About Lumogeny
Lumogeny helps you get a look right before the shoot: which style fits the job, where the lights stand, and how to make it with your own camera, lenses and lights.
The styles
Lumogeny is built on Photogeny, an atlas of 43 photographic styles: movements, studio traditions, commercial looks and the looks of phones and feeds. Each style is described by the photographic choices that make it, out of 295 choices in 15 groups: what is in front of the camera, how people pose, the light, the shadows, the lens, the viewpoint, the colour, the process and the finish. The descriptions are researched from 749 cited sources, listed on each style’s page, and checked against real photographs.
Where a style’s typical camera settings are stated by its photographers or its histories, the page says they are documented; where they are worked out from the gear and the look, it says they are inferred.
The photographs
The photographs on the style pages come from museums, libraries and archives that share them under open licences or in the public domain: 99 are shown, each whole, on a white margin, never cropped, with its maker, title, date, collection and licence. Most come from Wikimedia Commons (35), Art Institute of Chicago (15), Library of Congress (15), Rijksmuseum (10), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (8), Flickr (5), Flickr via Wikimedia Commons (3) and The Cleveland Museum of Art (2). Photographs still in copyright are linked to the collection that holds them, not shown.
The renders and the light plans
The renders are made in Blender with its Cycles renderer, which follows light as it travels, so a shadow falls where the light really puts it. The head is a synthetic clay figure made with MakeHuman, not a person; the still lifes are ceramic objects on a table. Every light in a scene file has its position, its size, its power and its colour temperature, and the light plans are drawn from the same files, so they are to scale. 17 styles have a rendered set-up so far; more are on the way.
Where a style has no render yet, its plan is worked out from its choices: which lights it needs and where they stand round the subject. That plan is drawn as a schematic and says “Schematic, not to scale”.
Shoot sheets and directions
The shoot sheet and the directions for a job are worked out in your browser by the same engine that describes the styles. What you type and the kit you fill in stay in your browser and in the page’s address; nothing is sent to us.
Generated images
There are no generated images on Lumogeny yet. When they come, each will carry a black band on the picture saying it is AI-generated and not a photograph. They will never show a real person or be made to look like news or documentary photographs.
Who makes it
Lumogeny is a service of Van Riel Online Services, Schiedamse Vest 154, 3011 BH Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Write to info@vanriel.eu with corrections, questions about a picture’s credit, or anything else. Chamber of Commerce (KvK) number 92029418; VAT number NL004933184B63.
The site sets no cookies and runs no analytics; the privacy statement says what it keeps. It is set in Archivo by Omnibus-Type and Azeret Mono by Displaay, both under the SIL Open Font License and served from this site.