Photoshoot plan

Photoshoot	Location/setting	Lighting	Shot Types	Idea	Props	Equipment
1 – pictures of grandmother (2 shoots)	Grandmother’s house – in a bedroom, hallway and dining room, using windows, and plain backgrounds	Natural – using window lighting, to create shadow and reflections	Macro, headshots, half body, full body	Identity – generational identity, identity in her home, age identity	Personal objects, jewellery, bracelets	Camera – portrait lens
2 – pictures of found images	Studio	Artificial	Birds-eye	Generational identity, age identity, the passing of time	White paper for the background	Camera, trigger, copy stand
3 – pictures of mum	My house – windows, bedroom, lounge and kitchen	Natural, using window lighting to add shadow and dimension	Macro, headshots, half-body, full body	Generational identity, age identity, identity in the home	Jewellery and personal belongings	Camera, possibly tripod, portrait lens

In my photoshoot using the copystand, I want to capture images from above, with evenly lit images, which I will then crop in lightroom as part of my editing process. In all 3 portrait shoots, I wanted to capture different shot types. I wanted to take some classic headshots, with natural lighting, as well as close up, abstract shots which only show certain parts of my subject.

After taking my pictures, I will import them into lightroom, with different collections: one for close up abstract pictures, one for headshots and one for wide/full body shots. I am planning to edit my pictures in the style of both Bill Brandt, and also photographer Luigi Ghirri. After these edits, I will experiment with collage and montage in style of my main artist, Joachim Schmid. These will inspire/ make up my final outcomes and final images that will then we printed and presented.

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I love the grainy, vintage-looking editing style both these artists use, which will help me to edit my images to a similar style to my archival images of my mum and grandmother.

Contact Sheets

After taking my images, I imported and filtered my images in lightroom.

Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt was born in Hamburg on the 2nd of May 1904 to an English father and a German mother. During the 1920s Brandt was sent to a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, to receive treatment for tuberculosis. It is likely that he took up photography as an amateur enthusiast during this time. In 1927 Brandt travelled to Vienna, where he met the writer and social activist Dr Eugenie Schwarzwald, a pioneer of education for girls in Austria, whose home provided a venue for the intellectual elite of the time. Schwartzwald found a position for Brandt in a local portrait studio and introduced him to the American poet Ezra Pound.

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In turn, Pound apparently introduced Brandt to the American surrealist artist Man Ray, who became a major influence on Bill’s work.  Brandt Assisted Man Ray in Paris for several months in 1930. Here he witnessed the heyday of surrealist film and grasped the new poetic possibilities of photography. Brandt also learnt several technical processes from Man Ray – the use of extreme grain for graphic effect as well as the use of radical cropping. 

In 1932, after a period of travelling around Europe, Brandt married Eva Boros, who he met in Vienna. In 1934 they moved to London and settled in Belsize Park, North London. Brandt adopted Britain as his home and it became the subject of his greatest photographs. In 1936 the first collection of grants early photographs was published in ‘The English at Home.”

Night photography became one of his specialities, and ‘Woman in Hamburg, St Pauli District’ (1933) may be his earliest experiment in the genre.  Brandt posed his wife Eva as a prostitute in the red-light district of Hamburg. Family and friends were to play many roles in his social documentary series. Brandt was also a collage artist, both in photography and later in life. Later in life, Brandt used beach-combed objects in collages. These were published as ‘Bill Brandt: The Assemblages.’

Joachim Schmid

Berlin-based artist Joachim Schmid, who has been concentrating on the recycling of vernacular photographs since the early 1980s, is a living embodiment of the visual scavenger. Schmid studied at Berlin University of the Arts from 1976 to 1981. He began his career as a freelance critic and the publisher of Fotokritik, an iconoclastic and original contribution to West German photography. In the pages of Fotokritik and in his regular articles and lectures for other outlets, Schmid published many examples of his critique of photography as a form of cultural practice.

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Living near one of the largest flea markets in Berlin, he had already amassed a rich, deep, and varied collection of vernacular photography which formed the raw material for many of his works. With the advent of the digital age, he has shifted his practice to the Internet, where he continues to ponder the future of photography in a globalized culture. In the current context of the frantic and furious proliferation of images, Schmid aligns himself with fellow artists who seek to tame images and keep them in line.

