# Lumogeny > Where the lights stand for 43 photographic styles, and a shoot sheet for your own camera, lenses and lights. Each style is described by the photographic choices that make it (295 choices in 15 groups), with real photographs from open museum collections (99 shown, with their credits) and, for some styles, a rendered set-up: a Blender render of a synthetic clay head or a still life with the lights exactly where the plan puts them. Made by Van Riel Online Services. Renders are synthetic figures, not people. Light plans worked out from a style’s choices (rather than rendered) are schematic and not to scale. Credit the museum photographs as their credit lines say. ## Pages - [Set-ups](https://lumogeny.com/): six rendered set-ups, each a picture and its light plan to scale - [All styles](https://lumogeny.com/styles/): every style by where it comes from - [Light lab](https://lumogeny.com/light-lab/): butterfly, loop, Rembrandt and split light from one softbox on a clay head; one, two and three lights on a still life - [Get directions](https://lumogeny.com/advice/): describe a photography job in plain words and get a few styles that fit - [About](https://lumogeny.com/about/): where the facts, photographs and renders come from ## Styles - [Daguerreotype portraiture](https://lumogeny.com/styles/daguerreotype-portraiture.md): 1839–1860, early processes, rendered set-up. Small, unique portraits on silvered copper plates, so sharp that every hair and thread shows and the sitter seems held in a mirror. - [Calotype and paper-negative photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/calotype.md): 1841–1865, early processes, rendered set-up. Photographs made from paper negatives and printed mostly on plain salted paper, from Talbot's calotype of 1841 to the waxed-paper surveys of 1850s France and of British India into the 1860s. - [Carte-de-visite studio portraits](https://lumogeny.com/styles/carte-de-visite.md): 1854–1900, early processes, rendered set-up. Small albumen prints of a whole figure, mounted on a card the size of a visiting card and collected by the dozen in albums. - [Yokohama photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/yokohama-photography.md): 1863–1910, early processes. Albumen prints of Japan made for foreign residents and tourists: views of temples, avenues, gardens and Mount Fuji, and studio scenes of 'manners and customs' (a rickshaw ride, a sedan chair, women with parasols or instruments) acted out by hired models before painted backdrops. - [Autochrome colour photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/autochrome.md): 1907–1935, early processes. The first practical colour photography: a glass plate coated with a mosaic of potato-starch grains dyed orange-red, green and blue-violet, developed into one positive transparency and seen against the light, in a diascope or projected. - [Pictorialism](https://lumogeny.com/styles/pictorialism.md): 1885–1930, pictorialist. Photographs made to be art on the model of painting: landscapes in mist, women and children in gardens and woods, portraits, nudes and allegories, all seen softly. - [Chinese salon photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/chinese-salon-photography.md): 1928–1985, pictorialist. Pictorial photography by Chinese camera-club and salon photographers in Shanghai, then Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, built on the rules of Chinese ink painting. - [Straight photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/straight-photography.md): 1917–present, modernist, rendered set-up. Sharp, unmanipulated black-and-white photographs of the thing itself: a pepper, a shell, a fence, a cliff, a machine, a face, seen close or squarely and rendered in full detail. - [New Objectivity photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/new-objectivity-photography.md): 1922–1933, modernist, rendered set-up. Sober, sharply focused photographs of single things, seen square-on and close: a plant bud magnified against a plain grey ground, rows of identical sweets, a blast-furnace wall, a painter standing in his street in coat and bowler hat. - [New Vision](https://lumogeny.com/styles/new-vision.md): 1922–1939, modernist. Photographs that make the camera a new eye: a square seen straight down from a radio tower, a mast climbed from below, bridge cables slicing a tilted landscape, a steel transporter bridge printed in negative. - [Mexican modernist photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/mexican-modernist-photography.md): 1923–1940, modernist, rendered set-up. Post-revolutionary Mexico photographed sharp and straight, then turned on its people, its things and its politics: a puppeteer's hands and their shadow in hard sun, a workers' parade seen from above as a field of sombreros, a sickle, bandolier and corncob laid out as a still life, cardboard mannequins smiling over a market stall. - [Modernist architectural photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/modernist-architectural-photography.md): 1929–1980, modernist. Photographs made to publish and promote modern buildings: glass houses, curtain-wall towers, terminals and their interiors, seen from a chosen oblique corner with every vertical kept parallel by a view camera. - [Fotoclubismo (Escola Paulista)](https://lumogeny.com/styles/fotoclubismo-paulista.md): 1946–1964, modernist. Amateur salon photographs from São Paulo's Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante that made the camera club's exhibition print modernist: hard sun, the cast shadows of sills, stairs and roofs drawn as