BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY
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07 SPRING PREVIEWS 23 EVGENIA ARBUGAEVA: THE ARCTIC WEATHER MAN 28 FABRICE FOUILLET: COLOSSUS IN THE LANDSCAPE 34 LINA HASHIM: SEX, SUICIDE & HAIR 50 NICK WAPLINGTON KEEPS IT IN THE FAMILY 69 ON TEST: LYTRO ILLUM
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Paul Kooiker on voyeurism, obsession & the enigmatic spell of sepia
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CONTENTS
Amitabha Buddha, Ushiku, Japan, 110m. Built in 1993. Image © Fabrice Fouillet. See page 28
AGENDA
07-12 Our spring preview of festivals, fairs and happenings | Products
PROJECTS
15-21
Tim Smyth | Miriam Stanke | Nicolas Silberfaden | Shane Lynam
FEATURES
23-27
Evgenia Arbugaeva captures the romance and the solitude of the life of an Arctic meteorologist
28-33 Fabrice Fouillet documents supersized public statues
34-39
Lytro Illum on test. See page 69
Lina Hashim’s controversial work confronts the complexity of her Muslim upbringing and assertions of identity in a Western society
40-49
INTELLIGENCE
63-66
IdeasTap’s demise points to a wider funding crisis in arts education | James Hyman takes his collection of BritDoc photography online
TECHNOLOGY
Paul Kooiker’s photobook, Nude Animal Cigar, spins a surrealistic take on voyeurism, obsession and the enigmatic spell of sepia
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Lytro Illum | Samyang 12mm f/2 NCS CS | Apple iMac Retina 5K
ENDFRAME
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Nick Waplington made his mark with his unflinching study of family life on a Nottingham estate. Twenty-five years later, he’s showing at Tate Britain. We chart his journey, via the YBA scene in London and settlers on the Israeli-Palestinian border
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AGENDA PHOTOFESTIVALS
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work by photographers from America, Canada and Europe. It is the brainchild of the Magenta Foundation, a non-profit arts publishing house based in Canada, which was established in 2004 and is best known for championing the work of emerging photographers through initiatives such as the Flash Forward competition. This year’s programme includes a talk by VII Photo photographer and World Press Photo winner Tomas van Houtryve, who will be speaking about drone photography in relation to his award-winning series Blue Sky Days. The festival will also include exhibitions housed in six shipping containers, including David Magnusson’s series Purity, about girls in the US who pledge to remain virgins until
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marriage; institute photographer Gabriele Galimberti’s Toy Stories, photographs of children from around the world with their toys; and Daesung Lee’s Futuristic Archaeology, which explores nomadic life in Mongolia via photographs of billboards placed alongside people. All six shipping container exhibitions run until 31 May. Other exhibitions elsewhere in the city include Flash Forward 10 at Gallery Kayafas, which will showcase work by nine emerging photographers to celebrate Flash Forward’s 10th birthday. www.flashforwardfestival.com
Photo London Somerset House, London 21–24 May A brand-new photography fair,
Photo London will present 68 international galleries this spring, showcasing contemporary work by emerging and established photographers. Produced by Candlestar, which oversees the prestigious Prix Pictet photography award, Photo London will take over most of Somerset House. The 18th-century palace will welcome London-based galleries such as Michael Hoppen, Grimaldi Gavin and The Photographers’ Gallery, as well as international galleries from Tokyo, Sydney, New York and Dubai. A ‘Discovery’ section will be dedicated to younger galleries, such as Tokyo’s G/P Gallery and Tiwani Contemporary in London. The public programme, funded by Maja Hoffmann’s Luma Foundation,
which also backs Rencontres d’Arles, will include an exhibition of treasures from the V&A archive (Beneath the Surface), an exhibition by Iranian photographer Kaveh Golestan, and a specially commissioned installation by Rut Blees Luxemburg, which will be shown in the courtyard of Somerset House. In addition, Tate Modern will host Offprint London, an art and photography publishing fair, over the same weekend. photolondon.org
Łódź Fotofestiwal Łódź, Poland 28 May to o7 June Krakow Photomonth Festival 14 May to 14 June The Łódź Fotofestiwal is back with a new artistic director for this
