Window light is an excellent, free light source. It can have the same effects as bigger, more expensive lighting equipment. A large window is pretty much just a huge soft box. It will diffuse light into the room and around the subject you place in front of it. The earliest photography studios didn’t use fancy electric lighting. They just used big windows. It can also create interesting shadows as well as the window itself being a part of the composition itself which can not be achieved with any amount of light.
Bruce Gilden (born 1946) is an American street photographer. He is best known for his candid close-up photographs of people on the streets of New York City, using a flashgun. He has had various books of his work published, has received the European Publishers Award for Photography and is a Guggenheim Fellow. Gilden has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1998. He was born in Brooklyn, New York.
About his style and technique:
Photographer Title Theme – Candid Black and White Photographer
Bruce’s style is defined by the dynamic accent of his pictures, his special graphic qualities, and his original and direct manner of shooting the faces of passers-by with a flash. Gilden is also very prone to shooting in extremely close proximity to his “models”, so close in in-fact that a lot of the people he photographs think he’s photographing someone being them which makes them feel more part of the image and gives them a more natural and interesting facial and bodily expression. Gilden’s powerful images in black and white and now in colour have brought the Magnum photographer worldwide fame. Bruce has been known to walk on certain sides of streets and locate himself in certain places he believes give the most diverse and interesting range of people and actions to capture in his portraits.
Bruces inspiration stems from a large fascination of his to do with capturing the energy, the stress and the anxiety of busy city life. He uses flash in a large proportion of his photos and is very selective on the characters he shoots. In one video he quotes, “I look for characters, things that make an impression on me. Someone who’s not the average looking person.”
One of his famous quotes is “If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, its a street photograph”. This quote captures his ethos of trying to take photos that fully represent the non pictorial qualities like emotions and moods of people in the city and those that come with city life.
Video Links:
Images:
Favourite image and analysis:
This is my favourite image because of the anger it carries through the texture of the photography.
Technical features of this photo include;
An artificial flash gun light along with dull daylight.
A macro lens used to distinguish the smallest of facial features.
A greater exposure and shutter speed to capture the minute changes in colour and the variety and true form of the main colours.
A higher saturation to give the photo some more warmth and colour.
Visual features of this photo include;
A very intricate texture with little noise in the photo but a lot of texture.
An extremely high sharpness and high levels of colour saturaion
A kind of 2D shape, made 3D by the small patched shadow areas and of out of focus scenery behind the model
There is also a high contrast to other colours in the photo and shadows are very prominant to enhance the facial features.
Contextual and Conceptual features of this photograph;
This photograph is part of a project carried out by Bruce Gilden called ‘Portraits’ which aimed to capture very different and diverse looking people who captured Bruce’s attention. There may be a personal context that Bruce applies with these photos as-well due to his rough up bringing he maybe feels like these people are those he was destined to end up among if he hadn’t have found photography.
The conceptual essence behind these portraits and portraits in general is to capture the whole environmental feeling from the place the photo was taken. For example emotions like anger and stress can come across from this photo due to unknown reasons. Or street photography portraits can capture the chaos that occurs in a city.
Why Bruce Gilden?
Out of all of the case studies I have completed so far on photographers, Bruce has come across to me as the most genuine, realistic and diverse photographers around. I love his confident style in shooting up close with a flash gun and not caring what other people think of him or his work for example he once quoted “nobody can tell me a picture isn’t good if think its good “. I also love his approach to finding who he’s going to shoot by looking for people who are “different” and not fitting into society because it makes them interesting. I also finally like the way he tries to capture emotions and feelings of city life in his portraits because I personally think street photography is all about not capturing an image necessarily but capturing a mood, emotion or vibe from a person or place.
The use of lighting is a studio is important because it is an environment that the photographer can control, this means that the photographer can get the desired effect.
This is broad lighting and is when the photographer wants to illuminate only one side of the subjects face and sometimes they will use a reflector panel to give some light to the other side but the main focus is on the side with the most light hitting it.
Here is an example:
In this photo the photographer has placed the light source to the left of the subject and then has no reflector to his right.
My Response:
I put my subject into the centre of the frame and then put a light with a diffuser to my right and then had no reflector.
John Rankin Waddell (born 1966), also known under his working name Rankin, is a British portrait and fashion photographer and director. Rankin is best known as the founder of Dazed and Confusedmagazine (along with Jefferson Hack), and for his photography of models including Kate Moss and Heidi Klum, celebrities such as Madonna and David Bowie and his portrait of Elizabeth II. His work has appeared in magazines such as GQ, Vogue and Marie Claire.
