," he writes in the BOOK'Sintroduction, and first met Debbie Harry in 1973. A year later, they founded Blondie. “When we were out on tour, or doing stuff, I would always have a camera around,” he told the Cut by phone last week, back in New York after spending the summer touring in Europe (Blondie's 40th-anniversary tour continues in California next month). “I don’t think there was a lot of preconception in it — it was mostly just about what I was seeing and what was around me.”
Though Stein claims to have thousands of photographs in his archives, the way he describes his photographic process is surprisingly casual. “People are always asking me to define punk, and I say there’s a big DIY element,” he says. “Obviously a lot of the people around me I felt were very striking and attractive, and I was just taking pictures of them. Everything in that scene was very familial.” Chris Stein / Negative: Me, Blondie, and the Advent of Punk, out today from Rizzoli, chronicles the early punk scene, featuring not only rare photos of Debbie Harry, but also Joan Jett, Iggy Pop, the Ramones, and Andy Warhol. Click through the slideshow for a look at Stein’s intimate photographs of Harry from the early days of Blondie.
Ed White walking in space over New Mexico, Gemini, 4 June 1965 (Nasa)
Far horizon
Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina, Gemini 9, 5 June 1966 (Nasa)
Cosmic stroll
James McDivitt, Ed White walking in space, Gemini 4, June 1965
Moon shot
Lunar surface and horizon, Luna Orbiter II, November 1966 (Nasa)
Rock of ages
Lunar boulders, St George crater beyond, Apollo 15, July 1971 (Nasa)
Space dust
Charles Duke, John Young collects lunar samples, Apollo 16, 1972 (Nasa)
Snapping photos in space wasn’t always so easy. Stephen Dowling discovers how the first astronauts battled radiation and more to take stunning cosmic images.
Anyone who learned to take photographs back in the days of film will remember how frustrating it could be. Quite apart from the trickiness of loading the film, budding photographers couldn’t be sure whether they had a potential cover of National Geographic or a pile of prints fit for the litter bin until the negatives came back from the lab.
Now imagine you had to deal with these difficulties hundreds of miles above a glittering blue Earth, tethered to the space capsule that is your only link between home and the endless gulf of space. Your movements are constricted by the clumsy spacesuit that allows you to survive out here. And you can’t even hold the camera up to your face to compose your pictures properly, thanks to your ungainly helmet. Finding out whether you’ve shot a masterpiece or a mistake has to wait until you’re safely back on Earth – where you might discover that all that cosmic radiation has fogged your film completely.
Gerald Carr, Ed Gibson leaving the hatchway, Skylab 4, June 1975 (Nasa)
It’s a wonder Nasa’s astronauts managed to capture anything at all, let alone the astonishing images they did. A new exhibition, containing some of the most striking, opened last week in London at the Breese Little gallery. ‘Encountering the Astronomical Sublime: Vintage Nasa Photographs 1961 – 1980’ includes many images snapped by astronauts, back in those pioneering days of space exploration.
Radioactive risk “Space missions in the 60s and 70s were definitely pushing at the limits of camera TECHNOLOGY – and indeed the limits of every other type of TECHNOLOGY. In many cases they didn't know how successful things would be until they actually tried it,” says Marek Kukula, the public astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.
“It's interesting to note that when Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space in 1961 there were no cameras onboard his Vostok capsule. Just eight years later the first landing on the Moon was broadcast live on TV.”
Unlike astronauts, photographic film doesn’t need a supply of oxygen to survive. But once you’re outside the Earth’s protective atmosphere there’s a very real threat – cosmic radiation.
Segment of Saturn's rings, Voyager 2, 1981 (Nasa)
“Most of the really nasty stuff is blocked by a combination of our atmosphere and the Earth's magnetic field, but when you go into orbit you're giving up the protection given by the atmosphere and for missions to the Moon and beyond you're also forsaking the Earth's magnetic shield,” says Kukula. “This isn't just a problem for cameras though – you also need to protect the astronauts, so shielding is an integral part of most space missions.
“The Apollo astronauts reported seeing flashes of light on the Moon, which we now think were radiation particles passing through the fluid in their eyes – the same radiation would have been affecting their cameras too.”
All this meant that cameras needed extra shielding to protect the film within. Still, the possibility remained that an extreme radiation event, such as a solar flare, could have wiped the film – or worse, proved fatal.
Tethered cameras There was another problem with space photography: pressing the shutter button wasn’t exactly easy, thanks to the bulky spacesuit gloves. Kukula likens it to trying to work “fiddly technology while wearing oven gloves”. Camera manufacturers like Nikon and Hasselblad had to come up with special designs so that suited space explorers could take pictures, both to aid scientific study and help to promote the space programme, which was being funded by the public purse. “Images are far greater ambassadors for public expenditure than huge swathes of raw astronomical data, a fact embraced and exploited by Nasa’s public relations department for over half a century,” the exhibition’s brochure notes.
Martian hemisphere, Viking 1 orbiter, June 1976 (Nasa)
“Cameras were adapted to take account of the practicalities of shooting in space,” says Michael Pritchard, director-general of the Royal Photographic Society. “Camera controls were extended or special alterations made so that they could be worked with heavy gloved hands. Some controls such as built in viewfinders were dispensed with as you couldn’t get the camera close to an eye for framing because of the helmet, so less accurate sights were used.