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4 Photo London will include work by emerging photographer Noémie Goudal, who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2010 and is represented by Edel Assanti, one of the exhibiting galleries. Image © Noémie Goudal 5 From the series British Food, 1995. Martin Parr's work is on show at Fotobookfestival Kassel – and he's bringing the Say Cheese! dining event with him. Image © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos 6 Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, Lagos, Nigeria, 2007, from the series The Hyena and Other Men, on show at Photo London with Yossi Milo Gallery. Image © Pieter Hugo
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year and next – Alison Nordstrom, the former senior curator of photographs and director of exhibitions at George Eastman House. This year’s theme, Hit the Road: Photographers Travel, will include exhibitions and slideshows from the 20 finalists in the Grand Prix Fotofestiwal 2015: Costilhes Cyril (France); Anna Grzelewska (Poland); Naomi Harris (Canada); Tito Mouraz (Portugal); Sarker Protick (Bangladesh); Mateusz Sarełło (Poland); Delphine Schacher (Switzerland); Jiehao Su (China); Patrick Willocq (France); Ksenia Yurkova (Russia); Christian Berthelot (France); Ciril Jazbec (Slovenia); Katrin Koenning (Germany); Karsten Kronas (Germany); David Magnusson (Sweden); Wojtek Moskwa (Poland);
Harri Palviranta (Finland); Borut Peterlin (Slovenia); Leonardo Pongo (Belgium); and Paweł Zak (Poland). Meanwhile, over in Krakow, the Photomonth Festival takes place from 14 May to 14 June. www.fotofestiwal.com
Fotobookfestival Kassel Kassel, Germany 04–07 June Fotobookfestival Kassel includes a packed programme of exhibitions, talks and portfolio reviews focusing on the photobook. A wealth of photobooks will be on show, but the main draw is the festival’s two awards – the Dummy Award, which is given to the best as-yet unpublished work, picked out by a jury of international professionals; and the Photobook
Award Kassel, which recognises the best photobook of the past year. The shortlisted books in each category will be on display at the festival. Martin Parr is this year’s guest of honour and will be critiquing photobooks as well as giving talks. He will also bring the Say Cheese! Dining Event to Kassel, a “photo-culinary journey of discovery”, previously staged in London, which includes a kitschy pop-up restaurant designed by Alice Hodge and features dishes cooked by Parr’s chef daughter, Ellen. fotobookfestival.org
Belfast Photo Festival Northern Ireland 04–30 June For its third edition, Belfast Photo Festival picks up on a
prevalent contemporary trend – photography’s merger with other art forms. The festival will “present unique perspectives on the limits of photography as a medium”, say the organisers, who will be showing work that crosses over with performance, literature, film, sculpture, painting and installation. The programme was being finalised as BJP went to press, but top of the bill are masterclasses with Alec Soth and Lorenzo Vitturi, and exhibitions such as Performance To Camera, featuring work by Manuel Vason, Ai Wei Wei, Lorraine Burrell, Keith Arnatt and Tom Lovelace, and Stage of Mind by Korean artist Lee JeeYoung, who builds dream-like sets in which she stages her photographs. The festival will also host last year’s Unseen
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PORTFOLIO
THE WEATHER MAN A journey through the Arctic led Evgenia Arbugaeva to a personal project about a solitary meteorologist in northern Russia, writes Gemma Padley Evgenia Arbugaeva was born in Tiksi, a town in northern Russia on the coast of the Arctic Ocean, to a father who breeds husky dogs; one day while out on a husky sledging trip, bad weather forced them to take shelter. They ended up inside one of the lonely meteorological research centres dotted along the area, and the International Center of Photography graduate found herself intrigued. Intent on finding out more, she went on to travel with an icebreaker ship that delivers supplies to the centres, spending two months visiting 22 of the outposts. But what she found was not what she had imagined. “I was brought up with stories of Arctic explorers and the idea of brave men who dedicated their lives to studying this uninhabited
region,” she says. “To me, they were like magicians because they had knowledge I didn’t know how to get close to. I went on this quest and didn’t know what to expect. The stations were very new and characterless, with lots of young people working there. It was a completely different generation of people with laptops. This was not what I’d had in mind, so I sailed in complete disappointment for two months.” It was only when the ship docked at Khodovarikha, an Arctic peninsula in the Barents Sea, that Arbugaeva found the living embodiment that she had envisioned – Vyacheslav Korotki, who had been living at the centre for 13 years, and had sailed on Russian ships for many years before that. “I got out and saw the lighthouse and