His series Other People’s Photographs (2008–11) takes the form of a set of 96 self-published books, each of which contains a selection of photographs found on the Internet and classified according to specific, nonsensical, odd criteria. Schmid notes that when images lose the thread of their origins, their incontinent production leads us into utter chaos. When this happens, the artist’s mission is to restore order – or at least a possible order, accompanied by a maliciously knowing wink. This provokes confusion in the naive and complicity in connoisseurs capable of savouring a caustic parody of the “official” classificatory methodologies of historians and museums.

Each volume of Other People’s Photographs brings together diverse elements on the basis of some unifying factor – however arbitrary and absurd it may seem – and thus suggests possible ways of categorizing the world. Schmid essentially mocks the supposed coherence of a theory of the catalogue and the archive.

Schmid’s use of extended series reflects his concern with photography as an encompassing, culturally dispersed social and aesthetic feature that runs throughout the public and private spheres of life. The fundamental richness of Schmid’s photographic raw material – along with the wit he often displays – derails any attempt to read his work as pure anthropology or social science. His artistic preoccupations reflect a close observation of photographic history and a fascination with photographic images themselves in all their alternately bizarre and conventionalized aspects.

Identity means the fact of being or knowing who a person is or the set of qualities that make a person or group of people different from others. Identity is important in photography because it allows a photographer to tell a story about their subject, whether it be an obvious story or something deeper about their character.

Identity Photography

Photographs have been used in many different contexts to show identity or an aspect of identity. From a social media profile picture to a police mug shot, photographs can speak of identity in a way that is different from other artistic mediums. This is because a photograph is inextricably linked to reality. A photograph resembles the likeness of what appeared before the lens. So, in the case of a profile picture, family album
or mug shot, identity is based on the repetition of sameness that is evidenced by the image produced by the camera.

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However, photography can also be used to explore identity beneath the surface of physical attributes, delving into topics such as race, gender and heritage/ethnicity. Photographers such as Rineke Dijkstra look at topics such as geographical identity, and adolescence. Some photographers explore the idea of identity, like Danny Lowe and his self-portraits above. Also, photographers like Robert Frank and John Heartfield comment on racism and social identity.

My Ideas

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My first idea is to produce a series of images based on the work of one of my favourite photographers, Michelle Sank. Her photographs of individuals in their houses inspire me because of the way they show personal identity in such a raw way.

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My second idea is to produce collages like the work of Joachin Schmid, using images of my mum, nana and me. My aim with these collages is to show generational identity, through 3 generations of women. My last idea is to produce comparisons of these 3 generations, around the age of 17/ teenage years. I would collect images / take images of me, my mum and nana to show the differences and similarities between us at around the same age. I might incorporate the work of Joachin Schmid into this, combining this with my idea above to create different pictures of nowadays/older pictures.

Claude Cahun

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Claude Cahun was a Surrealist photographer whose work explored gender identity and the subconscious mind. “Under this mask, another mask,” the artist famously said. “I will never be finished removing all these faces.” – This phrase relates to the ideas of the multiple identities she conveyed in her photos, showcasing early examples of gender fluidity. She was born Lucy Schwob in Nantes, France on October 25, 1894, to a prominent Jewish family. Her first recorded self-portraits are dated as early as 1912 when the artist was about 18. In the early 1920s, she would change her name to the gender-neutral Claude Cahun, which would be the third and last time the artist changed her name. Along with step-sister and lover Marcel Moor, she moved to Paris and fell into the midst of the Surrealist art scene.

The artist went on to collaborate with Man Ray as well as founding the left-wing group Contre Attaque alongside others. In the late 1930s, Moore and Cahun moved to Jersey where they, disguised as non-Jews, produced and distributed anti-Nazi propaganda. After being caught, imprisoned, and sentenced to death, they successfully escaped such a fate when Jersey was liberated by allies in 1945. Cahun is considered to be a ground-breaking artist who fully embraced her gender fluidity long before the term came into use.

