Personal Joiners

Over the next few weeks/days I will be adding new personal joiners to this post.

1. Pedal board

When going to my brothers gig recently I liked the way the light fell on this pedal board so I quickly took a series of photographs to assemble into a joiner. I normally avoid doing joiners like this as they don’t push joiners to their boundaries. Whenever I make a joiner I try to exploit the medium to produce unique images that couldn’t be done via any other medium. This image is almost no different to a single photograph of the pedal board.

2.Driving All Night.

I had the idea for this joiner quite a while ago, Many joiners show a movement of time and I wanted to take this concept even further by showing a large passage of time. My idea being a car with one half of the photos taken at one time of the day and the other half at another time. I had visualized the front being at day and the back at night showing a movement of time as the car drove “All Night” however I didn’t account for the available light source, which cast unwanted shadows on the car and forced me to have the front at night, I also think I missed a couple of shots and got the two angles slightly wrong. For both of these joiners I used the freeware program “The GIMP” (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) rather than Photoshop.

Screenshots.

3.Mirror Man

As I said earlier, Joiners are very good at portraying movements in time, I wanted to use this to show how taking a joiner is a process as opposed to a single photo and thought that using my reflections would be a unique and original way to convey this. I remember seeing a David Hockney joiner that had the same sort of concept.

Walking In The Zen Garden At Ryoanji Temple, Kyoto (Pictured above) Was taken in 1983 by David Hockney. I saw this photo in a book on Hockney when I was researching him in the library. Notice how he takes a photo of his foot every time he takes a step, showing that he is taking a step then a series of photos and continuing on. This shows that taking a joiner photograph is a process rather than a single act. This is what I was trying to convey with my photo.  I was also using available light because the flash would have reflected off the mirror, consequentially I needed a wide aperture to let in the light, the depth of field caused by this meant that I was out of focus. This was ok but to ensure there was at least one clear photo of me to show that I was the subject more than the mirror, I got a photo of myself in the middle completely in focus.

4.Sinead

Another joiner I assembled out of some photos my group took. What was good about the conditions I took this photo in was that it was very bright, meaning that the camera could have a small aperture, high shutter speed and not need a flash meaning that most of the image is sharp and in focus, the is no risk of camera shake and the would be no over exposure. I assembled it quickly on Photoshop in the same way as the others. I quite like the curve of the stairs in this photo. This was a mixture of standing still and moving around. something else interesting about joiners is that they act as a natural crop, because you only photograph your subject and not its surrondings, it draws your viewers eyes straight the subject.

6.Lamp post

Recently Peter and I noticed that some of the photos in David Hockney’s “Pearblossom Highway” were turned and off kilter, whereas all the joiners we had done, we had kept all our photos in one orientation. After seeing this I wanted to try turning the camera around to get a more defined image so I tried getting every rotation I could even going as far to turn the whole camera upside down, I now realise that the maximum amount of rotation I had to do was a half turn both directions. I also took photos down to my feet, which gives a reference point for the eyes so you can see the perspective shift. David Hockney does this in some of his photos and I wanted to try it. Unfortunately one of the lamp-post segments (The second down) was out of focus due to the fact it was very dark and I needed a very wide aperture to let in enough light to get the exposure correct, this combined with the fact I was zoomed all the way in, meant that focusing would be pinpoint. Unfortunately mine was a little out.

7. It’s A Small World After All

I had toyed with doing a 360º joiner last year in my intro course and so didn’t attempt any for this project at first. However after a little thought I decided to do another  as they are a prime example of something you cannot achieve with regular photography that you can with joiners. Last year I did a 360º joiner laid out flat, from left to right, and another where I quickly threw it into a circle to show it was a full 360º. However, this year I organized the circle better and put myself in the middle. I named it “It’s A Small World After All” because the circle it makes seems like a caricatured planet.

I stood outside the front of my house and took a photo and then turned to the right and took another. I continued this until I had a full circle and then moved the angle down taking photos until I reached my feet. Again inspired by David Hockney putting his feet in the joiner but also to add to the planet idea and could represent the inhabitants or the heart of the circle. It occurs to me now I could have used a tripod for this and it might have been easier to do or even have come out differently. When I did reach my shoes, I photographed the sides and the back (I cheated slightly in that I only managed to get one photo of my back leg so in post I copied, mirrored and edited it). Once I started editing it I arranged my photos in a line first, partially for use as a second version and to see if they could be assembled.

I then counted the photos and realised I had 14. If I were to remove 2, I could make 4 groups of 3, each with a straight photo and two diagonal. After deciding which 2 to remove I placed them in the circle and went around, starting from the second photo on the top right, rotating each in increments of 30º (0º,30º,60º,90º,120º,150º,180º,-30º,etc.) unfortunately to keep the circle uniform some sides do not match up perfectly but with the shifting perspectives it would be impossible to align the entire thing and keep it in the shape of a circle. But, as with most joiners, you pick whats most important in your frame and line that up, the small inconsistencies go unnoticed and it creates quite the accurate portrayal of human sight.

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