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What You Need to Know: The International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York is currently presenting the tender group exhibition “Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy” on view through September 11, 2023. Featuring more than 250 works by 16 international artists, the show explores intimate relationships through the artists’ photographs and photographic projects. With images dated between 1952 and 2022, the juxtaposition of time periods, styles, and subject matter offers an unparalleled opportunity to delve into the complex ways artists, cultures, and eras explore notions of love. Artists with work represented include: Nobuyoshi Araki, Ergin Çavuşoğlu, Motoyuki Daifu, Fouad Elkoury, Aikaterini Gegisian, Nan Goldin, René Groebli, Hervé Guibert, Sheree Hovsepian, Clifford Prince King, Leigh Ledare, Lin Zhipeng (No. 223), Sally Mann, RongRong&inri, Collier Schorr, and Karla Hiraldo Voleau.

Why We Like It: Intimacy, love, and relationships—and the myriad facets of each—offer perennial inspirations for artists. The inherent subjectivity of these themes allows for a deeply personal and nuanced exploration on both the part of the artist as well as the viewer, and the wide-ranging “Love Songs” exhibition at the ICP traces the indexical nature of emotions and internal worlds through photography. With works dating from across the better part of 70 years, an intriguing thread is brought to light through the similarities and deviations love and intimacy are addressed through visual means across time. From René Groebli’s image from “The Eye of Love” (1952), which relies on the index of lovers formerly present, to the multilayered work of Aikaterini Gegisian, whose composite compositions lend themselves to symbolic and metaphorical readings. Together, the hundreds of works featured in “Love Letters” are a testament to the collective humanity that can be found through intimate relationships.

According to the ICP: “This summer, ICP will turn over the entirety of our exhibition spaces to powerful, intergenerational stories of love in the exhibition ‘Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy.’ This major exhibition offers a unique viewpoint into how relationships are photographed and present images of intimacy rarely represented in photographic history with such openness and directness. We look forward to welcoming audiences to explore and connect with ‘Love Songs,’ which is an international collaboration with our friends at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris, and curator Sara Raza, who remixed the international show at ICP.”—David E. Little, executive director of the International Center of Photography.

See featured works from the exhibition below.

Aikaterini Gegisian, Handbook of the Spontaneous Other (Yellow 5) (2019). © Aikaterini Gegisian.

René Groebli, from “The Eye of Love” (1952). Collection of MEP, Paris. © René Groebli,. Courtesy of Galerie Esther Woerdehoff.

Hervé Guibert, Sienne (1979). Collection MEP, Paris. © Christine Guibert. Courtesy of Les Douches la Galerie, Paris.

Leigh Ledare, Diptych from the series “Double Bind” (2010). © Leigh Ledare.

RongRong&intri, from “Personal Letters” (2000). © RongRong&inri.

“Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy” is on view at the International Center of Photography, New York, through September 11, 2023.

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Gradient lighting is a more advanced technique that brings extra nuance and refinement to strobe lighting. It is an effect that is mainly used by product photographers but can have other applications as well.

In fact, I think it is so important for the genre that I listed it as one of the key skills that you need to learn to be a good product photographer in my guide to product photography. But, why do you need it and how is it done?

Why Might You Want to Create Gradients of Light?

Gradients can help our brains interpret something as three-dimensional more easily than if the lighting is very flat and even. The purely white circle below looks flat, while the one on the right with a gradient gives the illusion of being more 3D.

When photographing glossy, highly reflective surfaces, we see a sharp reflection of our light source. Glossy surfaces are like mirrors, so even “soft” light sources such as octaboxes or softboxes have hard edges when reflected off materials such as glass. The image below shows the reflection of light from a stripbox on a glass bottle.

Our eyes can behave a bit like a glossy object, so when we shoot portraits you can see the shape of the modifier used as a hard-edged highlight in the eye, even if the light over the rest of the face and body looks soft. This is a handy trick for figuring out someone’s lighting setup by the way! But, it can look odd and at times quite flat if you have nothing but hard-edged reflections on glossy products.

Compare the reflections on these two images of bottles:

The second image uses a linear gradient to add more of a sense of shape and depth to the bottle. This doesn’t mean that sharp reflections or rim lighting like the Cobra image are wrong. It is just another option in the toolbox that enables us to refine our images further and have greater control of our final output.