Cahun and Moore employed a subversive avant-garde art practice as a form of resistance. For example, they created anti-nazi leaflets, and distributed them throughout Jersey, leaving them in strategic places. They signed the leaflets der Soldat Ohne Namen (“The Soldier with No Name”). Their activities were discovered in 1944, and—though they were not leaders of a large-scale resistance movement, as the Nazis believed—the two women were imprisoned and sentenced to death for undermining Nazi authority.

Much of their property, including their art, was confiscated. They were saved when the island was liberated in 1945. A photo of Cahun taken after their liberation shows her defiantly clenching a Nazi military badge in her teeth. Cahun and Moore remained in Jersey, continuing to produce work until Cahun died at age 60. Moore inherited her possessions and art, but Cahun’s legacy was nearly lost when Moore committed suicide in 1972 and all of Cahun’s work was auctioned off. 

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Since her death, Claude Cahun’s work has influenced the ideas of gender, sexuality, and identity, both in society, as well as for many singers and artists also. These artists include photographer Gillian Wearing, who took inspiration from Cahun’s idea of changing identities. These inspired Gillian Wearing’s “Secrets and lies” collection.

Juxtaposition happens when there are two or more elements in a scene that contrast with each other. Or one element contributes towards the other to create a theme. It’s all about making the viewer wonder why the photographer chose a certain viewpoint for the picture / combination of pictures.

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To create a point of juxtaposition, the picture or composition must contain at least two elements with strong visual weight. The viewer looks at both of these at the same time, coming to a conclusion about the purpose of each element.

Photographers create juxtapositions by placing two things side by side, to highlight their differences. Photographers often choose to create juxtapositions to showcase differences often in society such wealth and poverty, but also things like beauty and ugliness, or darkness and light. Furthermore, they can also be created with differences or similarities in shape, line and colour.

Michelle Sank – Editions Emile

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Henry Mullins and Michelle Sank represent 165 years of the practice of photographic portraiture in Jersey. That period has seen the island undergo major social and economic changes. Through these photographers’ works, we examine those changes and the power structures that remain in place within this society. Between 1850-73, Henry Mullins made over 9000 “carte de visite” portraits of Jersey’s ruling elite and wealthy upper classes – The collection that exists of his work comes through his studio albums, in which he placed his clients in an ordered grid with reference to mid-nineteenth century social hierarchies.

Pairing his images with portraits made in 2013 by Michelle Sank as the inaugural Archisle International Photographer-in-Residence reflects upon a culturally diverse and more inclusive demographic of islanders as Jersey has evolved as a community supported primarily by an agricultural, maritime and emerging tourism economies to a contemporary international finance centre.

My Experiments

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Man Ray

Man Ray was a key figure of Dada and Surrealism, one of the few Americans associated with either movement. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, the artist adopted his pseudonym in 1909 and—while he also worked across painting, sculpture, video, and printmaking—became renowned for his striking, sensual black-and-white photographs.

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A number of his portraits—such as Larmes (Tears) (ca. 1932), which features a woman “crying” glass bead tears, and his pictures of Kiki de Montparnasse—are icons of 20th-century art. Man Ray also embraced technical experimentation; he used solarization and made Rayographs as he pushed the boundaries of avant-garde photography. At auction, his work has sold for seven figures, and his paintings have fetched particularly high prices. Man Ray is represented in the collections of such institutions as the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.

Man Ray’s work inspires me due to all the different ways that different shapes are created and highlighted when adding images on top of each other, adding perspective to the previous separate images. For example, the image above has a strong use of symmetry, which creates leading lines from each corner of the image, through the centre and across the hands. The high contrasted monochrome colour helps to show the focal points of the darker points of the image, such as the darker face to the left, as well as the face and hand next to it. Ray’s photomontages play with femininity and form as in his multiple exposure above – featuring Dora Maar, who was a French photographer.

My Experiments

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The photomontage is the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging, and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image. Sometimes the resulting composite image is photographed so that the final image may appear as a seamless physical print. 

The photomontage is an artistic practice that has endured almost since the birth of photography itself. At its most basic level, the Mphotomontage is a single image combined of two or more original and/or existing images. … A “new” image might also be created by altering an original photograph through tearing and cutting.

It was first used as a technique by the dadaists in 1915 in their protests against the First World War. It was later adopted by the surrealists who exploited the possibilities photomontage offered by using free association to bring together widely disparate images, to reflect the workings of the unconscious mind.