station, which were surreal,” she says. “The scene looked as though it was from my dreams. The head of the meteorological station – Vyacheslav – with bright blue eyes and a Zen-like nature, appeared and I thought, ‘This is exactly the place. Everything – this whole expedition, me studying photography, my entire life – has led to this.’” Arbugaeva spent a couple of hours talking with Korotki, then had to leave, but vowed she would return to work with him. The trip would prove difficult to organise, however, as there is no method of easy transportation to the peninsula. “The only way I could get there was to take a helicopter, which is expensive to hire,” she says. Eventually, with help from a grant from Photo de mer festival in Vannes,
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THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS A French photographer documents some of the world’s most arresting statues in a project that takes him from Asia to Russia to Europe. Many have religious associations, Fabrice Fouillet tells Gemma Padley, but he’s just as interested in their cultural significance M AY 2 0 1 5
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You won’t see New York’s Statue of Liberty or Rio’s Christ the Redeemer in Fabrice Fouillet’s Colosses. Nor will you see the Moai heads of Easter Island. What you will find is an array of less familiar outsize statues, in many ways more impressive than their famous counterparts. “These statues really surprised and impressed me,” explains the 40-year-old photographer, who contributes to publications including Wallpaper*, Le Monde and The New York Times, and has won awards for his commercial work. “I became interested in their dimensions from
a photographic point of view. “I set out to find others to be sure this would constitute a serious project, and I discovered so many. I realised that beyond their gigantic size they had strong ideological, political and social dimensions.” Deciding he wanted to see them in person, he immediately booked a flight to the Far East. “I’d never been to Japan,” he says. “It was the first place I visited for the project, and I stayed there for eight days. After photographing four statues, I travelled back to France, but I made plans to visit Poland to photograph Christ the
King in Świebodzin, which was built in 2010.” Trips to the Ukraine, Russia, China, Indonesia, Senegal, Thailand, Myanmar and Turkey followed, and Fouillet ended up being away from home from mid 2013 until the end of 2014. Often shooting early in the day, he avoided any crowds, preferring to shoot the statues alone, or with a few isolated figures for scale. “Most of the time there is this feeling of quietness,” he says. “I didn’t want to focus on the touristic; rather, I wanted to show the statues in their modern context – to see them in their surroundings.”
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[Right] From the series Unlawful Meetings, 2014 All images © Lina Hashim [Overleaf] From the series No wind–with hijab, 2012 M AY 2 0 1 5
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INVISIBLE Born in Iraq and now living in Denmark, Lina Hashim’s photographs negotiate the complex codes of her own identity as a young Muslim woman whose family sought refuge in the West. She explains the thinking behind her often controversial work to Colin Pantall
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INTERVIEW
DISSECTING NUDES For Paul Kooiker, photography and voyeurism are inextricably linked – the camera, a guilty look through the keyhole. In his latest photobook, Nude Animal Cigar, he plays with objects that have little to do with one another and applies sepia filters to create a diffused reality. Taco Hidde Bakker investigates
All images from Nude Animal Cigar © Paul Kooiker
Paul Kooiker’s latest photobook, Nude Animal Cigar, is a peculiar hybrid made up of variations on the three themes revealed in the title. It’s as if the weirdest and most beautiful nudes, mournful animals and mysterious still lifes of cigar butts have been picked out from photography’s 176year history. But although the images look oldfashioned, they have all been made within the past five years by this contemporary Dutch artist. Applying sepia filters to all the images, he lends the series a vintage and melancholy feel, and by virtue of the treatment knits this motley trio of monochrome motifs together. “My work is successful if it is about looking, and about photography,” says Kooiker in his studio, located in a quiet street on the southern periphery of downtown Amsterdam. “Ultimately, my work is about looking, and looking is the ultimate act of voyeurism. It makes the work accessible, as everybody is able to recognise himself in this act. It also leaves the viewer confused. What I want to achieve is to make the public feel accessory to the images they witness.”
