I used the Rembrandt Lighting technique to produce some high quality photos with Jude. I made these by having the light pointed at Jude at a certain angle to light up certain parts of his face and I think they turned out very good.
Butterfly Lighting:
Myself and Jude were in these photos, we positioned the light above us to cast the butterfly shadow under our noses and took the photos. These turned out very well detailed and sharp.
Back lighting:
We decided to experiment with the flash light and take photos of us facing in it’s direction to create a silhouette, these turned out pretty good.
Rembrandt Lighting is a technique used in portrait photography, started by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, a Dutch painter. The key factor of Rembrandt lighting is to brighten up a face so an upside down triangle is seen under the subjects eyes:
In the early 20th century, spotlights were introduced to Photography to create more realistic effects of lights and shadows. Rembrandt Lighting was one of the effects created by this and it became very popular in making promotional photographs of film stars:
Keanu Revees
Harrison Ford
You can create photos like these by:
Having the subject positioned in front of the backdrop. Make sure the light is placed at a 40 – 45 degree angle, higher than the subject. The camera should be using a 35mm or 50mm lens, the 35mm will give a wider point of view and the 50mm will give more depth of field:
Butterfly Lighting:
Butterfly Lighting is another technique in Lighting in Photography, usually used in a studio to make portraits. Other names used for this are “Paramount Lighting” and “Glamour Lighting”.
“Butterfly Lighting” gets it’s name from the butterfly-shaped shadow seen under the subjects nose. You can also see that this photo is quite sharp and very detailed in the subject’s face.
You can make these types of photos by:
Placing the subject in front of the backdrop looking forward straight into the camera. Have the main light behind you and above, shining downwards onto the subject’s face. If the face is still not bright enough you can have them hold a reflector which will help the light shine on their face more.
Chiaruscuro Lighting:
Chiaruscuro is another element in Lighting. Initially used in art in Italy during the 15th century, it’s used to create highlights and shadows:
Dark subjects were dramatically lighted by a shaft of light from a single constricted and often unseen source was a compositional device seen in the paintings of old masters such as Caravaggio and Rembrandt.
Later on, Chiaruscuro was implemented into film (Film noir). Which would create dramatic black and white shots:
How to create these photos:
Have the subject in front of the backdrop while having a key light shining on them. Include a reflector if necessary:
The “Camera Obscura” is a darkened room with a small hole or lens at one side and it is used to project an image onto a wall, like a modern day projector. This method was called “Pinhole photography”, which has been used since the 1550’s and it was used mostly for drawing and painting, this concept was later developed into the Camera.
Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside, where the scene is reproduced, inverted and reversed, but with colour and perspective preserved. The Camera Obscura was actually made to study solar eclipses without damaging your eyes from looking at the sun.
Nicéphore Niépce:
Nicéphore Niépce was a French inventor who is the Inventor of Photography. In 1826, he invented the technique “Heliography”, the precursor to the Daguerreotype. He used the technique to take the first photograph ever called “View from the Window at Le Gras”:
Louis Daguerre:
Louis Daguerre was a French artist and photographer who invented the “Daguerreotype” in 1939 and developed the Diorama theatre.
The “Daguerreotype” was a tool used to help print images in physical form, the method was to polish a metal sheet of silver-plated copper and treat it with fumes to make the sheet light sensitive and exposing it to a latent image for usually a few seconds for bright photos and longer for darker photos, once the photo comes out you then fume it with mercury vapour. The dark parts of the image would turn out silver, making the bright parts stand out by the contrast.
The photos would turn out looking something like this, these are called positives:
Henry Fox-Talbot:
Fox Talbot was an English member of parliament, scientist, inventor and another pioneer of photography. He wanted to develop the three primary elements of photography: developing, fixing, and printing.
Accidentally, he found out that there was an image after the short exposure. To view it in bright light, he used a different chemical to remove the silver film. This could be done by using his invention called the “Calotype”:
Robert Cornelius:
Robert Cornelius was an American photographer and pioneer in the history of Photography, he took the first photograph in the US by using a photographic plate he made in 1839. The photo was an image of himself, making it the first self portrait in the US too:
He wanted to improve on the daguerreotype, so he made his own plate and took this portrait outside his family store and it required him to sit still for 15 minutes for it to produce.
Julia Margaret Cameron:
Julia Cameron was a well known British Photographer. She did lots of soft-focus close up pictures and portraits of Victorian men, women and children and is deemed “One of the most important portraitists of the 19th century” and is one of the early Photographers in lighting.
Her photos had many connections to Pictorialism and the Pre-Raphaelites movement.
Here are some of her photos:
Pictorialism was an approach to Photography that emphasizes the beauty of subject matter, tonality and composition rather than the documentation of reality. Began in the 1860’s, it viewed the camera as a tool for making an artistic statement, similar to a paintbrush.
Henry Mullins:
Henry Mullins was a photographer who set up a studio called “The Royal Saloon” in Jersey 1848. His speciality was “cartes de visite” photos which was a type of small photograph. He would use these to take portraits of families and officers:
August Sander was a German portrait and documentary photographer, he was well known for his work on photographing German Citizens during the 1920’s and is said to be “the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century”.
Career:
Sander is well known for his work on landscape, nature, architecture and street photography. But above all, he is best known for his Portraits. He published an album containing some of his work on portraits and named it “People of the 20th Century”.