In 1923 the Russian constructivist Aleksander Rodchenko began experimenting with photomontage as a way of creating striking socially engaged imagery concerned with the placement and movement of objects in space. Other key artists of this process are John Heartfield, the German artist who reconstructed images from the media to protest against Germany’s Fascist regime, and Peter Kennard, whose photomontages explored issues such as economic inequality, police brutality, and the nuclear race between the 1970s and the 1990s.

John Stezaker

John Stezaker’s work re-examines the various relationships to the photographic image: as documentation of truth, purveyor of memory, and symbol of modern culture. In his collages, Stezaker appropriates images found in books, magazines, and postcards and uses them as ‘readymades’. Through his elegant juxtapositions, Stezaker adopts the content and contexts of the original images to convey his own witty and poignant meanings.

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In his Marriage series, Stezaker focuses on the concept of portraiture, both as art historical genre and public identity. Using publicity shots of classic film stars, Stezaker splices and overlaps famous faces, creating hybrid ‘icons’ that dissociate the familiar to create sensations of the uncanny. Coupling male and female identity into unified characters, Stezaker points to a disjointed harmony, where the irreconciliation of difference both complements and detracts from the whole. In his correlated images, personalities (and our idealizations of them) become ancillary and empty, rendered abject through their magnified flaws and struggle for visual dominance.

In using stylistic images from Hollywood’s golden era, Stezaker both temporally and conceptually engages with his interest in Surrealism. Placed in a contemporary context, his portraits retain their aura of glamour, whilst simultaneously operating as exotic ‘artifacts’ of an obsolete culture. Similar to the photos of ‘primitivism’ published in George Bataille’s Documents, Stezaker’s portraits celebrate the grotesque, rendering the romance with modernism equally compelling and perverse.

This is part of John Stezaker’s “marriage” series. which took famous pictures of celebrities at the time, and added juxtaposing images on top. This image is black white, with quite low contrast. The placing of the second image in the middle of the first creates a natural focal point. This also adds balance to composition, utilizing the rule of thirds. There is a slightly darker area to the right, on the male subject’s clothing. This creates soft contrast between the lighter tones of the woman’s clothing and these darker tones.

My Experiments

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Editing

After my photoshoot, I edited my best images.

Sequencing and Grid work

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The Deadpan Aesthetic

The deadpan photograph simply says “this is how things are”. Deadpan portraits show people in their natural state, typically not showing any sort of emotion. These subjects are not posed, are not dressed up for the occasion, and seem completely honest. The color of deadpan photographs is commonly de-saturated. While not completely devoid of color, the colors tend to be muted.

Bernd and Hilla Becher

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Bernhard “Bernd” Becher, and Hilla Becher, were German conceptual artists and photographers working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures, often organised in grids.

Together, the Bechers went out with a large 8 x 10-inch view camera and photographed these buildings from a number of different angles, but always with a straightforward “objective” point of view. They shot only on overcast days, so as to avoid shadows, and early in the morning during the seasons of spring and autumn. Bernd and Hilla Becher first began their still-ongoing project of systematically photographing industrial structures – water towers, blast furnaces, gas tanks, mine heads, grain elevators and the like – in the late 1950s.

Home

My Experiments

After editing my images with subtle adjustments, keeping them all in black and white to mimic the work of the Bechers, I created grids in photoshop. I did this by exporting my images from Lightroom to photoshop, then creating a blank document (A3). I then added each image, lined them up to create equal borders, and cropped the document to my desired size.

Photoshoot Plan

	Equipment	Shot types	Lighting	Genre
Photoshoot	Camera, tripod, lights with flash, ring light, umbrella light, box light and transmitter	3/4, Headshot, close up, side profile	Artificial	Identity, portraiture

One point lighting

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One point lighting in photography means that light is only coming from one source. A single source of light can have a very natural, or depending on the posing of the subject, sometimes dramatic look that will draw people’s attention to the single lighted person or surface. One-point lighting, depending on its positioning, can also create a harsh shadow. However, this also depends on the brightness of the light being used, whether it’s natural or artificial.

