I created this image using photoshop. Originally, it was just a portrait of poppy, but I duplicated the image 3 times and experimented with the opacity to create the effect of a multi exposure/ slow shutter speed image.
The Patent Diamond Cameo photograph was registered by F.R. Window of London in 1864. Four small oval portraits were placed on a carte de visite in the shape of a diamond, each portrait being of the same person photographed in a different position.
Chiaroscuro is the use of contrast between light and dark to emphasize and illuminate important figures in a painting or drawing. It was first introduced during the Renaissance. It was originally used while drawing on colored paper though it is now used in paintings and even cinema.
Chiaroscuro uses a low key lighting setup, where a key light is used as the sole light source to achieve dark backgrounds with starkly lit subjects.
Chiaroscuro is a technique that filmmakers use to create contrast between light and dark areas on screen. It’s often used as a storytelling device where there is an extreme difference in tone or mood from one scene to the next.
5 areas of chiarascuro
1.highlight
2.halftone
3.deep shadow
4.reflected light
5.cast shadow.
Chiarascuro is the juxtaposition between light and dark
My take on chiarascuro lighting:
These were the images that came out the best, in terms of getting the lighting correct; the juxtaposition between highlight and shadow.
Rembrandt lighting consists of a single light source placed on a 45 degree offset from the subject, about 5 feet away. Positioned roughly two feet higher than eye level, the light source is angled slightly downward and hits the side of the face that is farthest away from the camera.
Rembrandt lighting is characterized by an illuminated triangle (also called “Rembrandt patch”) under the eye of the subject on the less illuminated side of the face. It is named for the Dutch painter Rembrandt, who occasionally used this type of lighting.
REMBRANDT
He was a master of the chiaroscuro technique. And he often used this kind of light in his paintings, particularly in his self portraits.
Looking at his paintings, you’ll notice a single-light portrait lighting. How the short lighting hits the subject’s face is interesting.
As you can see from the image above, this lighting setup is a split light setup. It creates a triangle of light under the model’s eye on the shadowed side.
Rembrandt lighting is a dramatic light. It is one of those moody setups that plays with chiaroscuro. This technique from paintings uses the sharp contrasts between light and dark.
Rim lighting, also known as edge lighting, is a method of lighting a subject by using off-camera flash. The technique is used to separate a subject from the background by using a rim or strip of light around the edges of the subject.
How is it done?
A rim light is placed behind a subject that exposes the outline or rim of the subject with light. This lighting highlights the contours of a subject and creates a dramatic and mysterious effect. Rim lights can be used in a variety of ways.
My images:
Below are the photos I took of Poppy, these are the ones that worked with the light. It took many tries to get the lighting correct but we got it in the end to outline her side profile, hair, chin and slightly her body.
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.
Whys is called butterfly lighting?
Butterfly lighting is a simple lighting pattern used in portrait photography. It’s named for the shadows that’s formed underneath the nose. Not seeing the butterfly? Picture a butterfly flying toward you, wings spread out…that’s the shadows it creates.
What is butterfly lighting used for?
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.
What mood does butterfly lighting create?
It is ideal for portraits as it highlights the subject’s main features, like the nose and cheekbones. It creates a shadow under the subject’s nose and chin. These shadows make the subject look slimmer. The soft lighting pattern casts a feminine effect on the subject’s face.
The camera obscura, from the Latin meaning ‘dark chamber’, was one of the inventions that led to photography. The camera obscura has been a source of fascination to people for hundreds of years; originally used to observe solar eclipses safely, they were recognised as an aid to drawing in the 15th Century, and by the 19th Century they had become popular seaside attractions, much as binoculars are today. Some of these seaside cameras obscura’s still exist.
The first camera obscura was simply a small hole in one wall of a darkened room or tent. Light passing through the hole formed an inverted (upside down) image of the outside scene on a white screen placed across the room from the hole. Artists made use of the camera obscura, realising that they could trace the outlines of buildings, trees, shadows and animals to aid in the creation of their paintings.
The Pinhole Camera
The pinhole has played an important role in the evolution of the modern camera. Pinhole photography is lensless photography – a method of capturing images using a simple light-tight box with a single pinhole in one end. A piece of opaque tape or cardboard can serve as a shutter. Film or photo-paper is taped inside and the camera secured on a stable platform or tripod, exposure is calculated and the shutter opened. After the shutter is closed the camera is taken in
Nicephore Niepce & Heliography
Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world’s oldest surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate in 1825. In 1826 or 1827, he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene.
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (French, 1765–1833), Untitled ‘point de vue,’ 1827. Heliograph on pewter, 16.7 x 20.3 x .15 cm.
Motivated by the growing popular demand for affordable pictures, Niépce’s photographic experiments were conducted with the dual aims of copying prints and recording scenes from real life in the camera. At his family estate in the nearby village of Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, he produced legible but fleeting camera pictures in 1816. Over the next decade he tried an array of chemicals, materials, and techniques to advance the process he ultimately called héliographie, or ‘sun writing.’
How did Niecpe do it?
To make the heliograph, Niépce dissolved light-sensitive bitumen in oil of lavender and applied a thin coating over a polished pewter plate. He inserted the plate into a camera obscura and positioned it near a window in his second-story workroom. After several days of exposure to sunlight, the plate yielded an impression of the courtyard, outbuildings, and trees outside.
The process of Heliography:
The naturally occurring asphalt bitumen, is applied as a coating on glass or metal
This chemical then hardens in relation to the light exposure available
The plate is then washed with oil of lavender
After washing with oil, the only area remaining would be the hardened area where the image formed.
