17 February 2007

working with digital images - my recipy

We are introducing a new label called "tools and techniques" at The F Blog.
You are welcome to contribute with articles, short notes etc about the
process of making pictures. It´s an opportunity for those of you who
want to share something about cameras, dark room processing,
digital editing and so on. First article is by Tiberio Fanti, invited guest
February 17, 2007 (today). We are also placing articles published
earlier on at the blog under this label ( e.g. by Anders Blomqvist)

---
Working with digital images for almost one decade has made me settle
on a simplified “way of working” that characterizes at first glance, as
someone wrote me recently, the large majority of them. Today, most
of the images I’m publishing on the web are B&W but this doesn’t mean
I abhor colors. Indeed, I keep plenty of color images printed in my
drawers but, following the advices of many professionals I’ve been
able to put myself in touch - and, in some cases, in confidence -,
I opted to narrow the gamut of my offer. That’s why at present time
I’m described - and often introduce myself - as a B&W photographer.

photo: Tiberio Fanti

Beside this, I do believe that B&W still holds that special power on
influencing the beholder’s imagination that’s been almost lost in color
images after the advent of digital cameras. B&W to me better conveys
mood, volumes, space-time abstraction and some more I can’t explain.


My recipy

As I’ve written and said several times before, every starting image has
its own path to get to the final printed work. When I’m sitting in my
darkroom, i.e. with the hands on my PC, I don’t use a simple push-button
procedure. In my last ten years of work with the most spread image
manipulation tools I haven’t been able to find one that fits for the majority.

Rather, I have a recipy. Like my mother does in her kitchen, I know which
are the ingredients and the sequence of actions to perform but never make
the same cake. Usually, the first thing I do is to look for the image final cut.
It’s very important to do it early in the conversion process as we won’t be
influenced by those parts of the image that we deem unnecessary. Once
the image composition is adjusted, I make an attempt to balance the
brightness distribution curves, trying to enhance the chromatic contrast
of those parts which I deem valuable for the final result. This means that
sometimes I have to make several trials before getting a color image good
enough for B&W conversion. As a third step, I start evaluating the basic
three colors content and identify the zones requiring a specific B&W conversion.

Basic conversion is almost straightforward using the color channel mixing
features provided by almost every image processing tool. Once I have a
pure B&W image, I use to tone it, wishing to give it the right amount of
warmth a typical classic print conveys. To that purpose I use a simple
compound made of pure black and dark-brown tints, which are blended
according to my current taste and, obviously, mood.

At very last, I usually turn the image back in the RGB color space and add
a pinch of yellow
before balancing the overall luminosity for the last time.
It’s not difficult,I guess. Like cooking, it’s only a matter of “being present”,
taking care of
the process while it’s being applied. Never reduce everything
to pushing a
procedure-button; never leave the turkey in the oven and go
out playing
tennis. I’m from a large family holding some small hotels and
restaurants
in southern Italy: I can witness I never saw good chefs cooking
their meals
without tasting it!
---

unmasked


photo: Markus Jenemark

New York City at night, ca. 1935.


This is a magnificent picture. I have kept it a couple of months since I found
it at the National Archive´s site. But I have come back to it over and over
again. There is no information about the photographer. - urbano

Gloomy ;)

invited guest: Tiberio Fanti (part one)


I am glad to present pictures and texts on The F Blog from a truly devoted
photographer; Tiberio Fanti from Italy. I enjoy
his work a lot. Let´s listen
to what he´s got to say:

(invited by ulf fågelhammar)

Résumé My name is Tiberio Fanti; I’ll be forty next May. I took consciousness
of the importance of photography some
time after I met a fellow student,
at the University of Rome,
who introduced me to the whole traditional
chemical process.
Unfortunately I could not build my own darkroom for several
reasons - money and space above all -, that’s why I began taking photography
in serious consideration only after I could handle a
digital camera, at the
beginning of year 2000.
I must confess that my training period didn’t come
out really
exciting: I was tempted several times to give it all up.

During
my academic studies I had faced several times optics and digital
signal processing but this never gave me the opportunity to take better
photographs or achieve better images with accurate digital
manipulations.
After the inevitable equipment upgrade to a
digital reflex, I started considering
the setup of a tiny showcase
of my preferred works.



So I started studying some basics of web design and opened my window
to the world.
Few months after my website was up and running, during a job
travel in Norway, casting boringly my eyes on a newsstand at Oslo central
station, I discovered B&WP Magazine. Back in my office in
Milan, I wrote a
message to the magazine director, wishing to get
a feedback on my current
artwork. She answered me she would
have given a look to it but I didn’t get
a feedback till March 2006,
when I received an e-mail from an Italian B&WP
reader, who was
complimenting with me for being featured “website of the
month”.
What came after are just few more compliments and several nights
of rethinking and reassembling of my previously done work, including
the images presented here.
(Website: http://www.tiberiofanti.it/)

Please, enjoy.














Humble Arts Foundation

Gruppo F receives a growing number of emails concerning exhibitions
and various activities in the field of photography. If we like it, we will
publish it. This came in yesterday.




Two new shows currently on
display at http://humbleartsfoundation.org


group show no. 12
This month's group show, now narrowed to 18 (formerly 24) photographers,
largely explores the anomalies of man-made environments. Grant Willling
turns landscape into portrait with his vertical shot of a towering pine tree
while Jeremy Sheldon places a painted landscape before a "real" tree in
a twice-removed reference. This show also features Juliana Beasley,
Felix R. Cid, and Lucas Blalock, among others.


Introducing solo show
Each month, solo show exhibits 16-24 photographs from a photographer
previously featured in group show, departing from the one-image-per
-photographer format to showcase adeptly curated, long-term, focused
bodies of work. The premier show exhibits the work of New York
based photographer Rachelle Mozman, who examines the lives of young
children living in isolated “exurban” development communities in
New Jersey and Panama.