My examples of one-point lighting images

Two-point lighting

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Two-point lighting in photography is the use of two sources of lighting when shooting. This can create, soft even lighting, illuminating the subject’s features well. The crucial concept to understand when using 2 point lighting is that the light sources point directly towards each other and the subject is placed between the two. On plan, there is a straight line between light source 1, the subject, and light source 2.

High-key lighting

High-key lighting is a style of lighting for film, television, or photography that aims to reduce the lighting ratio present in the scene. This was originally done partly for technological reasons since early film and television did not deal well with high contrast ratios, but now is used to suggest an upbeat mood.

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High-key lighting is often used in commercials for food and beauty products. The brightly lit scenes often suggest an upbeat mood and positive message. This look can also imply truth and openness, making it effective for video interviews or training videos.

My examples of two-point lighting and high-key lighting images

Close-up photography refers to a tightly cropped shot that shows a subject (or object) up close and with significantly more detail than the human eye usually perceives.

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Satoshi Fujiwara

Satoshi Fujiwara is a Berlin-based artist and photographer. He initiates a pressing and critical action on the gazer, through the focal length set from portrayed subjects and the heterogeneous definition of his photographs, diverting from the standards of photo-journalism and an exclusively documentary dimension, thus producing a new emerging lexicon.

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It was through a career in advertising, working as a graphic designer and planner, that Satoshi Fujiwara, born in Japan and now living in Berlin, became interested in how visual information and photographic images influence people and society, and how he could attempt to redefine photography to make cross-sectional inquiry within his artistic practice.  Since 2015 his work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as Fondazione Prada, Milan; La Boverie, Liege; 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, Tokyo; and Deutsche Oper, Berlin.

Satoshi’s Code Unknown series takes its cue from the film of the same title directed by Michael Haneke, whom Fujiwara admires. In this series, Fujiwara surreptitiously photographed subway passengers and limited the “codes” for reading the resulting images by framing and digitally processing them and making the subjects’ identities nearly illegible. Fujiwara’s bold series is also an attempt to resolve the contemporary photographic problem of “portrait rights.”

He has also participated in several art and photography fairs, art festivals, and biennials such as Biennale de l’Image Possible, Liège; Photo London, London; Paris Photo, Paris; Unseen Photo Fair, Amsterdam. In parallel to those projects, the artist has also done several collaborations such as Issey Miyake and Deutsche Oper Berlin, as well as Balenciaga. Satoshi has also published several books, including:  Code Unknown, published by IMA photobooks, 2015; 5K CONFINEMENT, Luigi Alberto Cippini, published by la Fondazione Prada, 2017; HORSES, Satoshi Fujiwara & Yngve Holen, published by Walther König, 2018.

This image is part of Satoshi’s Code Unkown collection. The light in this image is natural due to the photo being taken unknown to the subject. The light comes from the left, creating a brighter side of the subject’s face. On the right side of the subject’s face, there is a soft shadow, which creates gentle contrast in the image. This shadow bleeds over to the left eye, and slightly into the deep parts of the left side of the face. The subject’s white hair contrasts with the black background, which creates a natural focal point. The fact this image was taken without the subject knowing could have been done to show the real versions of people, without posing or editing. This concept creates an authentic image, which shows a sense of vulnerability. – this is seen throughout Satoshi’s “Code Unknown” series.

My up-close images – photoshoot plan

	Genre	Location	Props	Lighting	Subjects	Shot types and modes on the camera
	Identity – portraits	Studio	Camera, tripod, and lights	Artificial – flashlight	People – my friends	Extreme close-ups – manual focus, macro, and portrait mode

Contact sheets

After taking my pictures, I put them into lightroom classic. I created a collection titled Up Close for them to go in, then flagging by best and worst images using the P and X tool. I then refined my selection even more using colour coding for my final images. After this, I edited my images using lightroom Classic also. I wanted to keep my editing natural, in the style of my artist above.

In this shoot, we had a bit of trouble with lighting – we found that a lot of our images were under or over-exposed at first. After tweaking camera settings and moving lights, as well as turning them down and sometimes up.

One of my contact sheets – we had quite an orange lighting at first, but turning the temperature of the lights down and increasing their intensity helped this. I was experimenting with different zooms and models here too.

