For this assignment, we were supposed to choose a photographer and a photo and try to emulate his or her work to some extent or create a work that is inspired by said photographer. The photographer I chose was Alfred Stieglitz, an American photographer who was known to be instrumental in making photography an accepted art form. For this assignment, I was inspired by “From the Back Window” which is pictured below. The photograph was published around 1915, 5 years before the 1920’s but close to the time period. I wanted to emulate the lighting and coloring style somewhat, but I also wanted to diverge a little bit from the photo instead. For both images, I decided to focus on the ground rather than the skyline and while its still there in my photos, it is not as prominent. One of the key things I decided to focus on was trying to emulate the lighting rather than the subject matter.
For the first photo which is shown below, I started out taking photos of cars for this assignment, however, I also decided to combine all the elements of the surrounding area to try to emulate the lighting of “From the Back Window” as much as possible. Considering that the lighting is coming from a different angle, I had to play around with the settings of my camera and go into Camera Raw for more accurate emulation of the black and white style of photograph. I feel like the results were not perfect due to the time and day, but I feel like I could have made parts of the image slightly brighter to convey that lighting that I was trying to emulate.
The second image that i took that I tried to emulate with was more successful in capturing the dark parts and the lighting was much stronger, but I could have angled the shot better from my point of view. However, I feel like I relied too much on the street lights too much and the image turned out too dark in my opinion. One thing that I enjoyed about taking this photograph was that the lighting had more of an impact on the photograph compared to the last one and better emulates that old-timey style and pronounced lighting.
PhotoChronologies 