Games are spaces of experience as much as entertainment. It shouldn’t surprise us that the photographic gaze, that eye for composition and purely visual aesthetic, finds ample opportunity for snapshots in these virtual spaces. In fact, it’s surprising that in-game-photography – for purely aesthetical reasons as opposed to documenting victories or snapping a pic of an impressive vista for use as a desktop wallpaper – is still as unexplored a country as it still seems to be.
[...] The art of in-game-photography is still in its infancy, but it seems obvious that, with constantly increasing photorealism and the popularity of open-world-games, more and more photographers will also look for inspiration and picture opportunities in virtual worlds. Games are places as well as entertainment; and after all, as Elliott Erwitt’s quote at the beginning reminded us: Photography has little to do with the things we see -, and everything to do with the way we see them.
The piece features five leading video game photographers: Duncan Harris, Iain Andrews, James Pollock, Josh Taylor, and Leo Sang. Some of their work is so eye-catching that game companies have asked to use the photos in their promotions.
In both still photography and video, camera work should generally be invisible to viewers, allowing them to focus on the subject being captured. The same is true for video games. Here’s a nerdy yet fascinating analysis of the camera in the legendary SNES game, Super Mario World. It’s so simple, yet so well designed that it’s not something you’ve probably ever thought about.
Prior to the fancy graphics video game players enjoy today, classic games were based on simple geometric forms. German photographer Patrick Runte decided to do a quirky photo project exploring what these games might look like if translated to the real world. His series, titled Jump ‘N’ Run, shows people dressed in simple costumes of “characters” from games like Pac-Man, Pong, and Tetris. Read more…
Learning to play a game and learning to use Photoshop follow two, very different patterns. In the first you “discover” how the game is played, you fiddle with the buttons, try combinations, have eureka moments and eventually become proficient at it. Learning Photoshop, on the other hand, requires extensive tutorials and help; books are available from thin “easy-to-use” instruction books to heavy tomes many hundreds of pages long. Read more…
People ask me, “Jun Shen, how do you shoot so fast on the streets?!?” I’m like a ninja, whipping out my camera, shooting it, and putting it away so quickly that my subjects don’t know what hit them. They walk away whispering to themselves, “What was that? Did he take our photo?
It’s thanks to video games, folks. Read on to find out why. Read more…
For his project Alter Ego, photographer Robbie Cooper traveled around the world to shoot portraits of online gamers. He then combined his portraits with screenshots of the gamers’ avatars in the various games they play, showing an interesting side-by-side comparison of what the people look like in the real world compared to what they choose to look like in their fantasy worlds. The project got its start back in 2003 after Cooper did a shoot with a CEO who used the game Everquest to communicate with his children after getting divorced. Read more…
Warco — short for War Correspondent — is an upcoming video game in which the player takes on the role of a journalist named Jesse DeMarco. Despite being classified as a first person shooter, the objective is to shoot people with a camera rather than a gun. After venturing into dangerous conflicts and risking your life to snag some footage, you’re given the task of editing the video into a compelling news story. It almost seems like a Pokemon Snap game for adults. If they went a step further and made an online multiplayer mode, that’d certainly be… interesting.
Back in 2009 we published a post highlighting 8 video games that feature photography. One of them was Fatal Frame, and an upcoming spin-off of the game will involve using an actual camera during gameplay. Shinrei Shashin, which translates to “Spirit Photo”, is being developed for the Nintendo 3DS, and makes heavy use of the portable game system’s 3D-capable cameras. Imagine playing the game in a dimly-lit room, and seeing a ghost in your room through the camera — horror games may soon become a whole lot more creepy thanks to built-in cameras and augmented reality. No word on release date, or whether the game will be available outside Japan.
Did you know that some of Kodak’s early DSLR cameras had built-in games? Before Canon and Nikon started making homegrown DSLRs, they actually started by partnering with Kodak in combing their camera bodies with Kodak sensors and electronics. For some strange awesome reason, the firmware developers decided to add games to a number of the models. The Pong game shown in the video above is found on the Kodak DCS 560. Too bad neither Canon nor Nikon continued this awesome feature once they started developing their own cameras.
Inanimate objects in video games have long been quite realistic, but facial expressions on human characters haven’t been nearly as believable. For a new game called “L.A. Noire” by Rockstar Games, a newly developed piece of technology called MotionScan was used in which real actors are surrounded by a whopping 32 cameras to accurately document both their body motions and facial expressions. As you can see in the behind-the-scenes video above, human characters in video games are about to get a whole lot more realistic — we’re just about out of the uncanny valley.
