Learning Fashion Photography From the Masters
In my first year of art school, in 1982, I had to take an Art History class as a requirement. I was pretty unhappy about this, feeling like it was a waste of time as I wasn’t going to learn anything about photography. I remember the class to this day. The teacher used a text book and showed us slide shows of the art as we went through the different periods of time and the art of that period. I was bored, restless, and just plain annoyed with being “made” to sit in this class. I arrived late where it was usually dark because lights were turned off to see the slide show. I sat in the back, slouching with generally a bad attitude. Until one day, up came a slide of Donatello’s sculpture, David, and I nearly fell off my chair.
A world opened up to me that day. I became familiar with the likes of Da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Van Eyck, Carravaggio, Gentileschi, Rubens, Velazquez, Hals, Rembrandt….the list goes on. You think I understand light? Just look up Carravaggio’s The Martyrdom of Matthew. Now this guy understood light! Look at the incredible depth he was able to paint because f he understood light. Or check out Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes. Her knowledge of light creates such an impact to a fairly “dark” painting, dark in both her style and her subject matter. There was a movement at the time she was painting called tenebrism which literally meant, “dark manner”. It described the kind of dark that is mysterious and gloomy in feeling. Incidentally, Artemisia Gentileschi was a woman. Social conventions, virtually no education and guild rules tended to exclude women from both training and practicing in the arts!
There were strobes, no beauty dishes, there weren’t any websites like this one or the strobist. They had candle light (fire), gas light and the sun. Imagine that! And these painters didn’t paint from a photograph taken from a scene because there was no such thing as photography in the 14th century. Yet they understood how light creates not only the mood and depth of a painting, they understood how it created the form of the human body. They studied light to understand it. They also studied anatomy. Understanding muscle and skeletal structure is SO important when lighting the human figure.
Light is as important for the perception of form as is the matter of which form is made. One function of light is value. Value refers to lightness, or to the amount of light that is (or appears to be) reflected from a surface. Value is the basis of the quality called chiaroscuro: chiaro (light) and scuro (dark), which refers to the gradations between light and dark that produce the effect of modeling, or of light reflected from a three dimensional surface.
There was a wonderful post on digitalphotographyschool.com about what the Mona Lisa can teach us about portrait photography. Leonardo Da Vinci used chiaroscuro to subtly play the light and dark, not only in the physical realm but also the lights and darks of human psychology. Modeling with light and shadow and the expression of emotional states were, for Da Vinci, the heart of it all. I won’t say too much more because you really should read the post at some point. I was amazed when I found it while stumbling around on dps.
Some good books on chairoscuro and anatomy would help develop your eye as a photographer. I suggest the following:
- The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern by Carol Stickland
- Leonardo Da Vinci on the Human Body by O’Malley
- Caravaggio: A Passionate Life by Desmond Seward
  (4.18 stars, 22 ratings)  Loading ... |
Donatello’s David looks like a ’70′s glam rock star.
Great article!
great article. its funny, im in that class now. art from back in the day really opened my eyes too!
The first time I saw Rodin’s Psyche at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston it made me weep. If you think the slide of David was great, go see it for real. (No I haven’t seen it. But I saw Matisse, van Gogh, Degas Sargent, Pissaro and Picasso. We love the MFA.)
Go to the museum. Don’t skip over the contemporary artists. The tourists skip those rooms and the images will often leave you shaking…
Melissa, this is great sharing, though I never study any art subject before. Through your explanation, this raise many questions in my head to capture the angle of light condition. Thanks
Excellent post. I agree completely. The old world masters understood light because they didn’t have an easy way to replicate it on demand.
Interesting blog – I just discovered your site via a flickr invite, and thanks muchly! I am definitely perusing it for lots of great info. I’m not a fashion photographer, but would like to learn more of these techniques.
Your discovery of Caravaggio makes eminent sense: his lighting is so fantastic from a photographer’s view, especially a fashion and figure photographer’s view.
I would add, though, that Caravaggio and the Baroque were not only about lighting but about action: that dramatic moment when Peter denies Christ, or the card shark pulls the card from his pocket, or when Judith kills Holofernes. Caravaggio’s genius was marrying the intense dark/light into the story being told. In this, he is even defining in painting the “Critical Moment” that Henri Cartier Bresson talked about in photography.
To learn photography, you can study any art: not just from a lighting perspective, but in a storytelling and communication sense: look at Rembrandt’s Night Watch, or his etchings, Van Gogh’s portraits, Monet’s studies of light on a cathedral, Delacroix, Ingres, Goya, J M W Turner’s Burning of the Houses of Parliament … by studying art we learn to see and to understand the world.
just a thought
Great article Melissa. I’ve spent a year living in Madrid when i was 18 and my favorite place in the whole city was the Prado. I remember spending hours watching the Dutch painting, famous for it incredible representation of light. The smell of paint, those quiet rooms, those candles in 300 yo paintings that looked so warm and more real than the surroundings, come to my mind as i’m typing this.
I think that for someone interested in photography as lightpainting, 2 hours in a museum worth more than 2 weeks in a equipment review site!
This is a great post. One of my favorite things to do growing up and traveling all over the world was (still is) to visit the art museum in any given city and get lost in the paintings. Only recently have I noticed the effect that some of my favorite artists have had on my work in terms of lines, framing and light. In re-discovering my passion for photography, I have found it an absolute necessity to start from the beginning again and re-learn the basic fundamental of art and portraiture (including light
). This post was tremendously helpful and I appreciate the resources that you provided.
Light is everything in photography. I point this out to models who, although smart in other aspects of life hadn’t always previously appreciated it. To take pictures of a given landscape at different times of day and in different weathers was always my favourite addiction before accommodating fashion photography and I believe it stood me in good stead. Thanks for flagging up photography’s most crucial aspect and the one which is most taken for granted.
Thanks for your insight into art and photography Melissa. I enjoyed reading the linked articles and have been continuously fascinated by light. It’s always good to learn from all art mediums to hone our own artistic eye. Happy New Year!
Great post Melissa
I studied fine art and life drawing in University. A knowledge in these subjects is as important and relevant for today’s photographer’s as it was back then and it really is about ‘painting with light’.
thanks for sharing!! what a great article!
One thing I think that you are missing from this well composed post, is the use of Rembrandt lighting and his entire school of thought and visual references that are a major educational resource for lighting. His studio was set up for natural light, the way the window and sky light were built. He is also a major contributor with his portraits and outstanding lighting techniques.
Good article. Light is the key, not many look at it that way.
Hi,
Nice article.
I really want to know about it.
Thanks for sharing.
I agree…light plays a huge role in all forms of art. It is what makes or breaks a painting as well.
Just goes to show that what was “right” 200-300 years ago still holds true! We have a lot to learn from those past masters. makes you wonder what they would do now if they had a camera.
Great read. I find my best inspiration by exploring other art forms, otherwise I simply feel I am parroting the other photographic work I see around me.