There are two main types of gradient lighting: linear gradients and radial gradients. This is a bit like the main gradient tools in Lightroom and Photoshop. Either way, the idea is to have an area that is more intense, fading off to an area with less intensity. So, with lighting this means having a brighter starting point that fades out gradually to darkness. We’ll now have a look at each of these types of gradients, examining how they might be used and how we can create them.

Linear Gradients

A linear gradient is one that goes in one direction away from the brightest point. This can be left to right, top to bottom, or diagonally. We can also vary the intensity and length of a gradient to give a very slim or much wider bright area depending on the effect we are after. As we want a strip of light to work with for a linear fade, we usually use a stripbox or a square-edged softbox as our modifier. To this we add a sheet of diffusion material.

Diffusion Panels and Diffusion Materials

The usual way to create a linear gradient of light is using a sheet of diffusion material between your stripbox (or softbox) and the subject. This needs to be as close to white as possible and translucent rather than opaque. You can use something like the core of a 5-in-1 reflector as a diffuser, but the texture in this material can cause some problems at times as we shall see shortly. It is generally better to use purpose-made professional diffusion material such as Savage Translum diffusion roll, LEE 216 diffusion roll, or an equivalent. This will keep your light at a more neutral tone, not imparting a color cast, and give a nice, even diffusion effect. You can find different densities of diffusion material to give a more or less pronounced effect to suit your taste. Personally, I wouldn’t go less than a 1-stop diffuser if you like a smooth look.

You can make or buy some kind of frame for your diffusion panel and then attach the material to it. Try to keep it pretty tight so that the surface of the material remains flat and even. The frame can then be clamped to a boom arm or the like to hold it in front of your studio light.

If you don’t fancy making your own diffusion panel, then you can buy ready-made panels from companies such as Manfrotto. When writing this article, Manfrotto kindly supplied me with their Skylite system with their diffusion material to test alongside other methods. I used their 1.25-stop material, but a 0.75-stop version is also available. The collapsible frame can be attached to a light stand using their grip head.

Creating a Linear Gradient

So, let’s take a look at how we can create linear gradients using our light and diffusion material. The first step is to see what the light looks like through the diffuser. Then, we will refine the position of the light to create different types of gradients.

Start out with a stripbox or softbox set up next to a diffusion panel. Try facing the stripbox directly at the diffusion panel with a short distance of 20-30cm between them. Instead of a hard reflection, you now get a strip of reflection that is much softer. The pair of images below shows what happens when I use the core from a large 5-in-1 reflector to diffuse the light. This was the core from a 5ft Phot-R reflector. The first image shows the view looking at the light and the second shows how the reflection appears on the bottle.

The next set of images shows the results of the same setup using the Skylite:

As you can see, it makes a difference which diffusion material you use. The amount of light blocked, the white temperature created, and the amount of diffusion are all different. So, you will need to adjust the power of your lights and do any color corrections afterward to suit your setup.

What we’ve created so far isn’t really a linear gradient. To do that, we need one edge to be brighter and fade off towards the other side. This is done by putting the stripbox at an angle to the diffuser. Take a look at the sample setup below:

This will give you a gradient that looks similar to this example:

For a softer edge, we simply move the stripbox slightly further away from the panel. Alternatively, if we turn the stripbox towards the diffuser so it is facing it a bit more and so that it touches the diffuser we get a sharper cut-off and a larger bright area as you can see below:

By varying the angle of the softbox and the distance between its edge and the panel we can choose a longer or shorter gradient with a harder or softer cut-off to it.

Note: This image, like the rest of the basic demo shots, has not been retouched and was shot in a small studio, which has resulted in some other reflections creeping into other parts of the glass. Please ignore those.

Radial Gradients

Radial gradients emanate outwards in more than one direction from a (normally central) starting point. You can create them using a bare bulb, snoot, reflector dish (with or without grids), beauty dish, and other lighting modifiers (it works best if they are round). As with linear gradients, you use a diffusion panel between the modifier and the subject. Different materials and modifiers will give you different results. You can see the most notable variations in diffusion materials from a bare bulb, such as the results shown below.

The next set of 3 images shows how this can show up on a glass object. The first image is with a reflector core, the second uses a cheap 216 diffusion material (not LEE’s original) and the third uses the Manfrotto Skylite.

