What makes a snapshot

Whatever you do, keep firing. Another reason? Shoot a lot and you will have far more pictures to work with later. If everything will be sharp, work with that. And watch out for group shots with everyone looking at you. For Shirley, a good posing technique is waiting for your subjects to look in different directions. Humans are not statues, so get them to move and look around. Movement adds energy and makes for stronger images.

With kids, get ridiculous, adds Schaeffer. Watch your framing and be familiar with your camera controls. Master those camera controls. How should you set exposures? For spontaneous kid shots Schaeffer almost always shoots in aperture-priority mode. If it drops below that, I bump up the ISO. Shirley thinks that zoom lenses are crucial for taking better snapshots, because you can compose more quickly and by zooming out for the bigger picture, you create more options for editing and cropping later.

When flash is used, it is unflattering direct flash, from the same position as the camera. Often there can be items in the frame the photographer did not intend to include in the photo. The photo may be badly processed or damaged if taken on film, or could have been processed in a certain way if digital.

The goal of snapshot photography, from the point of view of the photographer at least, is to show life as it really is, rather than a 'constructed' representation. Of course, there is still manipulation here - the photographer still chooses where to point the camera and at what point to press the shutter.

But artistic intention is not the driver behind the photo, just the goal to record what was seen. A difficult question arises when we look at what makes a snapshot photo into art. When taking a photo ourselves, we understand the context behind that image. But if it is the combined lack of artistic intent and lack of context that transform a photo from snapshot into art, then how can we determine if our own snapshots are art?

I would say this is partially possible, but it does depend on the subject. Taking street photography as a good example, you can take a photo of someone or some scene you find interesting. While you do have some context to the photo, all that context will be is that you saw the person. You don't know them, you don't know where they're from, or where they were going. All you know is you saw them and took a photo. This provides a good lack of context for judging the aesthetics of the image on its own merit.

You can, of course, also take photos in a snapshot style without the photos technically being snapshots. In the s a snapshot style was very popular for fashion photography, often using direct on-camera flash. Yet models were used, they were directed by the photographer, and there was certainly artistic intention behind the images.

One reason why a snapshot style of photography may be used it because it seems more raw, more real. We're seeing a similar thing at some photo stock libraries now - they are saying that clients want more photos of real people doing real things, rather than staged obvious 'stock' photos. They want stock photos that don't look like stock photos.

And where before they had strict criteria for submissions in terms of image quality, they are now clamouring for shots taken with phones. To conclude this article, I'm not saying that you should completely forget all the guidelines and technical details of photography and start blindly taking photos of anything that interests you in full auto mode.

But rather, we shouldn't dismiss snapshots as merely the work of uninformed amateurs. It is precisely because they are the work or at least appear to be the work of uninformed amateurs that allows some snapshots to take on a new context and be considered as art. Posted in Photography Tips. Tagged with art , cellphone photography , Documentary Photography , iphoneography , Snapshot , Street photography. Name required. Mail will not be published required. The majority of links on this website are affiliate links.

This means that I earn a commission if you purchase a product through one of these links. The product will still cost you the same as if you went direct, and the commission helps pay for running this site. Discover Digital Photography Information, news and advice on digitial photography.

The art of the snapshot photograph without comments A snapshot is is often used to describe a photograph in a somewhat derogatory sense.

History of the Snapshot In the early days of photography, taking a photo was quite a complicated affair. Friedlander, for example, became known for his photographs taken from moving vehicles [Fig.

By carrying his camera with him on his automobile journeys, Friedlander helped show how the world looks when traveling in a car, and windshields often provided a ready made picture frame.

Winogrand, too, shot pictures on the move, in his lifelong attempt to show what things looked like when photographed. This pronouncement, which serves as a kind of simple manifesto for snapshot aesthetics, was made during a lecture in Rochester, the home of Kodak. As writer Geoff Dyer recounts:. He preferred to talk about the picture of the gas station that Frank had photographed near Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Figure 2. Lee Friedlander b. Figure 3. But, of course, the more restricted question of what that photograph would look like in an advertisement is already largely answered, as the range of photographs—including historical prints, journalistic photographs, personal pictures —that appear in ads and corporate websites is vast.

Furthermore, the logic of advertising informs our use of Facebook, YouTube, and our personal websites— we are all marketers now. The stylistic advances attributed to Frank, Friedlander, Winogrand and many others continue to affect how we think about what can and should be photographed; we are now seeing a similar shift in what can and should be represented in strategic imagery.

