The Marks of Man

I have another 900 images to process, that's a lot of ginger nuts and green tea.

I started my post production on the other new book, "Landscaping with Natives". Even with all my actions and raw presets, its a sole-less factory job. Dan Carlin cheers me up, he and green tea and Ginger Nuts, makes the day bearable. In the film era I would have given the film to the processor and that would be that. There is a payment for digital technology. Here are a few test images. The book is a series of essays by well known and not so well known New Zealand Landscape Architects, discussing the use of New Zealand Natives in their designs.

Emily Allchurch & Nigel Warburton "Beyond the real, historical prisons of too much tidiness and those where anarchy engenders the hell of physical and moral chaos there lie yet other prisons, no less terrible for being fantastic and unembodied---the metaphysical prisons, whose seat is within the mind, whose walls are made of nightmare and incomprehension, whose chains are anxiety and their racks a sense of personal and even generic guilt." Aldous Huxley on Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons . Emily Allchurch's new series, Urban Chiaroscuro , is a photographic homage to Giovanni Battista Piranesi's (1729-78) darkest work; but it is also an exploration of her own imagination. The starting point for each picture is a specific plate from the eighteenth century architect's sinister Carceri d'Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons) , first published 1749-50, an enigmatic series of etchings that has been admired b...

Emily Allchurch, Xavier Bray and Minna Moore Ede When the eighteenth-century vedute painter, Canaletto, employed his camera obscura to paint the Grand Canal in Venice it was not only topographical accuracy he was seeking but also an aid to framing and editing his compositions. The camera obscura, a small box which rendered the three-dimensional world into two dimensions, had been used by artists since the sixteenth-century. According to the contemporary painter David Hockney, its use was far more widespread than is admitted by art historians today, employed by countless artists over the centuries as their ‘secret weapon’. Whether or not Hockney is correct, the way in which artists construct their images has always been a point of interest for their audience. It is this that is so compelling about the work of Emily Allchurch, for in an innovative reversal of this way of rationalising the world, she uses the Old Masters as her own camera obscura. Exploiting celebrated compos...

By Zoe Kleinman Technology reporter, BBC News Image manipulation expert Ric Bradley airbrushes Zoe Kleinman Whether it's Obama on the beach or the impossibly flawless skin of this month's glossy cover girl, any picture can now be digitally altered to tell an entirely different story. In the age of the airbrush, can we ever really believe our eyes? One man who can is Professor Hany Farid, a computer scientist and digital forensics expert who is a professional spotter of faked images - although he does not like the term. Technology and culture Continue reading the main story This is the first of a five part series exploring the intersection between technology and culture "Fakery is a loaded word - I prefer alteration or manipulation," he said. "It's not always in...

I was interviewed about my work on Plains FM, I was a bit of a mumbler, but survived. Click to play below. MP3 download