The reflector core struggles to diffuse a very specular light source, giving us the cross pattern. On occasion you may find the effect useful, but generally I would avoid using this type of material for radial gradients as the quality isn’t as good. Personally, I prefer the Skylite 1.25 stop out of all of the materials I’ve tried as it gives the smoothest gradients.

Creating a Radial Gradient

The most basic radial gradient is a bright spot that fades outwards. I tend to use either a reflector dish on my studio lights with grids to control the spot size, or a snoot. This means you can be more precise and create smaller pools of light, which is useful for small products.

We can also have a hard edge to part of the gradient if we want to. This is done using the same principle as with a hard-edged linear gradient; simply touch the panel with part of the modifier.

To soften the edges all the way around the gradient, we simply move the modifier away from the diffusion panel so that it no longer touches it.

One way in which I use this technique is for jewelry and watches. I position a diffusion panel over the item and use snooted lights to create gradients.

The watch image is straight out of camera – it’s just a JPG conversion from the RAW with no adjustments made. As you can see from the behind-the-scenes image, I added a mirror just under the camera to bounce some light back into the dark areas at the front.

Essential for Product Photography

If you are going to work as a professional product photographer, then you really need to be able to create various types of gradients. Lighting is one key way that a professional differentiates themselves. If you can make their products look sexier than they can, then they are more likely to hire you! Gradients are a fantastic tool for glossy metal and other shiny surfaces to add a more interesting and high-end look.

About the author: Joe Lenton works as a freelance product photographer and is also a Judge, Mentor, and Ambassador of The Societies of Photographers. He holds a Fellowship in product photography with The Society of International Commercial & Industrial Photographers.

Image credits: All images © Joe Lenton, used here with permission. Not to be reproduced without permission from the author.

Photography is a huge part of our daily lives. For many of us, our recollections go back to perhaps instamatic cameras and electromechanical single-lens-reflex (SLR) cameras. While some of us still have separate cameras, more likely we are using our camera phones to record and document all types of events.

Over the past week, International Photography Day was celebrated, a day to honor photography. Design News has put together a list of major milestones in the evolution of photography.

Design News would like to thank the sites photographytalk.com, thoughtco.com, and Wikipedia for providing the historical information to help produce this timeline.

Early Optics: 1400s – 1700s

Near the start of the 16th Century, scientist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci sketched out diagrams and wrote instructions about the camera obscura. In these papers, he included not just pinholes but also simple glass lenses.

Early Film: 1604 – 1827

Astronomer Johannes Kepler gets credited with coining the term photograph for a drawing with light in 1604. He was referring to using telescopic optics to project an image onto a sheet of paper or a canvas to draw the stars. 

Astronomers and inventors sought a way to make the paper or canvas itself sensitive to light. Glass or metal plates were also used in experiments by various people. 

Around 1717, German polymath Johann Heinrich Schulze accidentally discovered that a slurry of chalk and nitric acid into which some silver particles had been dissolved was darkened by sunlight. After experiments with threads that had created lines on the bottled substance after he placed it in direct sunlight for a while, he applied stencils of words to the bottle. The stencils produced copies of the text in dark red, almost violet characters on the surface of the otherwise whitish contents. The impressions persisted until they were erased by shaking the bottle or until overall exposure to light obliterated them. 

First Photograph: 1827

It was just one in a series of experiments but View from the Window at Le Gras is the earliest surviving photograph. Nicéphore Niépce used a sheet of metal with a film of chemicals spread on it. 

Though light-sensitive, it wasn’t very sensitive. It took 8 hours to record the image. You can see sunlight illuminating both sides of the buildings. From here on, the timeline of photography moves rapidly. 

Different metal plate technologies began to be used by astronomers, other scientists, and a new breed of artist/scientists, the naturists. The naturists were quite often scientists and inventors themselves, using this new technology to record the beauty of the world around them.

Bettman

View from the Window at Le Gras is known as the earliest surviving photograph.

Daguerreotype: 1839

Around this time, the word photography began to be used to describe this new industry. From 1839 on, the popular metal plate process known as daguerreotype opened up this mix of art and technology to the masses.

Well, the masses that could afford the time and money involved anyways. Though it may have been one of the easier metal plate photographic processes, it was still messy, expensive, very time consuming, and somewhat dangerous.