Voyeurism
Born in 1964, Kooiker graduated from the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the early 1990s. In 1996 he won the Prix de Rome with a project on women weeing in the forest that set the bar for his future art; a montage of 40 colour photos, with barely discernible female nudes, out-of-focus shots, image repetition, and the implicit hint of voyeurism – a theme mentioned repeatedly by critics writing about his work. For Kooiker, photography and voyeurism are
inextricably linked, and the camera is a guilty look through the keyhole, though he thinks “nothing is as terrible as erotic photography”. Instead, he sees his work as a commentary on it. He isn’t interested in the single photograph, so his projects are always conceived as a series; in the two decades since his audacious debut, he has published book after book, bearing titles such as Hunting and Fishing, Showground, Room Service, Crush, Sunday and Heaven. Most of them were designed and published by Willem van Zoetendaal, the Dutch gallery owner, publisher and photobook designer who retired from the gallery business last year. Two years ago, curator Wim van Sinderen of the Fotomuseum in The Hague asked Kooiker to work towards a retrospective exhibition. However, rather than collecting a ‘best of ’, Kooiker proposed he develop a new installation, and a book in which he would predominantly show new work, or old work in a new guise. The museum agreed and Kooiker realised the project by focusing on images of nudes, animals and cigars. All three are close to Kooiker’s heart: the nudes and sometimes animal photographs had already made their way into his books, and the cigars he has photographed obsessively in recent years. Gathering 63 photographs of each of the subjects, he made a series of large exhibition panels, loosely arranging the images into grids; the sturdy book, by contrast, follows the staccato rhythm of the title, showing 63 sets of nudes, animals and cigars in that repetitive order. The images on the right pages are systematically
accompanied on the left pages with the indications N 01, A 01, C 01 and so on. This time Kooiker decided to publish the book with up-and-coming Ghent-based publisher APE (Art Paper Editions), engaging the services of graphic designer and artist Jurgen Maelfeyt. He proved a worthy successor to Van Zoetendaal, displaying a similar feeling for how to deal with Kooiker’s work and helping create something that is neither a conventional catalogue nor a photobook. It is, says Kooiker, “a catalogue conceived of as an artist’s book”. Kooiker sets a different technical challenge for each of his projects, helping unite his images through these practical parameters. In his previous book, Heaven (2012), it was the Polaroid format, which Kooiker had either used as a means of making sketches or as a basis for his processed works, mostly nudes. The series, comprising of 494 Polaroids, begins with selfportraits of Kooiker posing next to his deceased father lying in state and ends with model studies of a plump female nude, one of his recurring subjects. Surprisingly, the latter series is printed on the book’s front cover, thus constituting an alternative beginning. In Nude Animal Cigar, the connecting thread is the process of sepia toning. Once applied to analogue prints to enhance their durability, sepia toning is now but one of many tools in Photoshop used for aesthetic and nostalgic effect. “The effect has been successful and absurd,” says Kooiker. “The strange thing is that it has been barely spoken about [in reviews of his project]. I don’t think people note the irony.”
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INTERVIEW
Nick Waplington is racing around, negotiating busy traffic on a rainy east London day. He currently lives in New York, but today he and his assistant are preparing and finalising the prints and framing for his upcoming exhibition, Working Process, behind-the-scenes photographs of the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen, which are now on show at Tate Britain (until 17 May). As we drive down Old Street, he points to a building and says, “The first time I met Lee [McQueen] was at a party there in 1995. I was with Phil Poynter, at that time editor of Dazed & Confused, and the stylist Katy England, and we met Lee, Robbie Williams and Kate Moss,” he continues. “We drank all night and they ended up dressing up Kate with design ideas. Lee and I became good friends, and as a shy man he only really trusted me to photograph him.” Waplington’s exhibition, which is curated by Simon Baker, shows some of the fruits of that friendship. McQueen commissioned Waplington in 2008 to document the preparation for what was to become the Horn of Plenty collection of Autumn/Winter 2009, one of his most critically acclaimed, referencing key moments in fashion history and his own
previous collections, presented on the runway in Paris, together with a black-sprayed rubbish tip. Waplington was given total creative freedom, yet the project is essentially a collaboration between the photographer and fashion designer; the book was finished in 2010, when McQueen sequenced the images just before he died. Waplington has stayed faithful to his edit but decided to wait a respectful time before having the book published.
