006 - Learning from the Masters Part 1

Welcome to Episode 6 of the Travel & Adventure Photography School podcast!
Today we are talking about what we can learn from studying master painters. This is part 1 of a 3 part series happening over the next three weeks. Today, we talk about master painters, next week we are talking about the original masters of photography, and then we will talk about what we can learn from a few of the master’s of the craft today, specifically in the outdoor adventure realm (like Jimmy Chin, Chris Burkard, and Paul Zizka).

This three-part series is about learning one of the fundamentals of photography. Not your settings, ISO, and Shutter Speed, but a way to build your photographic eye, which will enable you to take so many more amazing images.

We will be talking about four things you can learn by studying great paintings and painters

• Lighting

• Posing

• Colour

• Composition

Lighting

• The way painters incorporate light into their scenes can tell us a lot about how we should be using light in photography

• Rembrandt Lighting

• Check out the catchlights

• Even the lighting in master landscape painters (like Lawren Harris of the group of 7) can show us a lot about how light and shadows should play on landscapes

Posing

• Many of the classic portraiture poses have come from painters

• Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. A classic pose that we see consistently in portraiture today

• These posing tips can be used to inform how you should get somebody to pose in your outdoor and travel images. Look at how the painters utilize negative space, arm/hand placements, etc...

Colour

• Colour is one of the most important things in a photograph.

• Painters are all about blending and balancing colours. A lot of the master painters are masters of colour theory as well.

• Look at these paintings with an eye towards how they utilize colour to draw you through the image, highlight certain elements, play down other elements, and to create a cohesive look. 

• We can learn a lot about how they balance varying colours in their scenes to help us create more interesting and gratifying images. 

Composition

• Every element of a painting is chosen to be there.

• We can do the exact same thing in any set of scenes we create. You get to choose what is in that scene. 

• Look for composition elements like framing, rule of thirds, the golden ratio, and more in the paintings to understand their composition

• Look for extraneous elements that may be distracting and remove them. The same thing can be done in landscape and travel photography. What elements are crucial to your storytelling?

All told, these master painters have informed the standards of visual arts of hundreds of years. What they did in the centuries past, still work today to help create classic, timeless images. 

The best way to learn about light is by studying the Masters:

• Rembrandt (there is a lighting style named after him)

• Vermeer (Girl with a Pearl Earring)

• Leonardo (Mona Lisa)

• Lawren Harris (Group of 7 painter)

• Even Van Gogh and the way he used colour and motion