In most cases we can make use of natural or available / ambient light, but we must be aware of different kinds of natural light and learn how to exploit it thoughtfully and creatively. We can do this by looking at the:

• intensity of the light
• direction of the light
• temperature of the light (and white balance on the camera)
• making use of “the golden hour”
• Using reflectors (silver / gold)

There are different types of studio lighting that we can use such as Rembrandt, butterfly and chiaroscuro.

Rembrandt Lighting

Rembrandt lighting is a technique for portrait photography named after Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, a Dutch painter. It refers to a way of lighting a face so that an upside-down light triangle appears under the eyes of the subject.

Chiaroscuro Lighting

Chiaroscuro, Italian for lightdark, is bold contrast between light and dark. It first appeared in 15th century paintings in Italy and Holland. However, true chiaroscuro began during the 16th century in Mannerism and Baroque art. Dark subjects are dramatically lighted by a shaft of light, creating a split of light and shadow.

Butterfly Lighting

Butterfly lighting is a type of portrait lighting technique used mainly in a studio setting. Its name comes from the butterfly-shaped shadow that forms under the nose because the light comes from above the camera. It is also sometimes called ‘paramount lighting’ or ‘glamour lighting’.

Arnold Newman was an American, Jewish photographer who its best known for his environmental portraits. He is also famous for taking portraits of well-known cultural figures, for example, Pablo Picasso, Marilyn Monroe and more. Newman has many different photographs of his that are famous.

Image Analysis 1

This photograph is by Arnold Newman of Alfried Krupp who was an industrialist who ran war factories for the Nazis. Krupp insisted on using slave labour where the prisoners were working to death and even the Nazi’s proposed to use free German workers instead. Krupp always held hatred towards Jewish people. However, he was always intrigued by Newmans art.

Newman did’t want to take this photograph originally but after consideration he chose to do it. When positioning Krupp he asked him to lean forward, and Krupp gripped his hands together and rested his chin onto. Newman said ‘he felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck’ and this is when he took the shot. Krupp did not like the photograph at all and was said to be furious, Newman saw this as revenge.

This photograph brings out emotions of being uneasy and intimidated. This is because the subject is an old man who has a sinister look paired with the darkness of the photograph. His earie look is more intense because he is glaring down the camera making it feel like he is looking right at us. The photograph doesn’t much light, the main source being sunlight through the roof windows which reflects off of all of the metallic materials in the backgrounds. Everything behind the man is old, rusty and worn down adding to the uncanny feel.

Image Analysis 2

This is Newman’s famous photograph of Igor Stravinsky who was a Russian pianist, composer and musician. In this photo, he is dominated by a grand piano silhouetted against a white wall, with the composer confined to the corner. This suggests that music was a big part and had a big impact on his life. In this photo, the piano also looks like a music symbol which also represents his love for music.

An environmental portrait is a portrait taken in the subject’s usual environment, for example, in their home or place of work. These types of photographs can reveal things about the person photographed, such as where they feel the happiest or most content. Environmental portraits capture people in their natural environment rather than in a studio where photographed can be forced. This way the photos can almost tell a story of the subject since they’re being captured in their own, personal element.

Typology is a single photograph or more commonly a quantity of photographs that share a high level of consistency. The term was first used to describe a style of photography when Bern and Hilla began documenting dilapidated German industrial architecture in 1959. They described their subjects as ‘buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style’. Every photograph was taken from the same angle, at approximately the same distance from the buildings.

Typographs links to environmental portraits as the photographs are all taken in a similar way, using the same techniques.

Photoshoot 1

This is the first photoshoot I did based on Formalism. This one is inspired by Walker Evans and Darren Harvey-Regan. However, some of the photos didn’t turn out with good quality. I also don’t appreciate the lighting and backgrounds so for the second shoot, I used different objects and backgrounds.

Here are a couple of photographs from this shoot that turned out well:

Photoshoot 2

In this photoshoot, I experimented with using different lights and unique objects to create circular shadows on the white paper. I like how these photos turned out and have different shape, patterns and lines from the shadows. For these photos, I used the studio light and positioned it in certain ways to allow the objects to create shadows. For the photographs with just the circle shadows, I put an object which had holes all over it, in front of the light to project circle shadows onto the white paper. I really like how this turned out.

