Near & Far

Cel­eb­rat­ing big and small – with a difference.

Photo gal­lery time. Here are two series of images that were recently brought to my atten­tion. The pho­to­grapher, Elam-graduate Hil­ary Upton, used some inter­est­ing tech­niques to achieve quite dif­fer­ent results.

St Paul's Cathed­ral. Photo: Hil­ary Upton.

The first series of images is com­prised of tex­tured land­scape shots of iconic build­ings. The shots, vari­ously entitled Find me in New York, Monday in Paris and Lon­don were tweaked in Pho­toshop, recre­at­ing meth­ods that tra­di­tion­ally would have taken place in the dark room.

Upton says that pre-Photoshop she would have under­taken this pro­cess with an enlar­ger in the dark room by expos­ing two sets of film to paper. "Pho­toshop is basic­ally the new dark room the only dif­fer­ence is you can see what you are doing – how­ever I do feel it can some­times be too easy to take modi­fic­a­tions too far, and it's a shame to lose some­thing in the pro­cess of tak­ing the photo."

Big Ben. Photo: Hil­ary Upton.

Tower of Lon­don. Photo: Hil­ary Upton.

New York. Photo: Hil­ary Upton.

The second series, 'Tea', was taken using a pro­cess called TtV ( Through the View­finder), a tech­nique that gives pho­to­graphs a vin­tage feel, with soft focus, dust and scratches adding to the over­all effect.

Lemon – taken using a Through the View­finder (TtV) tech­nique. Photo: Hil­ary Upton.

"Through the View­finder pho­to­graphy is defined as tak­ing a pic­ture of any sub­ject through the view­finder of any cam­era with another cam­era," says Upton. "In this case I used the view­finder of a vin­tage Argus and a Canon digital SLR with a macro lens. To block out any light or reflec­tions I cre­ated and used a black card like sleeve over the Argus. Once you have cap­tured the shot you are left with an image among a sea of black to which you then crop in Pho­toshop leav­ing the curved black frame of the pho­to­graph. I tend to print the image with an addi­tional white bor­der so you don't loose any­thing when fram­ing as such."

Soup. Photo: Hil­ary Upton.

String. Photo: Hil­ary Upton.

- Michael Barrett

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