Low-key photography
[4][5] Renaissance and Baroque, represented by different painting styles including sfumato and chiaroscuro used by artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Rubens), tenebroso (it.
dark, mysterious) used by artists such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Jusepe de Ribera among others, produced paintings in which black was predominant on the canvas and the light often come from only one source to achieve dramatic scenes.
[12] The term was named after the style of lighting the face in most of Rembrandt's self-portraits, but also in other works, such as the Portrait of an Old Man in Red (1652–1654), dominated by Tenebrism.
[16][17] After the decline in popularity of the Pictorialism movement, the new style of photographic Modernism came into vogue, and the public's interest shifted to more sharply focused images.
The Russian painter Kasimir Malevich, a member of the Suprematist movement, created the Black Square in 1915, is widely considered the first purely abstract painting.
[15][24] Sfumato usually implies using many translucent layers to create a gradual tone spectrum from dark to light, eliminating thus the unwanted sharp contours.
[15][25][26] On the other hand, chiaroscuro, another oil painting technique, uses strong tonal contrasts between light and dark to model three-dimensional forms, often to dramatic effect.
[27] The first use of light-dark three-dimensional shadows – known as "skiagraphia" or "shadow-painting" in Ancient Greece – is traditionally attributed to the Athenian painter of the fifth century BC, Apollodorus (in De Gloria Atheniensum, Plutarch).
[29] In the paintings with religious scenes, the Renaissance artists reassigned this holy light as the predominant source of illumination, relying heavily on the chiaroscuro technique.
If the religious chiaroscuro of the Renaissance served to create quiet and calm scenes, painters such as Caravaggio, Baglione, Veronese, and Georges de La Tour, had the tendency to use this style for a dramatic effect.
Caravaggio has accomplished the dramatic illumination to its greatest extent with his method called tenebrism – a technique that has spread to Europe under the name of caravaggism.
Moran, Teton National Park,[50] natural light falls only on the peak of the mountain, while the rest of the photo is a mixture of dark grey tones; some of Edward Weston's photographs are also illustrative of the low-key style, such as Nautilus (1930), Pepper No.
[52] In 1944, Robert Capa takes photos of Picasso[53] in natural light that only highlights the right half of his face, leaving the left one in the shade.
It is best to keep it black or dark gray ... and from there, it is about improvising to achieve that perfect shot you have in mind"[73] Lights Talking advises choosing and maintaining the lowest ISO (100, 64 or even 32) to get noise-free photographs.
[75] Painting the human body in black is also employed in low-key photography using non-toxic dyes or pigments in order to darken and enhance as much as possible the colour of the subjects photographed, and to achieve the desired effects.