Edited Photo

These are my favourite photo from this shoot, I like how the lighting was manipulated to make the photograph unique and eye catching. I slightly edited this photo by changing the levels and curves through photoshop.

Walker Evans

Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist. These photographs are some of his formalism photographs, he has captured images of different tools against a white background. This allows the object to be the main focal point and be seen clearly. There are no shapes made out of any lights in these photographs as it is focussed on the whole area. These photographs are quite simplistic since the subject of the image is quite central, in the majority of his photographs. This leaves quite lot of negative space around the object. His photos are very monochromatic since it’s mostly black, white and grey ones with a couple of them having more yellow/orange tones.

Darren Harvey-Regan

Darren Harvey-Regan did similar work to Walker Evans as Evans inspired him. He used two halves of sperate tools and then joined them together to photograph. This put a unique spin to the past similar work, and modernised it. His work is eye-catching because of its beauty and quirks.

“It’s a means of transposing material into other material, adding new meaning or thoughts in the process. I think photographing materials is a way to consider the means of creating meaning, and it’s a tactile process with which I feel involved. Touching and moving and making are my engagement with

I took these photos with a consideration for the formal / visual elements.

Framing a piano stand in the lens, I particularly liked the geometric shapes that fill the image. I tried to leave the top of the photo with negative space to create more balance and allow your eyes to be drawn to the pattern of circles.

What is Formalism?

Formalism is the design, composition and lighting of the subject. It describes the critical position that the most important feature of a work of art is its form, the way it is made and its purely visual aspects, rather than its narrative content or its relationship to the visible world.

Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar—it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable.

— Stephen Shore

The 7 basic elements to photographic art are;

• Line

Lines in photographs can be straight, curved or both and can be presented in many different ways. They can appear in man-made things and natural and can be captured on purpose or by chance.

• Shape

Shapes are created when a line, or more, conjoins or closes off. Shapes in photographs may be familiar or unique, unfamiliar shapes which draw your attention. Shapes are everywhere in photography, everything is a shape.

• Form

Form is when you take the two-dimensional shapes and turn it to three-dimensional. The two types of form are geometric and organic, this is the same for shape.

• Texture

Textured can be described in many ways, such as, smooth, rough, wet, bumpy and more. Photography presents the textures in a way that can be ‘felt’ with the eye.

• Colour

Colour has three properties, these are: hue, value, and saturation. Hue is the description of what colour something is (red, blue, pink etc).Values the brightness or darkness of the colour. Lastly, saturation is the intensity or purity of a colour. The purest colour is a hue with no white, black, or grey added to it.

• Size

Size in photographs is relative and can be an illusion. Different size types are large, medium and small. The size of objects in photographs can be manipulated to look bigger or smaller.

• Depth

Most photos have a foreground, middle ground, and background. The stronger the portrayal between those successive “grounds,” the stronger the sense of depth is in the image.

Nostalgia

This is my first attempt at the virtual gallery. I used photos that I took from my ‘Nostalgia’ photoshoot. For the gallery I edited the photos to be black and white as I thought it would look the best. The photographs on the side walls are my least favourite in the gallery as it was hard to angle them correctly. Despite this, I do like how it turned out since it was my first try.

I used this photo, which I found on google, as the gallery. I edited it to change the colouring of the lighting as I didn’t like how bright it was.

I added in new layers and imported the different photographs onto the gallery. I used ‘ctrl T’ to be able to adjust the positioning of the photographs and put them on the walls.

I then added a drop shadow to give it a more realistic effect. This made the photographs look more like real photographs hanging on the wall.

To improve that even more, I also added a slight stroke to give a small border around the photgraphs.

This is a print screen of all of the photographs I took in my photoshoot. I experimented with different lights, making the temperature warm and cool. I positioned the objects in different places to have a variety of photos. The objects I used for this still life shoot were nostalgic as the teddy is a childhood toy which has memories connected, the polaroid can be seen as nostalgic since, even though is is a recent photo, polaroid’s are old, lastly, the tin box could symbolise a time capsule holding nostalgic memories.

The photos below are some of my strongest photographs from this photoshoot.

Simple Editing to enhance my strongest photo:

This is a screen screenshot of the before and after of a photo from this shoot that I edited in Lightroom. I brightened the image and increased highlights. I also adjusted the tone curves to dull down certain colours.

This is the final image: