Renaissance Still Life Photography

Creating photographic images in the style of the Renaissance masters is very a satisfying endeavor and requires only the simplest lighting equipment, but very careful technique. The idea here is not to imitate painterly effects, but on the contrary, to use the camera’s ability to render the most minute details of the subject, using the lighting and compositional styles of the great artists.

Take it from Caravaggio
At right we see Caravaggio’s Still Life with Fruit on a Stone Ledge, a painting that incorporates the essential characteristics that we wish to emulate. Notice first the lighting. The scene appears to be illuminated by a slightly diffused shaft of sunlight coming through an unseen window. Notice also how the composition consists of objects of various sizes, to add interest. Now it is the case that some still life paintings, including the Caravaggio shown here, are loaded with metaphorical references, however we will leave the subject of art interpretation to others, and confine ourselves to the essential technical details pertinent to stylistically reproducing a Renaissance-era still life through photographic means.

Another important, (but usually overlooked because it is so ubiquitous) aspect of still life painting (and indeed, virtually all painting), is that in photographic terms it has a very large depth of field, that is to say, all parts of the picture, from front to back, are equally in focus, something that is not always the case with a photograph. In order to achieve this when creating an image with a camera, the usual method is to close the lens down to a very small aperture. There are two problems with this: 1. the smallest aperture available may not be small enough to produce the required depth of field; and 2. using small apertures lowers the resolution of the final image, which is antithetical to our goal of rendering the finest possible detail. Typically, apertures beyond f/8 compromise the sharpness of the image. At below left we see a photo I simply call Pitcher with Blue Mug, the subjects of which are few and fairly nondescript, but nonetheless make up an appealing composition. Taken with a 6 megapixel Canon 10D at f/8 with a 50mm lens positioned a few feet away from the subject, this image, when printed on canvas at 24 x 28 inches, is tack sharp from the front of the cloth to the wall behind the table. A single image taken under these conditions could not capture all parts of this subject in sharp focus. Now, stopping the lens down to f/22 may produce an image that appears to be entirely in focus from front to back when printed in a small size, but a sizeable enlargement would reveal an unsatisfying softness over the whole picture. The photo at left is a composite of five images, the camera lens being focused on a different part of the subject for each frame, starting with the front of the cloth and working toward the wall in back. While the individual images can be stacked and tediously combined manually in an image editing program, it is far easier and quicker to let a specialized program such as Helicon Focus do the work.

Composing the image
The first step in creating your still life is to concentrate on arranging the chosen objects into a pleasing composition against an appropriate background. As a general guideline, the objects chosen should be of different sizes and perhaps different textures, and should have some relationship to one another in the sense that it would not be unusual to find these objects in close proximity under ordinary circumstances. As to actually arranging the objects, the classic rules of composition apply here, and are explained in countless books on both photography and painting. For quick examples and inspiration, there are many Renaissance-style still life paintings to be found on the internet, both by Renaissance artists and contemporary ones. If you’re lacking a specific object you’d like to include in your composition, thrift stores can be a wonderful and inexpensive resource for these. Think creatively. In Still Life with Pitcher and Blue Mug at left, I purchased the mug and small bowl at a local thrift shop. The bowl wasn’t entirely the color I wanted, so I gave it a quick paint job (just on the half that faces the camera) with some children’s acrylic paint. I couldn’t easily find a metal pitcher like the one I wanted, so I made one from things I had around the house-- construction paper for the body and spout, some caulking for the edging, an old piece of thick insulated wire for the handle, and some paint.

If there’s a background showing in the image, I like to use it to create the impression that the objects reside perhaps in a crumbling Italian villa, or an old Dutch cottage on the banks of a canal. The background wall in Pitcher with Blue Mug above is simply a piece of painted cardboard. In another approach, the original background may be masked out in an image editing program and replaced with one which has the color and texture appropriate to your intent. Photographs of real walls, close-ups of bricks, rocks, or even weathered concrete can provide an endless variety of background “walls” for your still lifes. In Still Life with Mandolin at right, the background wall is actually the spalted concrete surface of my patio. Note that any heavily textured background must be photographed in lighting conditions that mimic the lighting of the objects in your still life.

Alternatively, your still life need not have a vertical background at all. In Still Life with Mango below, the background just fades to black. The surface on which the objects are placed also deserves some consideration. This can be a table. shelf, floor, or just a board. The table top in Still Life with Mango below is actually two abutted pieces of walnut plywood from some old kitchen cabinets. The joint between them is hidden in the area where the background goes dark. The narrow table top in Still Life with Pitcher and Blue Mug and Still Life with Mandolin is simply an old unfinished 1 x 12 inch pine board sitting on top of a utility counter in my basement.