Louis Daguerre & Daguerreotype
In 1826, when Joseph-Nicephore Niepce took the world first photograph, it took eight hours to expose. Little more than ten years later, his associate Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre devised a way to permanently reproduce an image, and his picture—a daguerreotype—needed just twenty minutes’ exposure. A practical process of photography was born.
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.
Boulevard du Temple, Paris, 3rd arrondissement, a street scene captured in a Daguerreotype in either 1838 or 1839. Believed to be the earliest photograph showing a living person. It is a view of a busy street, but because the exposure time was at least ten minutes the moving traffic left no trace. Only the two men near the bottom left corner, one apparently having his boots polished by the other, stayed in one place long enough to be visible. (Louis Daguerre)
Henry Fox Talbot & Calotype
William Henry Fox Talbot was credited as the British inventor of photography. In 1834 he discovered how to make and fix images through the action of light and chemistry on paper. These ‘negatives’ could be used to make multiple prints and this process revolutionised image making.
WHAT IS THE CALOTYPE?
In this technique, a sheet of paper coated with silver chloride was exposed to light in a camera obscura those areas hit by light became dark in tone, yielding a negative image. The revolutionary aspect of the process lay in Talbot’s discovery of a chemical (gallic acid) that could be used to “develop” the image on the paper—i.e., accelerate the silver chloride’s chemical reaction to the light it had been exposed to. The developing process permitted much shorter exposure times in the camera, down from one hour to one minute.
The developed image on the paper was fixed with sodium hyposulfite. The “negative,” as Talbot called it, could yield any number of positive images by simple contact printing upon another piece of sensitized paper. Talbot’s process was superior in this respect to the daguerreotype, which yielded a single positive image on metal that could not be duplicated. Talbot patented his process in 1841.
Robert Cornelius & self-portraiture
A self-portrait is a representation of an artist that is drawn, painted, photographed, or sculpted by that artist (a selfie).
The world’s first “selfie,” a self-portrait taken by Cornelius in 1839.
The image above was taken in 1839 by an amateur chemist and photography enthusiast from Philadelphia named Robert Cornelius. Cornelius had set his camera up at the back of the family store in Philadelphia. He took the image by removing the lens cap and then running into frame where he sat for a minute before covering up the lens again. On the back he wrote “The first light Picture ever taken. 1839.”
Julia Margeret Cameron & Pictorialism
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 – 79) was an ambitious and devoted pioneer of photography. Best known for her powerful portraits, she also posed her sitters – friends, family and servants – as characters from biblical, historical or allegorical stories.
Pictorialism is an approach to photography that emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality.
Examples of pictorialism:
On one occasion Julia printed a negative by the pioneering Swedish art photographer O.G. Rejlander, surrounding the portrait with ferns to create a photo-gram frame – a combination of an image made in a camera and a camera-less technique. It shows Cameron’s experimental nature and provides a glimpse of her photographic practice before she acquired a camera of her own.
Within a month of receiving her camera, she made the photograph that she called her ‘first success’, a portrait of Annie Philpot, the daughter of a family staying in the Isle of Wight where Cameron lived. She later wrote of her excitement:
I was in a transport of delight. I ran all over the house to search for gifts for the child. I felt as if she entirely had made the picture.
-Julia Margaret Cameron
From her ‘first success’ she moved on quickly to photographing family and friends. These early portraits reveal how she experimented with soft focus, dramatic lighting and close-up compositions, features that would become her signature style; pictorialism.
Henry Mullins & Carte-de-Visit
Gustav William Henry Mullins (1854-1921) was a portrait photographer, patronised by Queen Victoria. Gustav Mullins was a partner in the firm Hughes & Mullins, photographers, based at Union Street, Ryde, Isle of Wight.
Cartes De Visite
His specialty was cartes de visite and the photographic archive of La Société contains a massive collection of these. Their on line archive contains 9600 images, but the majority of these are sets of up to 16 photographs taken at a single sitting. In those times even 10s 6d was a substantial sum to pay to have one’s photograph taken, and included among his subjects are many of the island’s affluent and influential people, including Dean Le Breton, the father of Lillie Langtry.
He was also popular with officers of the Royal Militia Island of Jersey, for whom it was very popular to have portraits taken, as well as of their wives and children, for the more senior and more affluent officers. The pictures of these officers show clearly the fashion for long hair, whiskers and beards in the mid-1800s.
I’m not very happy with this photoshoot as none of the photos are what i was aiming for. We were set this task in class to find places in the school to take environmental portraits. This was difficult as the lighting around the school isn’t very good and alongside the dull colours, it doesn’t create a good photo.
However, I edited a few of the images and i like the outcome of two of them:
I like the outcome of this image as it fits with the topic of environmental portraiture. This is a student sat in front of a board with whatever subject he’s taking. The image is strong as he is sat in a firm position, you can see his full body; I cropped the image so that he is in the centre of the photo, creating a focal point. I also turned the image into black and white, as there was a lot of colours in the background that were distracting from the focal point.
In environmental portrait photos, the subjects in the photos usually have a straight, emotionless face. I told this student to make a straight face to fit with this.
I like the outcome of this image, however, I think the quality could have been a lot better. There wasn’t enough time spent taking these photos; and I feel like if we had taken more time taking these photos, we could have experimented more and tried out different angles, backgrounds and maybe lighting. I like the fact his whole body is in the photo and the background does relate to him and reflects on what he does in his working environment. This is what an environmental portrait should be like.