Another one of my contact sheets – using P and X to find my favourites, and removing those with over/underexposure. Also removing pictures with too high temperature or blurry images. We had an issue with blurriness at first, so we used a tripod to combat this as the photo shoot went on.

Best Images

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Editing

For my editing, I used lightroom classic in develop mode.

My final edit – I like how my use of cropping in this image makes the composition more abstract, focusing on an unusual angle that isn’t seen in my other images. My editing increased the brightness effectively I think, which was needed to help the initial underexposure.

I think this is my most successful edit – I cropped it a lot which added depth and more interest to the image. I love the way the light falls on the right of the subject’s face, with the left strongly highlighted. I think my edit was quite successful, which added needed brightness to the tones in the image, which was originally quite dark and underexposed.

In this edit, I firstly cropped the image, then added contrast, highlights, and blacks into the image. Cropping the image created the more close-up effect I was looking for, and my editing techniques added depth.

In this edit I wanted to keep it quite natural – I liked the shadow to the right and wanted to keep that. In my editing, I brightened the image by turning the exposure up, turning highlights up, and increasing clarity.

Again in this image, I liked the shadow to the right – however, the image was a little dark, to begin with, so I brightened it and added saturation and grain to bring out the subject’s eyes.

In this final edit, I wanted to increase light tones and highlight my subject’s hair and eyes. I did this by increasing whites, exposure, and highlights, and adding grain and a little saturation.

Overall, I think this shoot could be improved. I think our pictures are all quite similar which is quite difficult to edit, but with cropping, this was easier. – to combat this, in the future I will use different angles and move around my subject quicker when taking images to produce more varied images.

Portraiture photography is a type of photography aimed toward capturing the personality of a person or group of people by using effective lighting, backdrops, and poses.

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Portraiture is a very old art form going back at least to ancient Egypt, where it flourished from about 5,000 years ago. Before the invention of photography, a painted, sculpted, or drawn portrait was the only way to record the appearance of someone. – But portraits have always been more than just a record. They have been used to show the power, importance, virtue, beauty, wealth, taste, learning, or other qualities of the sitter. Portraits have almost always been flattering, and painters who refused to flatter tended to find their work rejected.

A notable exception was Francisco Goya in his apparently bluntly truthful portraits of the Spanish royal family. – Getting painted portraits done used to be exclusive to families in the upper classes of society.

That all changed when photography came into existence. In 1839, Robert Cornelius shot the first successful portrait, a self-portrait using the venerable daguerreotype. Cornelius took advantage of the light outdoors to get faster exposure. Sprinting out of his father’s shop, Robert held this pose for a whole minute before rushing back and putting the lens cap back on.

However, shooting with the daguerreotype required between 3 to 15 minutes of exposure time depending on the available light — making portraiture incredibly impractical if not impossible. But that’s not to say no one dared to experiment and use “Daguerreotyping,” as it was called, as an aesthetically satisfying form of creative expression. Scottish artists David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson incorporated heavy influences of Rembrandt painting styles, particularly intentional lighting, hand placement, and posing to their photos. The portrait below shines a welcome light of liveliness and grace against the stiff and cold subjects of the first daguerreotypes.

Louis Daguerre

Daguerre experimented for years with increasing the sharpness of the lens in the camera obscura and working at discovering the reaction of various light-sensitive materials when applied to different surfaces. With Nicephore Niepce, who was engaged in similar efforts, he worked on this. 

By 1835, word got around Paris that the city’s favorite master of illusion and light had discovered a new way to enchant the eye. In January of 1839, the invention of a photographic system that would fix the image caught in the camera obscura was formally announced in the London periodical The Athenaeum.

Louis Daguerre called his invention “daguerreotype.” His method, which he disclosed to the public late in the summer of 1839, consisted of treating silver-plated copper sheets with iodine to make them sensitive to light, then exposing them in a camera and “developing” the images with warm mercury vapor. The fumes from the mercury vapor combined with the silver to produce an image. The plate was washed with a saline solution to prevent further exposure.

Daguerreotypes offered clarity and a sense of realism that no other painting had been able to capture before. By mid-1850s, millions of daguerreotypes had been made to document almost every aspect of life and death.