People of the 20th Century:
This book was published in 1929 and had 60 environmental portraits within. The physical copies of the photos were destroyed in 1936 by the Germans during World War Two.
MASTER MASON, 1926:
This is one of the photos from the album and I will analyse it.
In this, you see a Brickmason standing next to a pile of bricks looking at the camera. The bricks create a pattern of lines going straight down and across. His white overalls create contrast with the rest of the darker surroundings and is the first thing that you are most likely to get drawn to, you can see that the light shining on him is coming from the right as the left of his body is darker than the rest and he is casting a shadow on the brick pile to the left. It is unclear where he is as there is no background, so it can only be assumed he is inside a factory or working on a house. His face gives neutral vibes, he doesn’t appear happy or sad and instead looks more focused on getting his work done and over with. Behind him you can see some sort of furnace or machine, perhaps used to make the bricks for him to use, along with a bucket at his feet that could be used for the mortar to hold the bricks together.
Altogether, the photo feels very neutral, in both the Man’s emotion and feeling the photo creates. It definitely catches the environmental portraiture side as it shows a man in his working environment.
At a first glance, we can see Krupp at the very front looking at us, he is clearly the main subject of the photo being the very first thing we notice. Behind him, seems to be some sort of industrial building and looking closer their are also trains in the background. The blue sparks on the left train, because of the bright lighting, catches your eye and it looks like it’s coming from someone welding the train which implies that this place is supposed to hold, manufacture or repair trains. Some other items are spotted too, like the collection of wheels right behind Krupp and all sorts of bars and tools laying around behind him as well. Notice also how the lighting is only shining on either side of the man’s face from two adjacent lightbulbs above him creating artificial lighting except for the rest of the factory where natural light is shining through, the lightbulbs create contrast on his face as the middle appears darker. Two scratched-up and written on columns are also on both his left and right which can create a way of measuring rule of thirds as it helps separate different sections of the photo and the columns also create a sort of frame inside a frame effect, limiting the view of the rest of the factory. Lines of perspective can also be seen going all the way through the factory to the end wall to show depth of field and how long the building is. The man’s clothes aren’t what you’d expect a factory worker to wear, he is wearing a suit which means he must be the manager of this factory.
Contextual:
This Photograph is of Alfred Krupp and was taken by Arnold Newman in Germany, 1963. Alfred Krupp is a German Industrialist and a Nazi Sympathiser and Arnold Newman is a Jewish Photographer. These two kinds of people have very brutal history together, particularly during World War Two. In the factory you can see trains and railways, which were used mostly to transport captured Jews to the concentration camps during World War Two. Krupp would enslave Jews during WW2 by giving them hard labour until they couldn’t work any longer, rendered useless, he would send them to the concentration camps to be killed. Given this information it gives the photo a sense of unease and gives an idea on what this photo is actually about. Krupp is now seen more as a bad guy, which can be both applied to his actions and serious appearance in the photo.
Technical:
Arnold Newman at first didn’t want to take the photo of Alfred Krupp obviously due to their history together. Arnold said he ‘saw him as the devil’ and that he wanted to ‘put a knife in his back’. When Newman agreed to do the shoot and had Krupp positioned in the factory, he asked him to lean forward so he put his hands together under his chin and leaned in, giving a more serious stare which made him look scarier. Arnold later said that his “hair stood on end” because of this. Arnold also said when he clasped his hands together that “As a Jew, it’s my own little moment of revenge.”, ‘It was my impression of a Nazi who managed to survive despite killing millions of people’.
Conceptual:
The meaning of this image is clearer now, given the info from Newman himself we now understand that he wanted to show how this person got away with doing what he did and the aftermath of World War Two still remains.
Environmental Portraiture is a genre in photography and the photos under this genre feature people in their working environments, typically with the person in the foreground facing the camera head on and with elements of their occupation/lifestyle in the background.
Here are some examples:
The purpose of environmental photography is to capture and illuminate each individual’s character and portray the essence of their personality. It is a way of expressing the person from the way they live and what role they play in our society. It is also good that these photos are taken in real places so it has a sense of realness, as opposed to being in a studio where it isn’t in the real world.
The background is a key element and plays an important part in the photos too because it gives even more detail and information about the person. For example, the picture with the woman and the child is seen in, what appears to be, the middle of nowhere with rubbish scattered everywhere, a wasteland. You can see very clearly that the woman is unhappy, not too different to the area around her. It is also implied that these people are in a third world country if you look closely at their clothes, the baby being makeshift-strapped to the woman’s back and the dirt on their bodies. I believe the purpose of this photograph is to show us the different parts of the world and how different other people’s lifestyles are in comparison to ours.
I think I did a pretty good job to sum up my entire Anthropocene project. Overall, the quality of the photos is great but quantity is unfortunately slightly lacking. With the Estate photos being very good as a whole, it only featured mainly two areas and I could have improved by going out further to capture other buildings.
The Jung photos also look good but are both lacking in quantity and, slightly, the editing. Because some of the photos didn’t have dramatic enough blurring which I think I could have improved on significantly by taking more building photos and adding more layers to distort the images more.
These photos have been some of my best ones I’ve ever taken and I’ve enjoyed this entire project. I loved taking these photos as much as I did editing them and I hope I get the opportunity to take photos like these again.