Earliest Camera: 1841

Photographers of this era generally used cameras designed and made by themselves or skilled craftsmen, adapting lenses made by optical manufacturers to use photographically.  

Early in the camera timeline of the history of photography, optical companies such as Zeiss, Leitz, and others started to design lenses specifically for photography. Voightlander went a step beyond and introduced a camera for metal plates in 1841. 

Developing Film Cameras

The problem with metal and glass plates was that they were fragile, cumbersome and hard to work with, and costly for the average person.  

A combination of two technologies, silver halides and celluloid based emulsions would undergo further development.  In 1835, Henry Fox Talbot invented a viable method of spreading a gelatine emulsion on paper. In 1839, astronomer John Herschel came up with a way to fix the image recorded by silver halides.

Late in the 1800’s, George Eastman pioneered the use of photographic film. Eastman started manufacturing paper film in 1885 before switching to celluloid in 1888–1889. His first camera, which he called the “Kodak“, was first offered for sale in 1888. It was a very simple box camera with a fixed-focus lens and single shutter speed, which along with its relatively low price appealed to the average consumer.

The Kodak came pre-loaded with enough film for 100 exposures and needed to be sent back to the factory for processing and reloading when the roll was finished. By the end of the 19th century Eastman had expanded his lineup to several models including both box and folding cameras.

35-mm Film

Another major photographic milestone was the development of 35-mm film. Oskar Barnack, who headed research and development at Leitz, decided to investigate using 35 mm cine film for still cameras while attempting to build a compact camera capable of making high-quality enlargements. He built his prototype 35 mm camera (Ur-Leica) around 1913, which transported the film horizontally, producing a 24x36mm image frame.

After World War I, Leica commercialized their first 35 mm cameras.

Single-lens-reflex Cameras

It was the single-lens-reflex (SLR) camera that paved the way for contemporary photography,  first electromechanical and later digital versions. The first practical reflex camera was the Franke & Heidecke Rolleiflex medium format TLR of 1928. Though both single- and twin-lens reflex cameras had been available for decades, they were too bulky to achieve much popularity. The Rolleiflex, however, was sufficiently compact.

Mehmet Ali/ iStock / Getty Images Plus

Medium format cameras were the first practical reflex cameras, though they were bulky and expensive.

1933 saw the introduction of the Ihagee Exakta, a compact SLR which used 127 rollfilm. This was followed three years later by the first Western SLR to use 135 film (otherwise known as 35 mm film), the Kine Exakta. The 35 mm SLR design gained immediate popularity and there was an explosion of new models and innovative features after World War II.

The first major post-war SLR innovation was the eye-level viewfinder, which first appeared on the Hungarian Duflex in 1947 and was refined in 1948 with the Contax S, the first camera to use a pentaprism. Prior to this, all SLRs were equipped with waist-level focusing screens. The Duflex was also the first SLR with an instant-return mirror, which prevented the viewfinder from being blacked out after each exposure. This same time period also saw the introduction of the Hasselblad 1600F, which set the standard for medium format SLRs for decades.

In 1952 the Asahi Optical Company (which produced Pentax cameras) introduced the first Japanese SLR using 135 film, the Asahiflex. Several other Japanese camera makers also entered the SLR market in the 1950s, including Canon, Yashica, and Nikon. Nikon’s entry, the Nikon F, had a full line of interchangeable components and accessories and is generally regarded as the first Japanese system camera.

35mm SLRs became one of the primary types of cameras for photographic images. Their form factor and image format are still one of the more dominant forces in modern digital photography.

Digital Cameras

The roots of digital photography, which would revolutionize the industry, began with the development of the first charged-coupled device at Bell Labs in 1969. The CCD converts light to an electronic signal and remains the heart of digital devices today. In 1975, engineers at Kodak developed the very first camera creating a digital image. It used a cassette recorder to store data and took more than 20 seconds to capture a photo.

By the mid-1980s, several companies were at work on digital cameras. One of the first to show a viable prototype was Canon, which demonstrated a digital camera in 1984, although it was never manufactured and sold commercially. The first digital camera sold in the U.S., the Dycam Model 1, appeared in 1990 and sold for $600. The first digital SLR, a Nikon F3 body attached to a separate storage unit made by Kodak, appeared the following year. By 2004, digital cameras were outselling film cameras.