Henry Fox Talbot

Shortly after the invention of the daguerreotype was announced in 1839, Talbot asserted the priority of invention based on experiments he had begun in 1834. At a meeting of the Royal Institution on 25 January 1839, Talbot exhibited several paper photographs he had made.  These showed his ways of chemically stabilizing his results, making them insensitive to further exposure that direct sunlight could be used to imprint the negative image produced into the camera, onto another sheet of salted paper – creating a positive. 

The calotype was then introduced in 1841 – it used paper coated with silver oxide. The calotype process produced a translucent original negative image from which multiple positives could be made by simple contact printing. This gave it an important advantage over the daguerreotype process, which produced an opaque original positive that could be duplicated only by copying it with a camera.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron, 11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879 was a British photographer who is considered one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous victorian men and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature. She also produced sensitive portraits of women and children.

Cameron’s portraits are partly the product of her intimacy and regard for the subject, but also intend to capture “particular qualities or essences—typically, a genius in men and beauty in women”. Mike Weaver, a scholar who wrote about Cameron’s photography in a work published in 1984, framed her idea of genius and beauty “within a specifically Christian framework, as indicative of the sublime and the sacred”.  Weaver supposes that Cameron’s myriad influences informed her concept of beauty: “the Bible, classical mythology, Shakespeare’s plays, and Tennyson’s poems were fused into a single vision of ideal beauty.”

Oliver Doran

Oliver Doran is an internationally acclaimed commercial, editorial, and portrait photographer, Oliver Marshall Doran divides his world between Jersey, London, and Dubai. With more than 15 years of experience, Oliver is often found at the crossroads of cinematic and theatrical explorations of human conditions, as he photographs some of the most recognizable faces on the planet.

With more than 15 years of experience, Oliver is often found at the crossroads of cinematic and theatrical explorations of human conditions, as he photographs some of the most recognizable faces on the planet.

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Celebrating personality and amplifying uniqueness while always striving to be real and relatable is Oliver’s calling card. Being a strong advocate of organic creativity, he has quite the reputation for his skillful use of light and mood to create striking visual breakthroughs that also strike the right chords and achieve diverse briefs and business goals.

His passion for travel, meeting new people, and appreciating cultures different from his own lights the fire beneath everything he does. His roster of experiences includes working for the royal families in Bahrain and Dubai, an honor that he cherishes. Some find working with famous people intimidating, but for Oliver, the experience has made him empathetic to the innate human spirit.

Oliver creates vibrant, cinematic images using both flash, natural light, and a mixture of both. He is comfortable in and out of the studio with complex lighting setups as well as working with ambient light in any location; day or night.

Lighting

Studio Lighting types

Chiaroscuro is a film lighting style that emphasizes shadow and light. Chiaroscuro first emerged during the Renaissance art movement – as a painting technique used to create tension between the light and dark elements in portraits and other still life. It was developped by Leornardo Davinici, Caravaggio, Vermeer, and Rembrandt. Today this technique is used both in photography but also in film and tv – it played a big role in the film genre of noir movies.

Rembrandt lighting is a studio portrait-lighting technique where a small inverted triangle of light is visible under the subject’s eye. It creates beautiful and compelling portraits with very little equipment. The origins of Rembrandt lighting came from Pioneering movie director, Cecil B DeMille is credited with the first use of the term. While shooting the 1915 film, The Warrens of Virginia, DeMille borrowed some portable spotlights from the Mason Opera House in downtown Los Angeles and “began to make shadows where shadows would appear in nature.”

When business partner Sam Goldwyn saw the film with only half an actor’s face illuminated, he feared the exhibitors would pay only half the price for the picture. After DeMille told him it was Rembrandt lighting, “Sam’s reply was jubilant with relief: for Rembrandt lighting, the exhibitors would pay double!”

Butterfly lighting is a lighting pattern used in portrait photography where the key light is placed above and pointing down on the subject’s face. This creates a dramatic shadow under the nose and chin that looks like a butterfly. In order to create butterfly lighting, position your main light above and in front of your subject. Some photographers also add reflectors under their subject’s chin to minimize the strength of the shadow. This type of lighting is named after the shadow it produces under the subjects’ noses. It vaguely looks like a butterfly – it is also sometimes called Paramount or Hollywood lighting.