Living Room
It’s seemingly worlds away from the glamour of this fashion milieu, but Waplington’s creative trajectory began on the Broxtowe housing estate in Nottingham when Margaret Thatcher was still in power. His father had grown up on the estate and his grandfather still lived there so, while studying photography at Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent University), Waplington started taking pictures there. He documented two families for five years, capturing the lives of those who had been rendered unemployable and forced to rely on a begrudging welfare state. Thatcher proudly announced that there was “no such thing as society” in an interview for Woman’s Own in 1987; photographing the living
rooms of these two families, Waplington shot a microcosm of working class life under her political regime. Shot before the rise of generic Ikea furniture and large plasma TV screens, Living Room was an attempt to show life honestly, without condescension, as was the general attitude of British documentary photography of the time. “I was inspired by the colour work of Paul Graham, Martin Parr and Tom Woods; I liked their aesthetic, though not necessarily what they photographed. I found their approach to be too anthropological,” says Waplington. “I’m a middle-class boy from Surrey who wanted to show the warmth of a working-class family, and make work with less distance, and a sense of humour, that showed the best in people.” As such, it’s almost a precursor to the reality TV shows that would later record the masses for the entertainment of the masses, I suggest, without devaluing the work. “Actually, I did make a film at the time for Geo TV that was screened in Germany and France in 1992,” says Waplington. “I shot it on Hi-8 video and I’ve still got the master tapes somewhere.” Waplington ended up publishing the project as a book, with introductions from Richard
WORK IN PROGRESS He came to international attention with his degree project shot on a Nottingham housing estate, and nearly 25 years later, Nick Waplington’s work documenting the preparations for Alexander McQueen’s final collection has gone on show at Tate Britain. The trajectory in between – including his years partying with his YBA friends before opting for a quieter life in the US, and spending five years shooting within the disputed borderland of Israel and Palestine – reveals the story of a creative maverick with a relentless curiosity for his fellow man words & portrait by michael grieve M AY 2 0 1 5
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Image © Nicolas Haeni for Self Publish, Be Happy
NEXT ISSUE
Next month, we put the focus on photobooks, with an all-star issue featuring the best independent publishers from London and Paris discussing the current climate for book-making, Tate’s photography curator Simon Baker on the importance of books in photographic history and their place in his institution, four top book designers on what makes a good one, Michael Mack on his First Book Award, and Matthew Connors on his forthcoming book, Fire in Cairo Next issue, on sale 06 May M AY 2 0 1 5
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INTELLIGENCE
Public funding, or the lack of it, underpins Intelligence this month – as we look at IdeasTap’s demise and James Hyman’s private collection of British documentary photography
IdeasTap turns off Set up six years ago to help young people entering the creative industries, IdeasTap has run out of money – and there’s no one to step in and support it. Tom Seymour speaks to its founder, Peter De Haan Peter De Haan blames the government’s austerity programme for the impending closure of arts funding and education charity IdeasTap, which he founded in 2008 but will shut down in June. The organisation’s communitybased website, which boasts almost
200,000 members, will no longer be supported, and seven people will be made redundant; De Haan says he is “dismayed” about what he sees as a lack of support from government bodies such as the Arts Council. “I’m bitter, because I see other organisations that play the politics get the money and then waste it,” he says. “They’re appalling... I can’t even get a response from Ed Vaizey [Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries]. It’s unbelievable.” De Haan warns that government cuts have created a legacy that will be felt in years to come, pointing to the recent Warwick Report into arts education. “The report suggests the arts are not catered for
by government agencies,” he says. “Arts education is steadily being marginalised, despite the value that creative industries offer the UK, both culturally and financially. I hope they wake up – and soon.” James Hopkirk, editor of IdeasTap’s website since December 2008, is “gutted”, adding that the charity is closing just when “it’s bigger, better, getting more reach and providing more opportunities for young people than ever before”.
