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AO1 Develop Ideas, AO2 Explore Ideas, AO3 Record Ideas, AO4 Present Ideas, Uncategorized, Unit 2 Portrait

Studio Photography Lighting (Singular)

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STUDIO PHOTOGRAPHY ONE POINT LIGHTING

This post is focussed on our studio lighting photoshoot using a single light to capture images.

Single point lighting or “one point lighting”, is the technique of carrying out a photoshoot within a studio with only a single source of light, for example large lamps, spotlights or torches.

It enables reflective lighting techniques, and it sometimes, can be used to focus a viewers attention to a particular aspect of a photograph or subject in the photograph, or it can be used to create shadows when used correctly that add additional depth of field and conceptual features to an image.

Contact sheet of images:

 

From this contact sheet I picked out my favourite two images from the shoot and edited them in Adobe Photoshop.

My final edited images from the single point lighting shoot:

I chose to edit both of these images because of the sharpness, diversity in model actions, contrast differences, brightness differences and the similarity in the position of the single light and the shadows on the models’ face.

The camera was using a high ISO of around 800 and an above average aperture on the first photo, and using a lower ISO of around 600 and a smaller aperture on the second.

The shutter speed for the first photo was slightly faster than the second creating the darkened effect with only the single light from the side creating the shiny parts that give the image its ‘definition’.

The depth of field in both images is shown through the shadows created by the side-lighting however, this only shows depth of field on the model themselves.

Alex looking “into the light”

“Seriously Serious”

AO1 Develop Ideas, AO2 Explore Ideas, Uncategorized, Unit 2 Portrait

Case Study Street Photography – Bruce Gilden

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Bruce Gilden

Who and what:

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:

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Favourite image and analysis:

 

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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.

AO1 Develop Ideas, AO2 Explore Ideas, Uncategorized, Unit 2 Portrait

Studio portrait lighting

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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.

Image result for broad lighting for studio

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:

Image result for broad lighting portraits

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.

AO1 Develop Ideas, Unit 2 Portrait

Chiaroscuro / Rembrandt Lighting

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Chiaroscuro:

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 lighting is 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 | 7698
Rembrandt Lighting | 7699
Experiments with Colour
Rembrandt Lighting | 7717
Rembrandt Lighting | 7710
AO1 Develop Ideas, AO2 Explore Ideas, AO3 Record Ideas, AO4 Present Ideas, Uncategorized, Unit 2 Portrait

Street Photography Photo shoot

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Street Photography Photo shoot

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

AO1 Develop Ideas, AO2 Explore Ideas, AO3 Record Ideas, AO4 Present Ideas, Unit 2 Portrait

Night street photography

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Christmas light switch on street photography

For my next attempt at street photography, I decided to take photos in town at a Christmas celebration. I thought this would produced some good outcomes as there would be a lot of people compared to my last attempt, and I therefore thought that I could find a wider variety of more interesting people to photograph. Since there would be more people, I thought that I could blend in a little more and maybe be able to capture some more candid images of people. However, I also took portrait style images of people where they were looking straight into the camera. I also tried to find interesting backgrounds that would makes my images look more attractive.

Contact sheets

Best images

Analysing

Context

This is an image that I took of a Christmas parade dancer while she was in conversation with one of her friends.

Visual

Visually I think that this image is very successful. I like how the subject was captured in the centre of the frame, and how I manged to capture her laughing as it gives the image a positive atmosphere. I also like how there is a lot of lighting due to her costume, as it makes the image look more interesting and colourful which would captivate an audience.

Technical

As this image was taken at night in the dark, my ISO was set to 1600 and my shutter speed was set at 1/60. These settings helps me to get this image perfectly exposed. I also used flash to capture this photograph to fill in any shadowing that would’ve happened due to the uneven street lighting.

Concept

I think that the happy expression and positive atmosphere along with the Christmas nature of the photo shoot, represents how this time of year is truly abut happiness and not about being materialistic.

 

Context

This is an image that I took of a child on the Christmas parade train, as he he leaned out of it to try and catch the foam “snowflakes” coming out of the top of the train.

Visual

One element I like in this image is the foam snowflakes. As some bits were falling very close to my lens, they ended up not being in focus as my priority was to capture the child’s expression. I like how this looks as I think that it adds more detail to the image without taking attention away from it.

Concept

I think this image shows how people should appreciate small details in life. While I took this image there was a lot going on, 100s of people crowding around us, confetti being set of, a choir singing yet the child chose to focus on the snow.

Technical

 

 

Context

This is an photograph I  took of a lady just after the Christmas lights had turned on. She caught my attention as she was dressed in a bright red jacket, and was wearing a lot of fur. I caught this image the moment she turned back to look at the lights on the tree

Visual

Visually, I think this image is very successful. It it well exposed and it is sharp making it good quality.  The use of my flash meant that she wasn’t wash out by all the background light. The angle I captured this image from was also very successful as I got the whole of her face in the photograph.

Concept

I think that the way she is so intensely staring at the tree and the lighting is really interesting as it may make people wonder what the woman was thinking while she was looking.

Technical

For this image my shutter speed was set 1/60 and my ISO was set on 6400, as it was very dark outside and I needed as much exposure without machining the image look noisy. For this image I also used flash so that the woman in the image was evenly lit, as there were many lighting decorations everywhere that caused uneven lighting.

