Eugene Atget

Eugene Atget was a French photographer who photographed Paris closely looking at street passages as well as architecture. The medium he used was a large format wooden bellows camera, this effect gives you a shallow depth of field and allows you to distort the shape of the image by skewing the film plane,as this medium is heavy therefore he would have used a tripod as it was not easily removable. Through using film his images are high in grain and some of the edges are slightly distorted, in most of his photographs the contrast is medium to high. The photographs he took vary in composition from straight on, to a side angle view. Atget photographed in the pictorial style with his images having a soft misty focus with some areas being reduced in clarity.  His picturesque images symbolise tradition also with his framing.

This is my interpretation of Eugene Atget's photography. However the scenery is more of a contemporary version as the architecture and streets have changed dramatically in the last century, although the composition, perspective and texture is the same. As I shot on a Digital SLR I put the settings onto a low aperture so everything wasn't too clear like Atget's images giving them a soft misty focus, I had the ISO settings on high to give a grain to the image as well as giving it a slight grainy filter in post-production. I also changed the image to black and white in post-production. The perspective of the photograph is to the side of the street going down, with the camera level at my eye view like the two images of Eugene's above, also with in this perspective and angle it shows the top of the high buildings like his.