lines, new concrete buildings seen steeply from below or above, and sand, leaves and wiring cropped into pattern. - [Subjektive Fotografie](https://lumogeny.com/styles/subjektive-fotografie.md): 1949–1958, modernist. Black-and-white photographs that turn what the camera sees into the photographer's own picture: lamps and lights drawn into looping traces, telephone wires reduced to black lines on a white sky, chimneys printed in negative, a face set beside its own reversed image, objects laid on paper as photograms. - [FSA/OWI documentary photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/fsa-documentary.md): 1935–1944, documentary & reportage. Black-and-white photographs made for a US government agency in 1935–1944 to show what the Depression did to rural America and what the New Deal was doing about it: sharecroppers in their houses, migrants at roadside camps, eroded farms, small-town streets. - [Picture-magazine photo essay](https://lumogeny.com/styles/picture-magazine-photo-essay.md): 1936–1972, documentary & reportage. Stories told in pictures across the pages of weekly picture magazines such as Life, Look and Picture Post. - [Drum magazine photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/drum-magazine-photography.md): 1951–1965, documentary & reportage. Black-and-white pictures made for Drum, the magazine of black urban South Africa in the 1950s: cover girls and fashion posed in a small studio against a paper roll under flood lamps, or out on city steps, rooftops and mine dumps; singers, boxers and couples caught mid-dance by flash in Sophiatown; undercover exposés and the crowds of the Defiance Campaign, the Sophiatown removals and the Treason Trial. - [New Color photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/new-color-photography.md): 1970–1987, documentary & reportage. Colour photographs of ordinary American things: a parked truck, an oven, a street corner, a motel room, a roadside after a flood, made when colour still meant advertising and snapshots. - [New Topographics](https://lumogeny.com/styles/new-topographics.md): 1970–present, documentary & reportage. The land as people have changed it: tract houses, industrial parks, motels, parking lots, grain elevators and the edges of towns, photographed level and from a middle or far distance, square-on or along a low horizon, in plain high sun or overcast light. - [French humanist photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/humanist-photography.md): 1930–1968, street & snapshot. Black-and-white pictures of ordinary people in the streets, cafés, riverbanks and working-class districts of Paris and its suburbs, made with small handheld cameras in available light and published in illustrated magazines from the 1930s to the 1960s. - [New York street photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/new-york-street-photography.md): 1955–1975, street & snapshot. Black-and-white 35 mm pictures of New York's sidewalks, parades, parks and crowds, made from about 1955 to 1975 by photographers who took Robert Frank's The Americans as permission to break the rules: wide-angle lenses close to strangers, tilted horizons, cut-off figures, grain and blur, hard sun or murky bars. - [Provoke and are-bure-boke](https://lumogeny.com/styles/provoke.md): 1968–1975, street & snapshot. Grainy, blurred, out-of-focus, high-contrast black-and-white pictures of Tokyo's streets, roadsides, highways and rooms, often at night, made by the circle of the magazine Provoke (1968–69) and carried on into the early 1970s. - [Diaristic snapshot photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/diaristic-snapshot.md): 1979–present, street & snapshot. Colour snapshots of the photographer's own life: friends and lovers in bed, in the bath, dressing up, getting high, fighting, dancing and grieving, shot up close at night with a flash on a small 35 mm camera. - [Girly photo (onnanoko shashin)](https://lumogeny.com/styles/onnanoko-shashin.md): 1993–2001, street & snapshot. Young Japanese women photograph their own lives on 35 mm film, often with a cheap autofocus compact held at arm's length, sometimes with a tripod and self-timer: themselves, friends, boyfriends and family, their rooms, clothes, half-eaten food, cats, flowers and the evening sky. - [Surrealist photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/surrealist-photography.md): 1924–1950, staged & conceptual, rendered set-up. Photographs that make the familiar strange: a big toe, a hand or an armadillo seen so close and lit so hard against black that it becomes a creature or a monument; bodies cut into fragments by the frame; faces and nudes doubled by superimposition or outlined by solarisation; funnels and tongs laid on paper as rayographs; mannequins and masks. - [Kharkiv School of Photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/kharkiv-school-of-photography.md): 1971–present, staged & conceptual. Snapshots of everyday life, parades, nudes and found family portraits are hand-coloured in loud, careless colour; two colour slides are laid together as a 'sandwich'; prints are collaged, toned, scratched or made deliberately 'bad': small, blurred and flawed. - [Düsseldorf School of Photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/dusseldorf-school.md): 1976–present, staged & conceptual, rendered set-up. Colour photographs of buildings, museum halls, libraries, crowds, landscapes and faces, taken square-on from a distance with a view camera and printed huge, often face-mounted to acrylic, so the wall-sized print shows more detail than the eye. - [Staged tableau photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/staged-tableau.md): 1977–present, staged & conceptual. Pictures that look like a moment from a film: an ordinary room, street or suburb in which a figure is caught mid-action, glancing at something outside the frame, with a story implied but never told. - [Hollywood glamour portraiture](https://lumogeny.com/styles/hollywood-glamour-portraiture.md): 1925–1955, fashion & commercial, rendered set-up. Publicity portraits of film stars made in the studios' portrait galleries: a face or half-figure, close to the lens, lit by hard spotlights in butterfly or Rembrandt patterns, with a hair light and rim light carving it out of a dark ground. - [Postwar couture fashion photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/couture-fashion-photography.md): 1945–1965, fashion & commercial, rendered set-up. Editorial pictures of Paris couture and American ready-to-wear for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar after the war. - [E-commerce packshot on white](https://lumogeny.com/styles/ecommerce-packshot.md): 2000–present, fashion & commercial, rendered set-up. The product alone on pure white: centred, filling most of the frame, sharp from front to back and lit by large soft sources so its shape and colour read truly, then cut out or clipped to white and cleaned of dust, with no shadow or only a soft contact shadow or reflection. - [Street-style fashion photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/street-style-photography.md): 2005–present, fashion & commercial. One dressed figure, seen head to toe, stands or walks towards the camera in the middle of a vertical frame; a 50 mm or short telephoto lens at a wide aperture softens the street behind, and open shade or overcast daylight keeps the clothes' colours true. - [Dark and moody food photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/dark-moody-food.md): 2012–present, fashion & commercial, rendered set-up. Food on dark weathered wood, slate, old baking tins and rumpled linen, lit by one window or soft source from the side or behind, so most of the frame falls into shadow and the light picks out texture, steam and crumbs. - [Indian painted photographs](https://lumogeny.com/styles/indian-painted-photography.md): 1860–1980, vernacular & studio. Studio and court portraits from India in which a painter takes over the photograph. - [Malian studio portraiture](https://lumogeny.com/styles/malian-studio-portraiture.md): 1948–1985, vernacular & studio. Portraits made to order for Bamako's clients: people in their best clothes, alone, in couples or in groups, seen whole or at three-quarter length, frontal and at eye level, posed with care in front of a hung patterned cloth whose print meets or clashes with their own. - [Indian candid and pre-wedding photography](https://lumogeny.com/styles/indian-candid-wedding-photography.md): 2008–present, vernacular & studio. Wedding photography of urban India since the late 2000s, in two registers. - [Light and airy](https://lumogeny.com/styles/light-and-airy.md): 2010–present, vernacular & studio, rendered set-up. Bright, soft, romantic pictures of couples, families and babies, exposed one or more stops over so skin glows and skies and highlights melt into cream, with low contrast, lifted shadows and pale pastel colour: peach skin, minty greens, blush and ivory. - [Korean four-cut photo booth (classic frontal strip)](https://lumogeny.com/styles/korean-four-cut-photo.md): 2017–present, vernacular & studio. The classic frontal form of Korean four-cut photography: self-directed portraits made against a plain booth backdrop and assembled into a four-frame vertical keepsake. - [Meitu beauty-app selfie](https://lumogeny.com/styles/meitu-beauty-selfie.md): 2008–present, digital & social, rendered set-up. Self-portraits taken with a phone's front camera (in the early 2010s, also a selfie compact) and run through a beauty app such as Meitu's, which edits the face itself: skin smoothed, lightened and flushed pink, dark circles and blemishes erased, eyes enlarged and brightened, jaw and chin narrowed. - [Flat lay](https://lumogeny.com/styles/flat-lay.md): 2010–present, digital & social, rendered set-up. Objects laid on a flat surface and photographed from directly above: an outfit with boots and a watch, a laptop with coffee and flowers, make-up, stationery, or tools knolled into parallel rows. - [Teal-and-orange cinematic look](https://lumogeny.com/styles/teal-orange-cinematic.md): 2010–present, digital & social, rendered set-up. Digital photographs graded like a Hollywood blockbuster: skin, sunlight, lamps and everything warm pushed to orange, while shadows, sky, water and backgrounds swing to teal, its complementary hue, and the other colours are muted. - [VSCO film-preset look](https://lumogeny.com/styles/vsco-film-preset.md): 2012–present, digital & social. Everyday phone pictures (coffee, windows, beaches, roads, skies, friends glancing away) graded to look like faded colour film: blacks lifted to a matte grey, contrast and saturation held back, highlights warm and shadows drifting green or teal, with fine added grain. - [Y2K digicam and flash revival](https://lumogeny.com/styles/y2k-digicam-flash.md): 2021–present, digital & social, rendered set-up. Nights out with friends shot on a cheap early-2000s compact digital camera: the built-in flash blasts faces and shiny surfaces while the room drops to black, the low-resolution sensor gives soft detail, noise and blown highlights, colours come out vivid or oddly tinted, and an orange date stamp often sits in a corner.