“Cameras would also make use of automatic winding of film and a number of models made use of extended lengths of film compared to standard lengths, to save the need of changing film in flight. One very practical measure was tethering the camera to the astronaut’s space suit so that it didn’t get separated if the user let go of it.”
Moon shots The Soviets – who at the time had the biggest camera-making industry in the world outside Japan – found many of the same solutions, modifying existing designs to capture their cosmonauts in action. Earlier this year, two formerly top-secret designs – including one meant for an aborted mission to land Soviet spacemen on the Moon – were auctioned in the UK. Another design, a heavily modified Kiev medium format camera used in the Zond-7 spacecraft, sold for more than $75,000 in 2012. In appearance, they have the hallmarks of a normal camera, but with exaggerated features such as giant winding dials and protruding arms to change the lens aperture.
As some of the images in the exhibition show, our blue planet proved a dazzling backdrop, and even without the proper aids to composition, some of the astronaut photographers took impressive pictures. The image of Ed White floating in space, GOLD visor glinting, umbilically linked to the open door of the spacecraft would be impressive enough – the white, brown and blue of our home planet floating behind, adds an extra dimension.
The exhibition also includes images taken on the Moon, during the handful of Apollo missions that explored our nearest neighbour. Thousands of images of the lunar surface were taken on modified Hasselblad cameras, part of a family extensively redesigned for the rigours of space travel.
"The shot of the Earth rising above the moon became an emblem for the nascent environmental movement highlighting both the fragility of the Earth in space and also its uniqueness,” says Pritchard. “For this reason it’s BECOME one of the world’s most reproduced photographs.”
But in order to save weight and allow more rock samples to be taken back to Earth, only the detachable backs of the cameras, which contained films, were kept. Almost all the cameras and lenses were left behind, destined to gather moondust until the next lunar visitors arrive…
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
PHOTOGRAPHY TECHNIQUES
Make the most of your CAMERA by learning new photography techniques. These include tips for photographing specific subjects, using different creative styles, and improving image quality.
Learn to make the most of your CAMERA equipment and accessories. Topics include camera lenses, lens filters, general camera care and maintenance. Tutorials are usually independent of camera type or brand.
Just as with any tool, having better CAMERA equipment only makes a difference when this tool is used effectively. Although photography might seem technical at first, eventually this aspect will become second nature — enabling you to focus on your artistic intent.
A camera's shutter speed can control exposure, but it's also one of the most powerful creative tools in photography. It can convey motion, freeze action, isolate subjects and smooth water, amongst other abilities. This tutorial describes how to achieve these various effects, in addition to hopefully stimulating other creative ideas for using shutter speed in everyday shots. For a background on how it factors into exposure, also see camera exposure: aperture, ISO and shutter speed.
Action photos are some of the funnest photos you can take but it takes a few tips to go from simple snapshot to something that really stands out. Usually the problem is with showing motion. As the image to the right shows, a fast shutter speed and the rear side angle doesn’t really do much for this shot. During this article we will look at other images that didn’t work, and others that did so we can learn how to improve our sports action photos.
Learning to Pan
Taking a shot similar to the one above but with a slightly slower shutter speed and moving the camera along with the bikers helps to blur thebackground and provide a better sense of motion. This technique takes some practice as you need to match the speed of the biker with as little up/down motion as possible in order to get a sharp image. When done well, you get an image that feels like its moving right along with the action. Definitely don’t expect all of these to turn out, you will take quite a few and hope that a few of them turn out good.
Find The Emotion
Sports always have some level of emotion that you can play off of. In this shot we can see the bikers faces that show the grit and determination to stay in first. Shots like this can really pull you in and give you a feel for the action. Using a relatively large aperture of f/5.6 separates the two bikers in front from the pack in the back. The short depth of field focuses the attention on the main bikers by blurring out the people behind them.
Pick The Right Angles
Some angles work well and some don’t work at all. This will vary depending on what sport you are shooting and what else is going on in the scene. In the next two images, you can see that the angle that was used can make a huge difference.
Boring and non-descript side image
Exciting front angle and tighter crop
Leave Room To Move
This may seem odd at first, but you need to leave room for the subject to move within the frame. Using basic composition rules we can often just leave some white space on the side of the frame that the subject will be moving into. These two images demonstrate this. The first one has the biker heading to the right but is too far into the frame and it just “doesn’t feel right”.
Biker to far into the right side of frame
In this next image I used a combination of the techniques above including picking the right angle, getting in tight, and giving room for the rider to go in the frame.
Much Better Action Shot Using Above Techniques
Summary
I am far from being the greatest sports shooter around but using a few simple techniques can really help improve the quality of your images. If you have some good sports shots, please share them in the forums.
Here is a quick tip for you that can make a big difference in your shots, try adding a little angle to your shots when you take them. The following two imagesshow what a little turn of the camera can accomplish.
introduction, and first met Debbie Harry in 1973. A year later, they founded Blondie. “When we were out on tour, or doing stuff, I would always have a camera around,” he told the Cut by phone last week, back in New York after spending the summer touring in Europe (Blondie's 40th-anniversary tour continues in California next month). “I don’t think there was a lot of preconception in it — it was mostly just about what I was seeing and what was around me.”