Photography focus
IdeasTap has given away more than £2.3m to 62,000 people in the past six years; it has supported 190,000 artists in the creative industries and linked to 51 partners. In the
From the series The Borders of Russia, which won London-based photographer Maria Gruzdeva the IdeasTap / Magnum Photos Photographic Award in 2011 in the age 16-22 category. Image © Maria Gruzdeva
photography industry, it capitalised on a long-term partnership with Magnum Photos, for example, and provided more funding for emerging photographers than any other British non-governmental organisation. Newly established photographers such as Lewis Bush, Pierfrancesco Celada and Maria Gruzdeva all completed their first major series with IdeasTap funding. IdeasTap also offered mentoring and networking opportunities. Magnum held its 2013 annual meeting at IdeasTap’s London
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TECHNOLOGY CAMERA TEST
Lytro Illum It promises something many photographers have only dreamed of – the end of ‘out-of-focus’ images. But cut through the hyperbole and what are you left with? Is the Illum a revolutionary new camera? Is it a concept in need of further development or, worse, a one-trick pony? David Kilpatrick investigates The concept behind light-field capture has been around for nearly a century, but it is only in the past decade that it has become an everyday reality, allowing anyone with £1300 to splash out to capture images that can be refocused after a shoot. Researchers at Stanford University in California began developing cameras using a microlens array to capture a 4D light field, demonstrating the idea in 2004. And it was after working there and completing his PhD into light-field applications that Ren Ng started Lytro, a California startup whose mission is to bring the technology to the wider world. It reached the market in 2012 with Lytro’s first pocket-sized camera. Then, late last year, it introduced the Illum, an enhanced bridge camera with a substantial zoom lens and a four-inch rear screen. However, despite the promise and the hype – ‘the end of out-of-focus photography’ – it has yet to prove its potential in the consumer market. Pictures of the Illum are deceptive as it’s twice the size it looks, even before you fit its giant lens hood. That brings it to nine inches with a solid 3.5-inch cylinder of lens – big enough to stop crowds. The rubber-coated body has minimal controls as most functions are delegated to the touchscreen, and those controls it does have fall oddly under the right thumb on the back, making it hard to avoid touching them. It has no viewfinder, but the screen tilts for waist- or chest-level use.
Inner workings
Inside the Illum there’s a 40-megapixel sensor, similar in size and resolution to that used in
the Nokia 1020 phone camera. The principle of light-field capture has been established for a decade. It depends on recording not just a brightness and colour value for a given ray intercepted by a recording medium, but also its direction of incidence and point of origin relative to the lens. To reconstruct an image, many pixels are needed, and the final resolution is 2540×1360, or four megapixels. Only one sensor pixel location receives each ray bundle, thanks to an optical layer over the sensor that creates a directional ‘gate’ for the ray to enter. If you’ve ever seen a split image wedge in a focusing screen black out when you move your eye from dead centre, this is a related effect. Every pixel location can only see a ray bundle from one point of origination in the taking lens, which is designed so the rear group has a precise relationship to the sensor. The middle and front groups handle focus, zoom and stabilisation. The Illum has autofocus, despite the ‘one-ray-for-one-pixel’ principle allowing refocusing from the raw file. This enables a properly focused live view image without intensive computation, and optimises the result. Images work best with the traditional ‘one-third into the subject’ focus approach; you can then shift the plane of focus anywhere within a substantial depth-of-field and simulate a very shallow differential focus effect if
you want to. Although the best images are obtained by careful focusing and composition, failure to do this won’t lose you the shot. You can refocus in front of or behind a correct focus point, but you can also refocus from a position of error within surprisingly wide tolerances. These seem to be related to depth-of-field. To accomplish all this requires more processor power than any other current still image workflow, and the ‘busy’ delays in-camera and on-computer give a clue as to how intensive the computation is. If you’re after a still image to print, all you get is a four-megapixel JPEG in the time it might take the same system to handle an 80-megapixel medium format shot. It’s partly why the Illum costs just under £1300. The substantial lens operates at f/2 all the time. It is never stopped down and has no iris. Its actual focal length to achieve a 30-250mm full-frame equivalent is 9.5mm to 77.8mm. Rays from the entire area of the front element (72mm filter thread) are recorded. Using one large lens encodes not just horizontal interocular stereoscopic information the way a 3D camera has in the past, but 3D over any radial angle. You can also shift your viewpoint slightly when processing the file, or animate the shift of focus and viewpoint combined. It’s not as strong an effect on distant subjects, which explains why Lytro tends to show off closer shots as examples. For close-ups the lens diameter is enough for enhanced 3D. A typical use, in conjunction with the powerful
Lytro Desktop software (on Apple Mac or PC), is to allow a trackpad or touchscreen to move the virtual viewpoint about 3cm off-axis. It’s like looking around your subject, but the closest shots can have missing information if you shift the view to an extreme. Landscape shots show the effect best if there is some foreground or framing. This slight degree of parallax is similar to human head and body movements, which assists our binocular vision and depth perception. When looking at something, you are never still – as any macro photographer will confirm. You move gently back and forth, and sway a bit. The brain takes the relative movement of objects and adds this to stereoscopic vision to build its model of the seen environment.