Rankin visited South Africa in 2010 with BBC to make a documentary titled, South Africa in Pictures. In the same year, Nike and Bono’s R.E.D commissioned Rankin to shoot for Nike’s global campaign to fight and spread awareness against HIV/AIDS. The campaign was called, Lace Up Save Lives.
In 2011 Rankin started the biannual fashion, culture and lifestyle magazine, Hunger and launched Rankin Film to produce and direct his own commercial and editorial film work.
Rankin |
Practical Responses to Rankin
Contact Sheet of Shoot
One Point Lighting:
Studio Lighting | 7772Studio Lighting | 7759
These photographs are examples of 1-point lighting as one soft light was used to light the subject. I feel these work well as studio lighting examples. due to the lighting and the positions the subjects are in.
Chiaroscuro, in art, is the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition. It is also a technical term used by artists and art historians for the use of contrasts of light to achieve a sense of volume in modelling three-dimensional objects and figures.
The term chiaroscuro originated during the Renaissance as drawing on coloured paper, where the artist worked from the paper’s base tone toward light using white gouache, and toward dark using ink, bodycolour or watercolour.
Below is an example of chiaroscuro being used in early renaissance paintings.
“The Adoration of the Child” by Gerard van Honthorst
Chiaroscuro also is used in cinematography to indicate extreme low key and high-contrast lighting to create distinct areas of light and darkness in films, especially in black and white films. Classic examples are The Cabient Of Dr Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), and Metropolis (1927).
For example, in Metropolis, chiaroscuro lighting is used to create contrast between light and dark mise-en-scene and figures. The effect of this is primarily to highlight the differences between the capitalist elite and the workers.
In photography, chiaroscuro can be achieved with the use of “Rembrandt Lighting”. In more highly developed photographic processes, this technique also may be termed “ambient/natural lighting”, although when done so for the effect, the look is artificial and not generally documentary in nature.
Rembrandt Lighting:
Rembrandt lightingis a lighting technique that is used in studio portrait photography. It can be achieved using one light and a reflector, or two lights, and is popular because it is capable of producing images which appear both natural and compelling with a minimum of equipment. Rembrandt lighting is characterized by an illuminated triangle under the eye of the subject on the less illuminated side of the face.
Below are two examples of our own experiments with Rembrandt lighting and chiaroscuro. Together we worked in a team to create these images, one taking the photographs and focusing the camera, one modelling for the portrait and the other changing the lights and altering them to get the effect wanted and needed.
We started with the lights in front facing at an angle to the left of the model however found that this caused too much light to fall upon the right side of the face, to alter this we moved the light right the way around her body to the back almost behind her and this enabled us to be able to keep the right side of her face in the shadows creating tones and contrasts that come with rembrandt lighting.
I feel these photographs work well for this style of lighting as they have the dark and light contrasts needed for this style of portraits and I feel the shadows and the light areas work well together and don’t clash or fight each other.
Rembrandt Lighting | 7698Rembrandt Lighting | 7699
Experiments with Colour
Rembrandt Lighting | 7717Rembrandt Lighting | 7710
This blog post is about the photo shoot i carried out in the streets of town in St. Helier Jersey. The focus of this shoot was portrait photography and i was aiming to capture a natural essence of everyday life in the town through the view of the camera without having staged or positioned photos.
Definition of street photography:
Street Photography, also sometimes called candid photography, is photography conducted for art or inquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places. Although there is a difference between street and candid photography, it is usually subtle with most street photography being candid in nature and some candid photography being classifiable as street photography. Street photography does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic. Therefore here it is worthy to note that the kind of street photography our project is focused on is portraits. I chose to go for a more candid approach to collecting these photos and therefore as we are collecting portraits, all my finished pieces contain people in them.
Difficulties:
One difficult aspect of this portrait shoot was the fact that some public members may not like their picture being taken. Therefore i used this theme of being unnoticed in a lot of the photos i took with a minimal amount of disruption to the public that i could use for example not having flash turned on or using the zoom to collect close up features instead of getting in peoples faces, or way.
Contact sheet with best images:
Here is a contact sheet with my best images from the portrait shoot.
My favourite image edit:
I edited this image because i find its the most focused and intricate portrait I collected of a person. It shows an elder gentleman with a cap on walking by and is effective because of its simplicity and the unusual angle it was taken from. It has a look of double exposure however, its is just the levels of color turned up and down
My favourite image edit: