Work record 2

Artist research

Lisa Milroy is an Anglo-Canadian artist born on 16^th January 1959 in Vancouver. Milroy is most known for her still life paintings of objects placed in patterns. She started doing sky painting in the 1990s, drawing the horizon line very close to the bottom of the canvas. One example of this is her print “sky” which depicts a field lined with trees, and then a clear blue sky with few clouds, this is printed by lithograph on a vertical 54.7 x 42 cm canvas

When you view “Sky” you get a sense of calmness from the print, mostly because the colour blue gives out a calm emotion to the viewer but also because there are only three layers to it, the fields in the foreground, the trees in the background and the sky backdrop. The sky portion is the largest portion of the print. As your eyes scan upwards you can see she framed the picture perfectly with mostly negative space. The sky is filled with some cirrostratus clouds that run diagonally across the page which add some depth to the negative sky area. Milroy's work relates to my exam topic of "framing devices" as the three portions of the picture frame each other put most importantly the bottom of the picture frames the sky, sort of like a polaroid pictures border.

In my preparatory shoots, I worked with trees a lot which helped show how i could use them for the exam, it also helped me realise what looked good and what didn't within photographs using framing devices. These shoots also helped me to understand what I was really influenced by.

In response to the exam, I intend to take pictures of the sky using natural borders such as trees, fields etc. With these pictures, I may use physical or digital manipulation to improve my work. In this exam, I would like to try to create a photo like Doug Aitken where he made one picture out of 4 different pictures.

Contact Sheet

My idea for my shoot 2 framing devices was to photograph trees, bushes and other natural things/objects to frame the environment around me, mostly the sky, similar to Lisa Milroy's paintings of the sky. 

Best images

This is the first of my best images. If you take away the leaves there are around 15 clear frames, when you add in the leaves the frames get more intricate than before. I chose this picture as it does not only frame the sky but it frames the sun as well when the sun shines through the leaves.  The branches are silhouetted against the light sky with the leaves in a midpoint of the photo giving a nice transition between the different shades of the photo. The sun has a little bit of lens flare which adds character and a sense of happiness to my photo.

This is the second of my best images. The photo has a tree line silhouetted against an almost clear sky, the portion of the sky you can see has clouds lining the top and the bottom of it which frames the sky. You can see sunbeams radiating out from the top of the photo where the sun was located. I chose this photo because half of it was dark and the other light which was a good contrast and I thought it would work really well with other photos similar.

This is the third of my best images.  It is a silhouette of a street lamp against the sky. The sky has two large dark clouds with light outlines that are meeting in the middle of the photo. In the centre third of the phot,o the lamp points upwards towards the sun that is trying to shine through the clouds. I wanted to keep this series of photos about photographing natural frames so I will crop the photo to get rid of the lamp.

This is the fourth of my best images.  it is taken through trees with the main tree going diagonally through the photo. The close trees are darker, silhouetted against the bright blue sky. The trees frame the sky and clouds by twisting together in nearly every part of the photo but the top left corner. This photo would work well with the other pictures of the trees. 

This is the fifth of my best images.  The photo frames the sky in a "U" shape using the trees of different colours with but with no silhouettes like many of the other photos since this is a more bright photo with a clearer sky. I think this photo would work well with the other photos as it would be a good contrast between the darker and brighter photos. 

This is the sixth of my best images.  The photo is in two main parts cutting diagonally across the photo, separated by the main tree branch. One part filled with twisting branches and the other filled with a clear blue sky. This photo would work well with the other photo and could link well with my fourth best photo as two halves of the same tree, in a brighter and darker sense. 

This is the last of my best images.  In my opinion, this is the photo that resembles Lisa Milroy's photo the most as it is 90% sky like hers. with only a little bit of the trees poking up through the piece as silhouettes. The picture is in two parts, the trees and the very light sky with the sun poking out from behind the cloud with sunbeams shining through the photo. This would also work well with other pictures and is the last piece to my collage.

Images to be improved

I chose these two photos as photos I could improve on as they are both slightly out of focus. I feel like the first photo is too dark while the second photo is too light. They also don't do a very good job at showing a clear frame around the environment as there is too much going on and since it is nature the colours are too close to each other making it all merge into the same thing.  The first photo used the settings aperture f5.6 which does not give a very wide depth of field, shutter speed 1/50 which makes the photo too dark and an ISO of 125. The second photo used the settings aperture f5.6 which does not give a very wide depth of field, shutter speed 1/50 which makes the photo too dark and an ISO of 100.

The negative blue space within my work has connotations to peacefulness and tranquillity as there are large amounts of it in my work. This also links to Milroys work as she also has vast spaces of blue skies in her paintings. 

I used a cannon EOS M body for all of my shots that I took. I didn't use a tripod as I was planning to because I thought I could get a more natural shot by just holding my camera, though maybe it would've been better to use a tripod. I had my camera on a "landscape" setting to get a wide depth of field and get the right settings. My settings ranged from ISO 100, aperture f5.6 to f18 and a shutter speed between 1/100 and 1/640.

Digital Manipulation

For all of my pictures I first started out by making the photo sharper if it wasn't sharp enough, to do this I used an unsharp mask and/or shake reduction. After this, I used the curves tool to correct the contrast and brightness of my images so they would work better together, and look more aesthetically pleasing without any harsh differences. 

I decided that it might be worthwhile to experiment with some different colours for the sky in the pictures. I used replace colour to replace the blue in the sky with other colours, there weren't many colours that worked properly so I only had limited options.

I edited the other RAW images using photoshop.

Physical manipulation

For physical manipulation, I used 5 different photos that I edited and made them into one, similar to Aitken. At first I wanted to do the four pictures like he did but I found out that the way I had done it would result in a pentagon rather than a square, this caused some problems as originally I had only prepared to use 4 of the photos but I worked with it and edited and added on a fifth which completed the collage of photos. To make this collage I cut equilateral triangles from the middle of my photo, the tip of the triangle being at the bottom of the picture and the two other corners in the top left and right corner of the photo. I then stuck all of these triangles together to get my pentagon shape.

I then mounted my final piece.


















My artist research was helpful as it helped me to understand the importance of negative space in framing photographs. It also helped to research the different ways to physically alter my images like Aitken did, when he made multiple photos into one.

Finished Edits