Particularly in the US, snapshot, street, or documentary-style photography exerted a profound influence on aesthetic and social questions about the role photography could play in culture. Ironic, perhaps, that the style now lends itself so well to strategic aims. For most of us, snapshots mean something because they preserve a memory, capture a moment, or depict a friend, family member or loved one—the same themes that Kodak promoted for decades.

From a personal point of view—rather than a strategic sensibility—the significance of snapshot aesthetics often revolves around what we see and feel when viewing snapshots, rather than what they mean to art historians, curators, and collectors. As John Berger brilliantly pronounced, advertising necessarily sells the past to the future.

Figure 4. Snapshot aesthetics often embraces the fine line between formal photography and randomness, between intention, posing, and editing, on one hand, and spontaneity, photography as experience, and strategic intention, on the other.

Within advertising research, a few scholars have begun to articulate and document visual rhetoric and its associated styles. However, this research remains largely focused on effectiveness. A brand culture perspective reveals how branding has opened up to include cultural, sociological, and theoretical enquiry that both complements and complicates economic and managerial analysis of corporate strategy. Work within this tradition focuses on the cultural building blocks of value for particular brand campaigns, often, but not always with managerial relevance in mind.

There is, however, a growing literature in critical marketing studies. I have argued for an art historical imagination within communication, branding, and consumer research, one that reveals how stylistic conventions—or common patterns of portraying objects, people, or identities—work alongside rhetorical processes in ways that often elude management studies. I continue tracing the genealogy of the snapshot beyond Dutch genre art, from street photography and reportage, to contemporary uses of the snapshots, such as paparazzi photography and photoblogs.

I discuss the role of snapshot aesthetics in contemporary brand communication and then present a wider view and a set of questions about the relationships between style and strategy.

What is the historical background of the snapshot, and how has it been regarded within theories of photography? What are the cultural implications of the snapshot, and how might these be visually communicated? What is the visual genealogy of snapshot aesthetics? Does snapshot aesthetics relate to new media forms such as Twitter, an audio analog of the snapshot, with quickly composed tweets acting as digital snapshots of everyday life?

In short, what can we learn about the relationship between photography and strategy by focusing on snapshot aesthetics? The snapshot, a straightforward, generally unposed photograph of everyday life, has emerged as an important visual framework in contemporary strategic communication.

Martens boots with a patent trench coat, leggings and shorts. Martens has enjoyed a renaissance in the past few years, reconfiguring their brand identity to conform to a fashion sensibility. What is more is that many of Dr. Martens ads depend upon style for their narrative power. That Dr. For the snapshot aesthetics harnessed by Dr.

How is this possible? To find some answers, we turn to image producers—photographers and editors—for insights into this strategic style [Fig. Figure 5. His images are generally brightly colored, almost garish, harshly lit, sexually suggestive and often puerile, drawing on pornography as well as snapshot aesthetics for inspiration.

Though a bit sleazy, they are often strangely compelling. The snapshot, along with its close relatives paparazzi photography, reality TV, and photoblogs, represents a particularly influential style that many contemporary advertising photographers embrace. For example, the brand Marc Jacobs has productively employed snapshots by well-known German photographer Juergen Teller in a long-running campaign that has garnered wide attention [Fig 6]. The apparent authenticity of these images—they appear not constructed—contributes to their appeal, both as a photograph and as an ad—and they circulate widely on the Internet, in blogs and fashion forums.

Figure 6. Juergen Teller b. Kmart, the once dominant discount store, now largely eclipsed by Wal-Mart, Costco and online retailers, has struggled for years. My earliest memory of Kmart is from , when it was near its financial peak. A group of friends and I went there right after seeing the movie Bang the Drum Slowly , a tearjerker about a terminally ill baseball player, starring a young—and certainly unknown to me at the time—Robert DeNiro.

Everyone in the movie used it, and it must have looked cool to a bunch of pre-teens. We found someone to buy us the tobacco, and we started chewing just like we watched in the movie, afterward becoming violently sick. Apparently, you should never chew Red Man like bubble gum. And since, I have never used chewing tobacco. But, wow, what influence that movie had!

We saw. We bought. We chewed. The realistic and heart-rending scenes of the movie exerted a profound influence on us, visuals that worked on my younger self in subtle ways. Figure 7. Figure 8. As one fashion blog reports:. A production team street casting in New York filmed potential models with a video camera to make sure they were telegenic. Several fashion bloggers were also hired to lend added authenticity.

Martens campaign images.