Christopher Martin(Contemporary)

Christopher Martin is a landscape and nature photographer based in Alberta, Canada. Martin especially focuses on the effects of motion blur, wide angles and long exposures to create his images. Based on his heavily art influenced

background it aloud him to take what he had learnt through paint and sketch to modern, contemporary photography. His worked has been used specifically in magazines and can be licensed for printed and online publications e.g District

News and Photolife Magazine.

Motion blur is used to provide a visitation of speed and movement, this effect can be easily created by using a slow shutter speed and balancing the camera on a sturdy surface to avoid camera shake or noise. This method works especially well with the effect of lights and quick movement, for example in this image the lights on the cars has created a beam following the direction in which the object travels – due to the lens taking in the sense of light a

movement whilst the shutter remains open.

For this image in particular it appears to keep the image of the cars movement so still and precise that the camera will

have followed their movement whilst been kept on a precise balance, perhaps using a moveable tripod. The shutter speed for this will have only been around, I estimate – 5 seconds to create the long beams. The give intensity to the lights a high aperture will have been selected to avoid over brightening

the image and giving the dimension of intense colour.

I selected this image out of his portfolio as I thought it was a perfect visual reference of speed and the illusion of how fast the cars are travelling. This would maybe be used in racing or

car based magazines as a form of advertising, as the image captures the eye with the bright colours and strobe effect

lighting.

David Emmite(Contemporary/Non-Traditional)

David Emmite was born in Texas and from an early age was fascinated by layering and overlapping a mixture of materials and objects to form artistic motifs. Later on in his life he went on to train at the Portfolio Centre in Atlanta with previous work in Portland and New York, eventually leading to the opening of his own studio in 1996. His work

has been featured in several advertising campaigns both online and print including Nike, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Sony Records and Doc Marten Shoes.

The series of photographs following the example below were part of a collection called “Field Guide”. His main focus here was woodland animals in an artificial setting by the inclusion of modern day aspects. It was humorous approach to experimental photography and was inspired by the Victorian Era taxidermy dioramas, his visual was a mixture of

science and art. To create these images real taxidermies were used as the main subject followed by a series of artificial and preserved landscape elements, he also experimented with several backdrops and printed paper to create the

background.

All the images were created within the camera using conventional film and a series of printing methods to give the artificial effect to

the gleam of the paper, as if it was a painting. This works especially well with bringing out the realistic elements of the image as if it was completely natural despite the inclusion of

modern technology.

Often a lot of the images look like they have been taken in individual layers and manually created, it was this that made

Emmite’s work so popular and interesting within the media and sparked his fame. The props were purchased online from eBay

and he shot the series in his studio in Portland.

Thomas Kellner(Traditional)

Thomas Kellner was born in Germany in 1966. As a young adult his main focus was his study of art at the University of

Siegen. Since 1997, Kellner worked as a visual artist and received a membership at the German Association for

Photography. From 2005, he was then invited to series of festivals and photographic events based in Houston, Beijing

and Brasilia.

In the early stages Kellner had always being interested in experimental photography and the concept of illusion. He

experimented with several photographic techniques including pinhole, cyanotype and saltpaper. Kellner’s most

famous work featured his aspect of layering imagery to create art, especially with historical landmarks and

architecture. It was then that his most popular series of photographs were created in 1997, by separating a full

image via taking several close-up images of a landmark.

His work has been used in solo exhibitions across the globe including Chicago, Hamburg, London and Siegen.

Kellner photography depicts a strong inspiration from David Hockney’s work on montages and create a collage based on one image. Kellner’s photographs are created via taking several close-up Polaroid's of sections of the build and then manually placing them together like a

puzzle to create the finished piece. Some sections of the photograph have being taken on a slight angle or in a

different composition to add illusion to the final piece, yet still leaving the building recognizable.

This type of traditional method can be automatically copied using modern day software such as Photoshop. The process includes find an object and taking several

images from one angle that can be pieced together later, very similar to how Kellner and Hockney work. But they

saving the images to a single folder and using the “Photomerge” tool. This allows the software to work out

what the overall image is a piece it all together in sections similar to Kellner’s work, this can then be

dragged and warped to give different effects in a quicker method compared to traditional film printing.