Archive for June, 2007

Lucien Hervé, French-Hungarian photographer, has passed away after long illness in the 97^th year of his life.

Hervé was born as László Elkán in 1910 in Hódmez?vásárhely, Hungary and was known as the most important architecture photographer of the twentieth century.
He studied economics in Vienna then moved to Paris where he met Robert Capa and Andre Kertész and made photo reports about the war for French magazines but got captured in 1940 and spent time in German captivity.
He started to paint in the early ‘40-s and his paintings were exhibited in 1942 and 1943.

In 1949 he met the architect Le Corbusier and made 650 shots in a day of a building of his that was being built in Marseille. Later he became Le Corbusier’s photographer and spent most of his time on the visual re-interpretation of the architect’s life-work. Eighteen-thousand of Hervé’s half million photographs are related to Corbusier’s works. Le Corbusier said that he had noticed such things on his buildings by Hervé’s pictures that he had not thought of before.

Hervé became the Knight of Order of Honour in 1991 for the role he played in the French Resistance during the Second World War II.

Lucien Hervé links:
Artnet
R A L P H: The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities

Original article in Hungarian on index.hu

Some posts ago I wrote about lighting tutorial slideshows by David Berman and Dave Hill’s works and his behind the scenes photos.

Today I came across Dave Black’s Website and the huge amount of workshop materials he published. Many, many great sample photos with detailed explanations on how he captured them. They are very useful whatever level you are in photography.
My personal technical favourites are on how to use remotely controlled Nikon SB-800 speedlights to light your subjects here, here and here.
But the most meaningful one at this moment in my life is the Principles of Success full of good pieces of advice for beginner – and not only beginner – photographers.

His pictures are copyrighted so I could not post any of them here.

I have just finished reading the second piece of the National Geographic Photography Field Guide series: People and Portraits written by Robert Caputo.

I wrote about the first book of the series a few months ago. The most surprising thing with that post was that I received a comment on my blog from Peter K. Burian, co-author of the book, who is Hungarian, just like myself.

This book is about a very difficult area of photography: photographing people. Difficult from technical point of view and also from writing point of view.
The technical part is that you have to be very much aware of what you are doing and why – with your camera and other pieces of equipment and the people you are photographing. You have to know what you would like to express and also how you can do that using some dull technology that knows nothing about emotions.
Writing about something that is very practical and can be developed only by practicing is a challenge that Robert Caputo coped with brilliantly.

He discusses topics like how to use the environment and available light, how to express movement on a still image, how to plan a photo essay, and – most importantly I believe – how to connect and work with your model when making pictures about him/her.

Twelve original photos made by Roger Fenton – one of the most important photographers of the nineteenth century – have been found in the Library of Manuscripts and Rarities of Eötvös Lóránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary. These works from the dawn of photography are without example in Hungary and it is still a mystery how and when they got to the Library or even to the country.

Roger Fenton was a pioneer of photography and regarded as the first war photographer photo-documenting the Crimean War in 1855 in extremely difficult circumstances (he got cholera and broke several of his ribs).

The found photos were made as salted paper and albumen prints and require special protection and care. Ten of the twelve images – sized 30×40cm in average – were made in 1856, two in 1858 - as a trusted photography history expert determined.

Original article in Hungarian on index.hu

These pictures were post-processed using the Sculpture variant of the famous LucisArt filter plug-in.

This was the original image:

And an other one:

And its original:

Related posts:
Playing with the LucisArt Photoshop filter plug-in
Isn’t it more interesting? (LucisArt)

I have just read an article with this title: So You Think You Know What An F-number Is. Brian Auer gives a detailed description of the relationship between F-number and aperture in his post with some scary mathematical background.