Post simulation
Combining this with the refocusing ability of the file format, the software animates a traverse through the depth of the image that also appears to slide the viewpoint. You see the relative position of background detail shift behind the foreground as you refocus manually. Like a pinhole camera image, there’s no differential focus present in light-field information, and the final stage of auto-animation when viewing the files shows maximum depth-of-field. You can simulate an apparent f/1 or f/22. The processing creates a depth map, which you can view, and can generate false image information, copying parts of the shot into areas where they didn’t exist. This drives home that you are not viewing one image of four megapixels but a calculation based on mapping the paths of 40 million rays. Lytro’s in-camera processing (once again, extremely powerful) and Desktop software process the 50-60MB raw files with user control of colour, sharpness, noise and unique functions, such as virtual aperture and focus plane. It’s a good thing the Illum enables refocusing as the autofocus
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The software creates video clips rather like a Ken Burns rostrum slideshow. You can string your Lytro shots into a sequence, and control the rotation and angle, the focus and transitions. It’s easy to see how the camera and its software can be used to create unique and compelling business presentations. As to whether it can replace 3D rotary table high-resolution product shots, as used by many websites, only time will tell. Much will be down to how well Lytro implements HTML 5 export in future. Because the raw file is a unique format, it’s not supported by any processor except Lytro Desktop, which stores the files in a library not unlike Lightroom or iPhoto. It’s easy enough to copy libraries from device to device, and add files from cards or folders, but there’s no command to merge libraries. I shot 148 Lytro images and found that the result was an 18GB library file. You can delete images from the library to keep the size down, and create a new library whenever you want. The system and storage overhead is comparable to working with the new Canon 5DS/R 50-megapixel files. In terms of still imaging, the best you get is a half-page repro, and the detail resolution is comparable to resizing a onemegapixel capture. Superficially, the images look rich and have good contrast and colour, with the right level of sharpening for screen viewing. For video, the results are comparable to HD720, upscaled to view at HD1080. But this is not what the Illum is about. Illum videos are already being shared on Facebook pages by wedding couples, using the link provided by their photographer for the hosted animation. The response is positive – that this effect, a picture where the focus travels through the shot before settling down to a sharp image, is indeed magical or compelling. Lytro uses the term ‘living picture’, and in the absence of anything seen before, it’s unfamiliar enough to attract attention. It’s a strange phenomenon as the images are not truly moving and have no sound; they are more of a tableau vivant. Several makers have added mini movie-clip shooting to their cameras – still pictures like a Harry Potter picture-framed snap,
1 Lytro image at very close focus – almost touching the lens – rendered to maximum depth-of-field 2 The original point of focus and depth-of-field at f/2 working aperture 3 With the point of focus moved forwards and the background blurred 4 By using the software’s tilt function, which imitates tilt on a camera lens, the focused band is restricted to a narrow horizontal strip, and defocusing becomes stronger front and back Illustrative images © David Kilpatrick
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function was far from positive and struggled with some complex moving subjects. It is possible to capture a frame out of focus to give fine detail, and also possible to capture shots that show minimal refocusing or 3D effects. You need to learn a new technique to compose and take good light-field images. Once it’s all captured and processed to a certain stage, files for viewing online can be hosted on Lytro’s own sharing space, with interactive or video playback options. There are apps for iPhone and iPad, and there’s conversion for YouTube video and for viewing on 3D devices. Can you refocus and make prints? Yes, but only to the fairly soft fourmegapixel standard by printing from a JPEG export as there’s no direct print command. You can display in anaglyph or paired image stereo mode, which is fun if you have red-cyan stereo specs or can cross your eyes comfortably. Since it takes one to three minutes just to render each image first, and a very fast computer is needed to fine tune the result and use the viewing and export functions, the photographer needs to create and share video clips via Lytro to allow others to see them. Otherwise, they’ll be gathered around your screen, waiting for things to catch up with your input – a bit like the early days of Photoshop 25 years ago.
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