Technically a "studio" is the workroom or creation space of an artist. The term may also include a place where students learn from a master or teacher in the creation of art, be it in fine arts like painting, pottery, sculpting etc, or more recently in other media such as graphic design, CGI or animation.
What better place to find a studio, than in an art gallery and co-incidentally on Art Gallery Way.
The Mosman Art Gallery and Community Centre lives in what used to the the Mosman Methodist Church. When the church found the upkeep of the building became too expensive, Mosman council took over the premises, refurbished it and turned it into the space we see today.
Mosman is quite renowned for its history in the arts and the Mosman Art Prize is probably one of the five most prestigious in the country behind the Archibald, Sir John Sulman and Wynne Prizes. As an acquisitive art prize, it pays in excess of $100,000 a year to the winners of the prizes in various categories.
This space whilst empty at the moment has been used to teach painting, theatre and dance, and so I suppose that if you apply the definition of a studio to this space, it matches up almost exactly with the classical definition of the word.
How fitting then that I in the creation of photographs should use a studio, in pursuit of a "studio shot".
One of the most cliched photographic techniques is to take a photograph with a sepia filter. I suppose that because we associate sepia with old-wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey photographs, that the cliche is allowed to persist.
What this photo does show off are the vaults and the space where perhaps the organ once resided. I'm not exactly sure why the main window upstairs in boarded up but it possibly has something to do with renovation work.
I haven't really bothered with most of the effects on this camera before because I consider them mostly useless. The camera itself only has a short focal length which I suppose is reasonable for most happy-snap photography but it still doesn't have the same ability to play with things to anywhere near the degree of even the most basic SLR.
The effect that I used here is something called "solarise". I'd seen the effect previously in darkrooms but with modern digital photography, it can be done instantly.
This is a ludicrously simple effect that I think produces fun results. All this is, is a simple inversion of colours. Some areas such as under the table in that background corner appear to glow eerily; outside becomes dark as night. The roof beams look almost washed out.
If pressed to choose which one of these actually is the "studio shot" in question, it's probably the sepia one. The word "Studio" itself is taken via Italian from the Latin "studium" which means "to study"; since this is one photo in a study, inside a studio, I think it very much qualifies as a studio shot.
No comments:
Post a Comment