AO1 Develop Ideas, AO2 Explore Ideas, AO3 Record Ideas, AO4 Present Ideas, Uncategorized, Unit 2 Portrait

Studio photo shoot

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This is a photo sheet of the whole shoot, the green markings show that I will use the photo, yellow means i might use it. Blue lines mean that I will crop the photo along the lines.
I used two point lighting for this photo, the blue light from the left creates attractive shadows, and the warm white light from the right helps make the skin appear more tanned and makes the whole photo look more real, instead of looking staged.
This photo has been edited to appear brighter and more grainy, this has been done by adjusting the saturation, gamma correction etc.
Here Layla is playing the guitar, her placement creates a show which is offset to the right which makes the image more powerful. It is also composed of neutral tones which complement the simplicity of the acoustic guitar.
In this photo Layla’s hand gestures create emaciated shadows across her face. The only light source is a soft box which helps create bold shadows.
For this photo I decided to experiment with blur. The photo came out blurry so I decided to blur the rest of it more so that the centre of the image looks sharper in contrast with them.
This is structurally my favourite photo as the middle is empty. The right side is really dark which diverts the attention away from the middle which is the weakest part of a photo.
AO1 Develop Ideas, AO2 Explore Ideas, AO3 Record Ideas, AO4 Present Ideas, Component 1 Personal Investigation, Component 2 ESA, Unit 2 Portrait

Studio Photography

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Rankin

Is a British portrait and fashion  photographer he is also the founder of ‘Dazed and Confused’  magazine  and for his photography.  He has work with many famous people, including models, Heidi Klum and Kate Moss, celebrities such as David Bowie and Madonna and is known for his portrait of Elizabeth II. His work has appeared in magazines such as GQ, Vogue and Marie Claire. 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 was destined for life of an accountant until he discovered his interests lay somewhere else as he drop his accountancy studies and began studying photography instead. Rankin’s work has a distinct patterns of using white backgrounds, or single colour background, which helps to concentrate all focus on the person he is shooting. The blank background creates almost a blank canvas in with the person is the paint, the more expressions and feeling in the persons face the more detailed the canvas becomes. He is very much a studio photographer and works with artificial light and flash photography to capture the detail on peoples faces.

Image result for john rankin photography

Image result for john rankin photography

 

Image result for john rankin photography

Lighting

  • Why do we use studio lighting?  It allows us to create natural lighting effects in a variety of situations its easy to  control and to adapt to fit the needs of the shoot. Also with so many options available nowadays, it doesn’t have to be confined to a studio.
  • What is the difference between 1-2-3 point lighting and what does each technique provide / solve

    Key Light

    Key Light

    This is the main light. It is usually the strongest and has the most influence on the look of the scene. It is placed to one side of the camera/subject so that this side is well lit and the other side has some shadow.

    Key and Fill

    Fill Light

    This is the secondary light and is placed on the opposite side of the key light. It is used to fill the shadows created by the key. The fill will usually be softer and less bright than the key. To achieve this, you could move the light further away or use some spun. You might also want to set the fill light to more of a flood than the key.

    Key, Fill and Back

    Back Light

    The back light is placed behind the subject and lights it from the rear. Rather than providing direct lighting (like the key and fill), its purpose is to provide definition and subtle highlights around the subject’s outlines. This helps separate the subject from the background and provide a three-dimensional look.

  • What is fill lighting? Fill light is form of supplementary light mainly used to lighten shadows in an image. Fill light is often used in portrait photography to create a contrast between the image subject and image background giving the scene a sense of depth despite the final product being 2 dimensional. In this situation the use of fill light also reduces the overall dynamic range of the scene allowing for easier selection of the exposure settings required to capture an image. When fill light is correctly applied it does not significantly impact the main light source of an image.
  • What is spill lighting? Light spilling is where light falls where it was not intended to fall, creating a hazy, blown out look at times.
  • What is Chiaroscuro ? It’s the strong and bold contrasts between light and dark areas in a photograph.

 

Ring Light

Two Point Lighting

Three Point Lighting

Chiaroscuro

 

AO1 Develop Ideas, AO2 Explore Ideas, AO3 Record Ideas, AO4 Present Ideas, Component 1 Personal Investigation, Uncategorized, Unit 2 Portrait

Street Photography

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Street Photography

What is 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.  The images captured when taking photos in the street are immediate and happen often quite quickly no member of the public stands there and stages this out therefore all images happen by fate.

For me there are a few ways of interpreting the way someone takes photos under the theme of ‘Street Photography’ In these examples some of the images were taken a long time ago.  For street photographers they have seen,through images,changes in clothes, appearance and just the way individuals have interacted with one another for the past hundred years or so.

There are many artists that are linked to street photography here are just some examples:

  • Bruce Gilden
  • Henri – cartier Bresson
  • Garry Winogrand
  • Weegee
  • Robert Doisneau
  • Vivian Maier

These are some quotes that photographers have said or wrote whilst out and about photographing the streets and whats inside it.

“Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good.” – Garry Winogrand

“I love the people I photograph. I men they’re my friends. I’ve never met most of them or I don’t know them at all, yet through my images I live with them”- Bruce Gilden

“Don’t wait. the time will never just be right” –  Napoleon Hill

Below is a video on some more examples of street photography :