By 2004, the sensor in the Canon EOS 1D Mark II had surpassed the resolution of the former industry standard Kodachrome slide film. Digital SLRs were pretty much taking over from 35mm SLRs.

TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA /AFP/Via Getty Images

Digital SLRs such as Canon’s EOS 1D surpassed the performance of film cameras in the early 2000s decade.

Smartphones Take Over

Today, most mobile devices—particularly smartphones—have cameras built into them. Samsung introduced the first smartphone camera—the SCH-V200—in 2000. but it was not until the introduction of the Apple iPhone in 2007 that the smartphone started to become a key medium for digital photography. Since then, improved sensors and optics have enabled smartphones to incorporate digital cameras that are rivaling discrete digital cameras for performance.

By 2013, smartphones with camera capabilities were outselling digital cameras more than 10-to-1.1 In 2019, more than 1.5 billion smartphones (most of which have camera capabilities) were sold to consumers, compared with about 550,000 digital cameras over roughly the same period.

Will AI Shake Up Photography?

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, has led to concerns that the future of photography may lie in some algorithms rather than the creativity of photographers. AI software can now be trained to produce images of objects and people that, while far from perfect, are in some cases reasonable facsimiles. This is an area to keep an eye on, as ongoing developments in generative AI software are likely to produce results that are more accurate and realistic.

The obvious question is, will photographers that were weaned on traditional photographic technology and adopted digital imaging technology now join another potential wave of photographic technology upheaval? Only time will tell.

Omer Messinger / Stringer/ Getty Images Europe

All the artwork and photos hanging in this gallery are AI generated. Could this be the trend of the future?

Upcoming lecture will discuss how photography played a crucial role at Arches and Canyonlands

Moab’s national parks—Arches and Canyonlands—owe part of their founding to photography: the medium was a way for conservationists to show the beauty of these areas to Congress over in Washington, D.C. Today, photos of the national parks are shared prolifically on social media in both positive ways—inspiring people to travel and get outside—and negative—prompting overuse of delicate areas if a photo goes viral. 

Kat Connelly, a backcountry ranger with the National Park Service, will discuss photography’s role in the national parks during a free lecture on Thursday, September 7 at the Moab Information Center. 

Connelly has been working for the NPS since 2018; she’s been in Moab specifically since the latter half of 2019. She’s a hobbyist photographer, and currently, shoots most of her photos in film—she loves the way it forces her to slow down to think about each shot, she said. Connelly first became interested in the relationship between photography and the parks during an internship as a photo archives technician at Yosemite: There, she digitized and organized the park’s collection of analog photos. 

During the Thursday lecture, she’ll display a number of historical photographs of both Arches and Canyonlands, and describe photography’s timeline. 

“We’ve gone from this period of time where a lot of people had not seen the West—they’d only seen it in paintings of these grand landscapes. We got to photography, and then were able to disseminate photos in newspapers or journals,” Connelly said. “Now we’re in the next iteration, where there’s so much spreading of imagery: Is that a pro or a con as we move into thinking of new ways to energize people about land conservation and recreating responsibly?” 

Connelly said it was easier to find historic photos of Canyonlands than it was of Arches—Arches was established in 1929, when photography wasn’t as popular; Canyonlands in 1964. She found images through NPS archives, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Denver Public Library: She mostly looked for images from surveys that worked to establish the parks. 

But she’ll also discuss the role social media photography plays. Both Canyonlands and Arches have their own social media accounts and often share modern photos of beautiful views and recreation options—and photos of the parks are shared by visitors. While those photos are aimed at inspiring visitors, sometimes social media can cause an influx of photographers to areas that are more sensitive to visitation. There’s a relatively new movement, Connelly said, to not geo-tag photos shared on any social media—but that also requires a careful balance of not gatekeeping certain areas. 

Even if you’re not interested in the discussion of pros and cons, Connelly said, definitely come for the historic photos: she’s loved looking through photos of old cars driving the White Rim and people’s historic tourist outfits. 

“There’ll be a really good collection to see,” she said. 

The lecture will take place on Thursday, September 7 at 5 p.m. at the Moab Information Center as part of the MIC and Canyonlands Natural History Association’s annual free lecture series.