Lighting
Once you’ve arranged you composition and decided on a background, it’s time to set up the lighting, which is key to achieving the Renaissance look. Although of the utmost importance, creating the desired lighting is much easier than creating an effective composition. All of the photographs in this article were illuminated with a single inexpensive 10 inch clamp-on lamp such as the one shown below. These lamps are commonly available at home-improvement and hardware stores. Since the intent is to produce the effect of a shaft of slightly diffuse sunlight entering through a window, a single source of illumination such as that provided by this type of lamp serves admirably. With the lamp positioned fairly low, two or three feet to the right or left, and a little in front of the subject, we only need a white reflector card on the opposite side to provide just a little fill light into the shadows. In order to produce the shaft-of-light effect on the background, one or more black cards or pieces of cardboard can be positioned to create the desired pattern of light and shadow, or, the effect can be created digitally in an image editing program. If you prefer to have the background simply fade to black, place a large (preferably black) card near the edge of the lamp’s reflector to reduce the amount of light falling into the background. Again, it is possible to create this effect digitally, but in this case it really is much easier to capture the image correctly in the first place.

Either a 100 watt incandescent bulb or equivalent compact fluorescent bulb works well. It’s best to set up the camera for a custom white balance for accurate color reproduction. If a compact fluorescent bulb is being used, let it warm up at least 10 minutes before doing the custom white balance or taking any pictures.

Capturing the images
The key idea here is to make a sequence of exposures, each one being focused at a slightly different distance from the camera, progressing from a point on the subject that is nearest the camera to one which is furthest away (or vice-versa). The camera, of course, must be mounted on a stable tripod. If using a single-lens reflex camera, enable mirror lock-up with at least a 2 second delay before the shutter opens. All focusing must be done manually, as the camera cannot be moved between exposures, and auto-focusing isn’t always very accurate anyway. Let me say at the outset that the process of critically focusing the camera at a given point on your subject is made far easier, precise, and unambiguous with a camera that has a magnified live-view capability. Pinpointing the exact plane of focus through the viewfinder can sometimes be difficult, so it may be advisable in that case to shoot a few extra frames for insurance, or, you can make your exposures, leave the camera in place, examine the images on your computer monitor, and if you’ve misfocused a frame, return the memory card to the camera and reshoot.

If you’re interested in obtaining the sharpest results, use a top-quality lens. Most kit lenses don’t fall into this category, so if you have a better alternative, use it. Another thing--frame the composition so that the final image needs little or no cropping. Many cameras’ viewfinders do not show the whole image, so check the framing on the camera’s lcd monitor, which usually shows the entire frame.
How many frames do you need? It depends on the lens aperture, the average distance of the lens to the subject, and how deep the subject is. I typically use a 50mm focal length lens at f/8 (I would use a longer lens, but I’m a little short on working space), and for the kinds and physical extent of subjects shown in this article, five or six frames seems to cover it. For a great many lenses, f/8 is close to the optimum aperture for achieving the highest resolution (the lens may be slightly better at f/5.6 or even f/4), and yet provides a modicum of depth of field, allowing for small errors in focusing or the effects of field curvature, if any. I wouldn’t recommend going beyond f/8--just take more frames instead. It may be necessary to increase the number of frames if the background is particularly far from the furthest part of the subject. Of course, if you’re adding the background after image capture, or the background fades to black, you may be able to use fewer frames.
Once everything is in place, determine the correct exposure and use that same exposure for every frame. When you’re ready to start shooting, mentally divide the depth of your subject into increments of approximately equal extent, according to the number of frames that are needed to cover the subject from front to back. Focus on a part of the subject that is nearest (or furthest) from the camera and expose a frame. Then, focus on the next furthest (or nearest) subject plane, make the exposure, and incrementally continue the process until you have frames covering the entire depth of the subject from front to back.

Processing and editing
Load the images into Helicon Focus, choose the appropriate settings, and sit back while it composites the images. I usually select low values of radius and smoothing in order to obtain the sharpest results, but this does tend to introduce artifacts around edges, and noise in smooth areas, which require additional editing to remove. In any case, the final image should be carefully examined and any focus or artifact issues addressed before you exit the program.

You may notice that one side of your image is brighter than the other, a consequence of the lamp being closer to one part of the subject, as seen in the photo at right. Now, a shaft of sunlight coming through a window doesn’t illuminate objects quite in this manner, so I prefer to balance the brightness to a large extent by darkening the offending part of the image. Another bit of editing I may perform on an image is to vignette, or slightly darken the edges, a technique that was also commonly used by Renaissance artists. Below you see the final image of Still Life with Wood Shavings, in which the illumination has been substantially balanced, and a vignette applied, as it would appear printed on gallery-wrapped canvas.