BIOGRAPHY | HUGH TURVEY - SOME BACKGROUND AND HISTORY
Inspiration:
STROBESCOPES / SEQUENCE | HUGH TURVEY - PHOTOGRAPHER
The Beginning – Inspiration:
Seeing Harold Edgerton and Eadweard Muybridge images and marveling at the technical achievement of the image capture.
In 1999 I compiled together an extensive list of ideas that I thought would work well as stroboscopic images ranging from every aspect of life. I really wanted not to be limited by the technique, as Edgerton had been as he usually had to photograph the subject matter against a dark/black background in order to see the full stroboscopic effect. I wanted my first set of images to be outdoors and seen to be an obvious progression of from Edgerton and Muybridge and not just a pastiche.
The project went on the back burner for 6 years until the digital camera technology along with the advances in post production software had lead rise to the possibility of me achieving the results that I imagined all those years previously.
I researched how Edgerton had achieved his results and had discovered, unlike myself , he had the backing of a university which meant he was able to custom build flash/strobe equipment in order to achieve his images. The result however is always a very direct source flash and the aesthetic is not necessarily in the technique but in the resulting patterns created by the multiple exposures.
At first I tried to see if it were possible to recreate the Edgerton images...a period of research that took 2 years off and on. I had tried to recreate the equipment as used by Edgerton but the size of capacitor required were no longer available at a reasonable cost (if at all) and I was frequently told that the military surplus was probably the only route down which I might find what I was looking for.
I also explored the idea and had been in discussion with a portable flash manufacturer about building an arrangement of approx. 30 flashes on a control sequencer….it proved to difficult to manage and would be possibly unreliable….and that’s a lot of batteries.
I had also looked at high speed equipment that could deliver very fast frames per second and would be shot on film but again the limitation would be cost of the equipment and the overall cast of the post production.
So...up to this all tests and exploration routes had proved a let down in terms of image quality
Every route explored so far had had it's pros and cons...so I decided to take the route that would offer the most versatility, that could be adapted and improved upon in post production...so the route chosen was to create a series of images that relied equally on the image capture which would be a combination of Edgerton and Muybridge techniques as much as the post production to create the final result.
We commissioned some equipment that would mount an array of cameras and an electronic time controller that could trigger the cameras at varying speeds in a linear sequence. Each camera was also equipped with it’s own high speed strobe unit and camera shutter speeds in excess of 1/1000perSec were needed to freeze the action.
The scenes were set, the pictures taken and then processed in post production by a team of people and finally were arranged in sequence to create the images you see.
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