Joint Lesson - Faking Photography

In this lesson we learnt about changing an image can change history. An example of this is the head of American President Abraham Lincon's head being put on a famous author's body. A famous picture of Italian Dictator Mussolini being pictured on his horse. The actuall photo is doctored becasue the man holding his horse by the reigns has vanished to make it seem that he is capable of controlling the horse rather than not being able to.

Because people have modified the images someone from a different generation has no idea and can see history in a different light because the image is so well done.

We were then set a task to work out the denotations and conotations of a photo taken from an event that has happened with no outside knowledge. Denotations included person, clothes, leaning buildings, rubbish and ruins. Conotations include Army, depression, war and disastar.

After we had came up with our own work, in a group we tried to make a story of what we had written and could see. Looking at the photo I assumed that to what I saw was a soldier walking through Iraq but yet it was the earthquake in Italy.

Photo Journalism Introduction

In yesterday's lesson we learnt about the history of photography in three seperate ssessions.
In the first session we watched a program called the history of photography in which it showed how two people made some of the first camera able to take what we call photos. These two men were called William Fox Talbot and Louis Deguerre. Fox Talbot created the Mousetrap camera in which it used silver sulphide to create photos. Louis Deguerre created the Deguerreotype in which the image was captured directly onto a mirror-polished surface.
Since then camera's have evolved into SLR (single lens reflex).

The second session we learnt how a camera actually functions. We learnt that the iris of the eye sees the world like a camera (upside down) but our brain corrects the image to how we see it.
This is what a camera does it as it has two mirrors to reflect the image onto the paper.
In this session as well we learnt about Shutter speed and Aperture.
Shutter speed is important because at a horse race a slow shutter speed means a horse at full momentum would be blurry but a faster shutter speed would mean it would be clearer.
Aperture is the opening of the lens and controls the amount of light allowed to hit the film. A larger small aperture means the smaller amount of light to hit the film while a smaller f-stop means more light can hit the film at the risk of over-exposing.

The final session was about semiotics and representation in which an example of this is 'This is not pipe'. Although the picture shows a pipe it cannot be a pipe as it has it cannot be used by a person in real life other than to be shown in a gallery. Another thing we learnt was denotations and conotations. If we take a picture of Cesc Fabregas the denotations are person, red, Arsenal and footballer. The conotations are money, wealth etc.